Philadelphia activists push data center moratorium as AI boom meets industrial-scarred cities

A majority of Americans oppose data center construction in their area, often because of environmental and energy concerns, according to the report. Data center companies and their customers have promised new jobs and economic growth, but that pitch has not won over that majority.

In Southwest Philadelphia’s Grays Ferry neighborhood, Shawmar Pitts, a lifelong resident and now managing co-director of the environmental justice group Philly Thrive, grew up next to what was then the East Coast’s largest oil refinery. The refinery shut down after a 2019 explosion. Pitts told TechCrunch that many friends and family suffered chronic health conditions, and that he did not understand what might have caused them until 2018, when Philly Thrive was tabling in his neighborhood about a proposed refinery expansion. “I read the information they had on the table about how living near the refinery affects you, and I’m looking at all the sicknesses on this paper, and I’m like, ‘My mother has this, my sister has that, my next-door neighbor suffers from this’ – every house, someone has something on that list,” Pitts told TechCrunch. “From that point, I was all the way in.” Pitts is among those leading the charge for a data center moratorium in Philadelphia. City officials have identified two potential sites: one in Northeast Philadelphia and the other in Grays Ferry.

Opposition is not unique to Philadelphia. Residents across the United States have pushed back against new data center construction, especially in cities and towns with finite resources, according to the report. The pushback has been particularly swift in communities where big industry’s mark is still felt. “We don’t want data centers,” Philly Thrive board president Sonya Sanders said at the Monday rally. “We don’t want the pollution, we don’t want the noise, and we know they’re not going to bring us more jobs.” Sanders’ husband, who was also a Grays Ferry resident, died of a rare bone cancer in 2020. She said he did not smoke or drink, and she believes that emissions from the refinery caused his illness. “In my eyes, they killed him,” she said at the rally. “The pollution killed him. I believe he would be here today if he wasn’t silently murdered, because it was the pursuit of profit that killed him.”

A Philadelphia data center may not have as severe an environmental impact as the now-defunct Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery, which processed up to 335,000 barrels of crude oil daily, the report said. But the international race to dominate the AI industry has become so extreme that by 2035, BloombergNEF predicts U.S. data centers will consume more natural gas than Germany and Japan combined. That is almost double the firm’s projection from nine months earlier. Natural gas burns a lot cleaner than other fossil fuels, like oil, but it is far from harmless. Burning one cubic foot of natural gas releases the equivalent of 60 grams of carbon dioxide, and additional data center demand is expected to generate an extra 1 million metric tons of greenhouse gas pollution each day, about 12% of all present-day U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Harvard University researchers found in 2021 that fossil fuel air pollution is responsible for one in five deaths worldwide.

At the rally, Clean Air Council attorney Annie Fox said a typical data center planned in Pennsylvania has hundreds of diesel engines that spew air pollution. Even if they are supposedly reserved for emergencies, she said, the government has already said that the data center should use those rather than drawing from an overstressed electrical grid during some heat waves. “We can expect that to get more frequent… Fossil fuel-hungry data centers will worsen climate change, making those heatwaves more frequent and severe,” Fox said.

Concerned citizens across the country do seem to be getting through to their officials, the report said. In New York, Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order that temporarily prevents the state from approving new permits for large projects. “Progress shouldn’t arrive with a higher utility bill, deleted water supply, or noise pollution,” Hochul said at a press conference. “These data centers can only be built, should only be built in places that want them.” Data center moratoriums have also been approved in a number of U.S. cities, including Denver, Indianapolis, Asheville, Charlotte and Reno. The purpose of these moratoriums is often to allow city officials to collect more information about the potential impacts of building data centers.