Erin Brockovich Builds Data Center Tracker as Communities Demand Transparency
Erin Brockovich Builds Data Center Tracker as Communities Demand Transparency
Erin Brockovich has created brockovichdatacenter.com, an online mapping platform where communities can report data center locations and their concerns. The platform received nearly 4,000 submissions in its first month, with transparency—the desire to know what's happening and where—emerging as the top concern, ahead of more familiar issues like noise or water usage, according to reporting from TechCrunch.
The consumer advocate, known for exposing groundwater contamination in Hinkley, California, began collecting reports in April 2026 after a public call for data center-related issues. The interactive map gathers reports from people living near these facilities rather than relying only on official government databases.
Where Reports Are Coming From
Texas leads in submission volume with 612 reports, including 297 from Sulfur Springs where MSB Global is building one of the largest AI data centers in the country. Within the first week, the platform collected more than 1,800 reports from 47 states.
The concerns people are reporting match what engineers know about how data centers work: they use massive amounts of electricity, they need enormous quantities of water to keep their equipment cool, they generate electronic waste when hardware gets replaced, they're noisy, and they keep growing. When you categorize all the reports by main concern, water comes first, then electricity use, then effects on community health.
The U.S. has more than 4,200 data centers operating today, though this figure probably misses smaller facilities and edge deployments—smaller computers placed closer to where they're actually used. Brockovich's crowdsourced approach appears designed to catch facilities that might not show up in commercial databases, especially those located near residential areas where local impact is most visible.
Why This Matters Now
The push for transparency reflects a real pattern of community pushback against data center expansion, especially now that AI is demanding larger facilities that use more power and need more cooling. Traditionally, when a company decides where to put a data center, they look at factors like access to electrical power, internet connectivity, and land costs. Public input has usually been limited to formal regulatory approval meetings.
The data center industry is seeing pressures that echo earlier conflicts around cellular towers in the 1990s and early 2000s. Back then, communities organized to track tower locations and health concerns before regulators had clear rules in place. The cellular industry eventually created better systems for talking to communities, partly because of organized resistance and partly to make permitting faster and smoother.
Data centers face a similar dynamic now, but with a key difference: these facilities are much larger and stay in place for decades, affecting a community's infrastructure long-term in ways a cell tower does not.
The Environmental Question
Brockovich brings environmental health expertise into data center discussions, an area where the industry has traditionally focused on energy efficiency—how little electricity they use—rather than broader community impacts. Her recent work involved hexavalent chromium, a toxic metal. California regulators set a drinking water safety limit of 10 parts per billion for it, which is far higher than the 0.02 parts per billion that scientists consider safe.
This matters for data centers because some new facilities are being built on or near sites with existing pollution concerns. Google's project to convert the Widows Creek power plant in Jackson County, Alabama—located across the Tennessee River from Chattanooga—sits near areas with serious hexavalent chromium contamination. A 2011 report from environmental groups found levels over 5,000 times higher than California's safety standard in nearby Stevenson, Alabama. Google's conversion project does not appear to be moving forward on its original schedule.
What This Changes
The crowdsourced mapping approach is different from how data centers have traditionally handled community relations. In the past, operators talked directly to local government about siting decisions, but the broader public often stayed in the dark until projects were already approved or under construction. The emphasis on transparency suggests communities want to know about data center plans earlier, not just vote on them after decisions are made.
From a business standpoint, this creates both problems and opportunities. Organized community tracking could slow down siting decisions and increase regulatory scrutiny, especially around environmental disclosures. But companies that are transparent about their plans might reduce conflicts later by setting clear expectations upfront and building trust.
The fact that the platform relies on community reports rather than company disclosures shows that people don't fully trust voluntary industry transparency. This pressure could push data center operators toward more systematic and open community engagement, particularly as facilities get larger and AI workloads drive bigger infrastructure needs.
There's a broader context worth noting. As demand for data center capacity grows, companies are expanding into secondary markets—smaller cities and rural areas—where operators may not have the experience managing community relations that the big hyperscale operators like Amazon or Microsoft have developed for major metropolitan areas. The nearly 4,000 submissions in the first month suggest that local residents and businesses are paying close attention to data centers in their areas. Whether the industry will change how it handles community engagement, or whether regulations will shift, is still an open question. But the scale of community response suggests that data center expansion is no longer invisible to the people living nearby.
