In Brief Posted: 2:05 PM PDT · May 31, 2026 Image Credits:Brandon Dill for The Washington Post / Getty Images Environmental activist Erin Brockovich has a new mission: bringing more transparency to data center construction and the impact those data centers have on nearby communities. Brockovich — who was famously played by Julia Roberts in a film dramatizing her legal case against Pacific Gas & Electric — recently launched a website with a map of data centers across the United States. The website describes the map as “a work in progress” that includes data centers reported by members of the surrounding community. In a Substack post, Brockovich said that after putting out a call for reports of data center-related issues in April, she received nearly 4,000 submissions in the first month alone. “The single most common concern — more than noise, more than water usage, more than rising utility bills — is the one word that keeps appearing in submission after submission: transparency,” she wrote. Brockovich added that she’s not “making a blanket argument against data centers” or AI, but rather against “the pattern our map documents: projects announced after permits are already secured, developers who don’t return calls, local officials who signed NDAs before their neighbors knew a project was being considered.” Topics Subscribe for the industry’s biggest tech news Latest in AI
