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Powering The Machine, Draining The Planet: Whether U.S. Environmental Law Is E onmental Law Is Equipped t quipped to Regulate the Ener o Regulate the Energy and W gy and Water Demands of AI Data Centers
This research paper examines whether the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act are equipped to regulate the energy and water demands of AI data centers. It finds structural gaps in all three: NEPA only applies to federal actions, so most privately funded data centers never trigger a review,…
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Case Study: Henrico County — How Two Neighborhoods Forced Virginia’s Second-largest Data Center Jurisdiction to Change Course
Two Henrico County neighborhoods, one Black and middle-income organizing around environmental justice and one White and high-income organizing around property values, converged on the same demand and ended the county's by-right approval of data centers in June 2025. The case study traces the thirteen-month campaign and the 17 grandfathered buildings the new rules cannot reach.
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Concentrated Benefit, Dispersed Burden: Who Carries Virginia’s Data Center Transmission, and What the Cost-Allocation Record Does Not Trace
A $1.06 billion transmission project serving Virginia's data centers is billed to an entire utility zone with no reference to geography, while the tax benefits of hosting stay with the local county, per this SSRN paper by Tommy N. Turner. Turner traces a Louisa County zoning overlay that let a 420-megawatt data center campus skip…
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Data Drain: The Land and Water Impacts of the AI Boom – Lincoln Institute of Land Policy
This Land Lines Magazine feature from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy examines the water, energy and land pressures data centers place on host communities as AI-driven demand accelerates. It cites projections of data centers using hundreds of billions of gallons of water and enough electricity to power tens of thousands of homes, and gathers…
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Data Centers and Construction Employment
This is a recap of a ReImagineAppalachia webinar on making data center construction jobs good jobs — with fair wages, safety standards and training pathways — for workers in West Virginia and Virginia. Building-trades leaders from Mid-Atlantic LECET, WV Affiliated Construction Trades and WV State Building Trades spoke, and the recap links to sample Project…
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Large Load Customer Treatment: Recent State Action on Load Growth, Data Centers, and Generation Capacity
DSIRE Insight's blog post tracks large-load customer policy actions across 33 states in the first half of 2025, covering interconnection rules, utility tariffs, and legislative studies tied to rising data center demand. The team logged over 85 discrete actions, including new large-load tariffs proposed or approved in Nevada, Utah, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Missouri. It also…
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The AI Data Center Boom Is an Environmental Justice Crisis
This National Wildlife Federation blog post recaps a three-part roundtable series with the Clean Economy Coalition of Color on data centers as an environmental justice issue. Panelists from groups including NRDC, the Center for Biological Diversity and Tucker United discuss community impacts, water and energy strain, and health risks, then question whether data centers deliver…
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The Secret Data Center Buildout – Public Citizen
Public Citizen traces how Amazon, Google, Meta and xAI use non-disclosure agreements to hide data center deals from the public until permits and subsidies are secured. In Virginia, 80 percent of localities with data centers have signed NDAs; in Tucson and Shreveport, officials concealed water use and multibillion-dollar deals for months. The piece lays out…
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Data Centers and Water Use – Nature Forward
Northern Virginia data centers used nearly 2 billion gallons of water in 2023, a 63 percent jump from 2019, making up roughly 3 percent of the Potomac River Basin's consumption. This post covers cooling methods, wastewater pollutants like biocides and corrosion inhibitors, and reporting gaps that leave water demand from AI-driven growth largely untracked.
Exposing AI Data Center Threats and Harms