Erin Brockovich — who landed a historic $333 million settlement against Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) in 1993 and inspired Julia Roberts’ 2000 film, Erin Brockovich — has revealed that she is now being flooded with submissions from U.S. residents reporting the construction of AI data centers in their areas.
“Anytime I get a cluster of emails, that’s a sign,” Brockovich told comedian Theo Von during Sunday’s episode of his This Past Weekend podcast, before explaining that “data centers” recently made it to her radar.
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“Then I started looking into it, and… my questions weren’t being answered about data centers,” Brockovich continued. “So, what I do is, I like to see the big picture, and I like to create maps.”
The environmental activist went on to say that she “created what’s called brockovichdatacenter.com, where people — if they were having issues with data centers in their backyard — could self-report.”
“And I’ve created self-reporting registry databases before,” Brockovich noted. “Think about it. We have no place where we can self-report. Everything that we report goes through an agency.”
“This is a place where people who I believe are living, breathing, and experiencing these issues are the best source of information,” she added.
Brockovich also noted that “the map crashed twice” in the first 72 hours after it was posted.
“I woke up on day three going, ‘Oh my God, it’s not one town and one aquifer and one data center. It’s the entire country,’” the consumer advocate, perhaps best known for building a 1993 case against PG&E for groundwater contamination in Hinkley, California, said.
Brockovich added the reports she has received involving data centers all seem to have something in common: residents said they were not made aware of the new facilities in their area, and oftentimes woke up to find that construction was already underway.
“They had no idea,” she said. “They woke up to this construction. ‘We weren’t informed. City Council didn’t tell us anything’ — because these big tech group came in and put these City Council members under a nondisclosure.”
Brockovich also claimed that this has happened “in every state.”
Last month, Brockovich launched a new battle against the proliferation of AI data centers, which have recently become a point of contention for many Americans, across the United States and beyond.
https://x.com/HQNewsNow/status/2079299364594368582/video/1?s=46
As Breitbart News reported, Georgia is struggling to meet the growing water demands of AI data centers, while Atlanta planners urge operators to prioritize community needs and reduce consumption — even as water usage varies widely across facilities.
Opponents of AI data center construction have also blocked or delayed a record number of projects worth nearly $130 billion so far this year, according to a recent study — while a recent Gallup poll shows a strong majority of Americans oppose AI data centers being constructed in their local areas.
In June, country music star Brad Paisley called on citizens to block the proposed construction of an AI data center that is planned to be built 50 yards from the Nashville Zoo, calling it “an absolute nightmare scenario,” adding, “It would be an enormous monstrosity.”
Last week, New York Governor Kathy Hochul (D) announced the country’s first statewide freeze on new data center construction, pausing environmental permits for up to one year while the state develops comprehensive regulatory standards.
AI data centers have become a political battlefield without clear sides — conservatives and leftists both oppose them when these resource hogs are built in their back yards. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his instant bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Alana Mastrangelo is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.