Erin Brockovich maps US data centers to highlight transparency issues

Environmental activist Erin Brockovich has launched a new initiative focused on bringing more transparency to data center construction and the impact these facilities have on nearby communities. As part of this effort, she launched a website featuring 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 community members. This initiative follows a call for reports of data center-related issues that Brockovich put out in April. In a Substack post, she noted that she received nearly 4,000 submissions in the first month alone following that call.

According to Brockovich, the feedback from these submissions highlights a clear priority for local residents. “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 clarified that she is not making a blanket argument against data centers or artificial intelligence. Instead, she is targeting what she describes as a pattern of secrecy in project development. This pattern, as documented by the map, includes projects announced after permits are already secured, developers who do not return calls, and local officials who signed non-disclosure agreements (NDAs)—which are legal contracts used to keep project details confidential—before their neighbors knew a project was being considered.

Brockovich, who originally gained prominence for her legal case against Pacific Gas & Electric, is positioning this mapping effort as a challenge to the lack of public oversight in infrastructure development. The actress Julia Roberts previously portrayed Brockovich in a film dramatizing that past legal case, but this new initiative shifts her focus to the physical infrastructure supporting the digital economy. By mapping these facilities, Brockovich aims to bring community-sourced visibility to the expansion of data infrastructure across the United States and highlight the impact those data centers have on nearby communities.

Why it matters

Data centers are critical infrastructure for the AI boom, but their rapid, often opaque development is creating friction with local communities. Brockovich’s initiative signals that transparency is becoming a central regulatory and social risk for developers.