It’s been more than 30 years since Erin Brockovich made history – and had a movie made after her – for standing against one of America’s largest power companies and winning a $333m groundwater pollution suit for a small California town. People still email her with environmental concerns.
This past spring she noticed a spike in emails from a small Pennsylvania county concerned about the sudden growth of a large AI data centre in their community. Data centres are giant warehouses full of powerful computers used to run digital services from movie streaming to online banking. There are more than 4,000 across the US, the most in the world. The UK and Germany are next with more than 500 each.
