The Data Center Next Door with Dr. Jacoby Wilson | from TED Tech

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2:27Hi everyone, Shoshana here. Today we're sharing an episode of a podcast we think that you'll love. It's been handpicked by the TED staff, and we think that as a TED Health listener, you'll come away with a fresh idea and a totally new perspective. Enjoy and head to the link in the description for more. Somewhere in your city, or maybe just outside of it, there's a building you've probably never thought about. No windows, no sign, and inside, no people. No traces of life. Instead, this building houses rows and rows of servers stretching ceiling to floor, cooled by enough water to serve thousands of homes.

3:10It pulls power from the grid 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And every time you run an AI query, stream a movie, or send a message to a friend, that building wakes up a little more. Lately, more and more of us have been waking up to an uncomfortable truth. The cloud isn't just an intangible product of the digital age. In fact, the cloud has an address, which means it has neighbors. And it's time we meet them.

3:48This is TED Tech, a podcast from TED. I'm your host, Sherelle Dorsey. We talk a lot about AI here on TED Tech, but this month we're looking at the physical house AI lives in, the data center. Data centers have been around as long as the internet itself, but they've never garnered this much attention or this much controversy. We've seen the headlines. Your neighborhood data center will impact your electric grid, your water system, your utility bill. And yet, with the rise of AI, this is what it takes to maintain the technology that has made an irreversible impact on the way we live and work, even as the cost gets heavier and heavier.

4:34This is a story about AI infrastructure. But really, it's a story about who decides the price of innovation and who ends up paying it. This month, TED Tech is traveling across the country to learn about what's happening on the ground as data centers expand, entering more communities. We'll look at power, literally and figuratively. What happens when electric grids can't keep up? What can communities do about a crisis they didn't create? We'll also hear about potential solutions and explore what those possibilities can look like. Let's get into it.

5:19Prince George's County, Maryland. Majority Black. One of the wealthiest Black communities in the country. Tree-lined streets, good schools, people who built something here and have been fighting to protect it. On the edge of the Beltway, there's an empty lot where a mall used to be. 90 acres. The county approved plans to turn it into a massive data center complex without community input. So residents pushed back. A petition gathered more than 22 ,500 signatures. Dozens rallied at the site. County Executive Aisha Braveboy convened a task force. That task force published its findings in November 2025.

6:05Residents said it buried the real story. the air quality, the water, the energy costs, the civil rights implications. So they wrote their own report titled The People's Report. The site's fate is still unresolved. The activism on display from PG County residents reminds me of a TED Talk from environmental activist Peggy Shepard. Peggy is co-founder and executive director of the not-for-profit We Act for Environmental Justice. She's seen stories like this unfold time and time again in communities of color across the country.

6:44Sherrell: It should be no surprise that every community should have a right to a clean environment. Yet some are sacrifice zones. Sacrifice zones, communities living on the front lines of pollution and environmental hazards. Now, this is a story about communities in crisis. Mostly, these are communities of Black and brown and Indigenous peoples. It's often a story of low-income communities. But race, race is the decisive factor. Now, studies show that an average middle-income Black family with an$87 ,500 income is likely to live with more pollution than a white family making$22 ,500 a year. Now, my organization, We Act for Environmental Justice, works within a movement of hundreds of environmental justice groups here and abroad to address the disproportionate impact of pollution borne by our communities.

7:47Sherrell: So I'm talking about environmental justice, which is a civil rights and a human rights analysis of environmental decision making with a focus on the permitting, the permitting process that gives polluters permission to pollute within a regulatory standard for air, water and soil. Now, these permits, they're an allowance that sacrifices the health of community residents. Peggy gave this talk at TED Countdown way back in 2022. This was long before data centers took over the headlines. But what stuck with me is this phrase she keeps using, sacrifice zones. And like Peggy said, not everyone experiences this equally.

8:34Sherrell: Communities experience environmental hazards and pollution exposure in diverse ways. In urban areas, mobile sources, contaminated sites, they're really the challenge. And local governments generally manage the infrastructure of pollution. But in smaller cities and rural areas, industrial and oil refineries, landfills and incinerators, they're usually the problem. And in places like Texas and California, there may be no zoning laws that separate industrial facilities from residential backyards. Peggy's framing doesn't come from a think tank or a policy paper. It comes from decades of watching the same decisions get made over and over again in communities that never got a seat at the table.

9:25Sherrell: So environmental racism and injustice results from a complex legacy of housing segregation, land use and zoning discrimination, and from unequal enforcement and policies. Now, decades ago, policies such as redlining denied home loans to people of color and to certain communities. And this government policy reinforced racial segregation in cities and diverted investments away from those communities, creating large disparities in home ownership as well as urban heat environments of few trees and no open space. So today, we're still living out the legacy of those racist policies. In 2026, that legacy looks a little different.

10:16No smokestacks this time. No rail yard. Just a building drawing power and water around the clock to keep the AI economy running, implemented by a powerful new industry. But ultimately, the behavior is the same. Powerful business interests taking advantage of historic disenfranchisement to quietly implement their agenda. Communities within one mile of data centers tend to be disproportionately communities of color, according to the Environmental Justice Data and Governance Initiative. They also face levels of particulate matter, nitrogen dioxide, and diesel pollution above the national median. Nearly half of all data center facilities nationally are located in census tracts where poverty is above the national median.

11:09Understanding this context, the headlines coming out of Prince George's County seriously caught my attention. This is the latest place to be facing this possibility, but they're also fighting against it. So to better understand what's going on, I reached out to someone who is watching this issue unravel in real time.

11:30Sherrell: Hi, I'm Dr. Jacobi Wilson. I'm a professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Health. I'm an environmental health scientist, and I do science that serves the people, other people, for the people, and by the people. Dr. Wilson and his colleagues did something that almost never happens in these fights. They showed up early, collected rigorous data that confirmed concerns of environmental harm, and handed that research back to the community. Residents then partnered with the NAACP to produce the People's Report, a community-driven analysis of the impact of data centers in Prince George's County.

12:07The document was released in March, and it's a counter to the county's own findings, which residents say buried the true environmental costs of data centers. The fight continues to unfold in PG County and the stakes remain high. So I started our conversation by asking Dr. Wilson what a sacrifice zone looks like in 2026.

12:30Sherrell: Now we're talking about digital sacrifice zones. OK, we're talking about digital sacrifice zones. So when you think about that, what are the impacts, the externalities that people are experiencing? So you think about air quality. When you have a gas turbine being used as the power source, that's methane. You're burning gas. You got combustion byproducts like particulate matter, dust in the air. You have volatilicine compounds. So you think about you got your new car, right? The new car smell. I always tell people, don't hold your breath. VOCs, right? You're not supposed to breathe that stuff in.

12:59Sherrell: You have sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide. All these pollutants are harmful to your health. Particular matter by itself can elevate your blood pressure, impact birth. So outcomes, so infant mortality, birth defects, low birth weight babies, right? So that whole complex of pollution can impact health. Then you have the water quality impacts. They're using millions of gallons of water to cool these facilities. You have thermal pollution. You have chemical contaminants. And then you also have this fight between local residents and the data centers for water. So it's just not a water quality issue.

13:32Sherrell: It's a water quantity issue, okay? Then you have the issues of energy justice. You got folks in this country right now who had to choose between paying for their energy bill, paying for their medicine, paying for their food. They're dealing with energy poverty. Now, we subsidize these data centers. They're getting corporate welfare, right? We subsidize them, bring them in. And then as a rate payer, if they're on your grid, we're subsidizing them on the grid. They get double welfare. What is emerging from this topic at large is this proliferation that you've described as also a civil rights issue.

14:04How do you go from, you know, server racks that are powering our day-to-day technology use into this now being a civil rights issue? I just I want to connect the thread.

14:16Sherrell: So environmental justice movement is a childless civil rights movement. So we're talking about people's rights when it comes to decision making. Right. So when you're making decisions about where a data center goes, just like we make decisions on where the incinerator went, where the power plant went, where the new highway is going to go. In many cases, those who are most impacted are not in the room making decisions. So they may have been elected officials who are making decisions on behalf of the citizenry, what's happening in the space, data center space. A lot of these folks are signing NDAs.

14:47Sherrell: So mayors, county officials, they're signing NDAs. And a part of this, OK, we want to make sure proprietary information about the data center and the type of technology being used is protected. But at the same time, it creates a lack of transparency, right? You as a legislator, as a county official, as a mayor, you represent the people, not the industry. But with these NDAs and lack of transparency, we're violating the right of representative justice to make sure the community's voice is heard in decision making. So this all connects back to civil rights. This all connects to the rights of the people.

15:22Sherrell: This all connects back to how a democracy is supposed to work. And it's undemocratic if you have a lack of transparency and decisions being made by those will be most impacted decisions. have no idea what's happening. Then all of a sudden, there's a new data center that's been built in their neighborhood and they had no voice in the process.

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16:58So I want to dive into the People's Report. Can you tell us about the People's Report and why this research actually needed to exist?

17:06Sherrell: I was part of a team that helped to write the People's Report. So the People's Report was developed in response to the task force report, accounting task report on data science. So in that task force report, they made its data center sound like they'll be great. And part of the playbook is when you think about any type of industrial development, they always leave with, there's going to be so many jobs produced, right? And I say it's economic development. I always say capitalized the C-O-N economic development. It's a con job. Because in most cases, when you think about the jobs, and we had a data center discussion, we actually had folks who actually helped to build hyperscale data centers who were talking.

17:49Sherrell: It was great to really learn about how they really built this whole process. But what was stated was, and as I was stating, in the construction phase, you have a lot of jobs. In the operation phase, you don't have that many jobs. And one person at the data center meeting that I attended said it compared to McDonald's. There's more jobs at your local McDonald's than at the data center. That was pretty powerful. What it means is there's not a lot of economic revenue. There's not a lot of jobs. There's not a lot of living waste jobs that are coming to the community. So that's why the report was developed.

18:22Sherrell: to be really in response, to fill the gaps in what was missing or excluded from the task force report. And to that end, Dr. Wilson, I'd like to learn a little bit more around how you all conducted the research, you know, who you spoke with, data that you gathered. How did you really make sure that the community's voice shaped some of the findings of the report rather than sort of just appearing in the footnotes? Yeah, so part of the environmental justice work, for those of you who know the framework, is really make sure that the people's voice, right, representative justice, communities speak with their own voice.

18:58Sherrell: So there were listening sessions, surveying that occurred to really engage those residents who are most impacted, working with coalition members, organizers, to really make sure that we develop the right questions. And, you know, that would really be responsive to the gaps, but responsive to the concerns of the community. So there was a lot of engagement that occurred with those front line, fence line organizations, those organizers, the residents who have voiced their concerns about the data center issue and being caught off guard by it again. You know, this came out of nowhere and folks were really shocked by it.

19:32Sherrell: Right. So we engage those people on the ground and the leadership, the community leadership to make sure that the report was more responsive than the initial task force report. And what were some of the aspects of the report that really surprised you? Was there certain numbers that stood out, certain patterns that stood out or any stories that emerged that kind of stopped you in your tracks? I think some of the concerns that folks raise, I think, were very interesting concerns. People don't want data science. I think what came out of that is folks are not just worried about the environmental impacts or the externalities, but they're also concerned about living in a digital sacrifice.

20:10Sherrell: They're also concerned about the security state, the monitoring state, like George Orwell's 1984, you know, Big Brother, how and how that could impact them. I think there's some larger concerns about AI in general and folks concerned about AI. That's a whole connection to AI and generative AI, some of the algorithm stuff. So I think that's unoccurring as well. People's concern about AI and technology kind of running amok, getting back to the economic argument. But there's this concern that if we have more data centers to support AI, then we're just accelerating job loss. Because we've heard from the tech bros that AI is going to change the way we work, right?

20:55Sherrell: There's going to be fewer jobs. There's going to be more automation in general. We see more automation in our factories. It's going to be less needed for certain sectors, certain occupations. So folks are also concerned about that, right? So I think you have all that kind of baked in. to some of the concerns that were captured and just some of the general concerns that people have about data centers and AI. Can you talk a little bit about maybe how that partnership came together? Like, why did it make sense for the NAACP to get involved? Progress we make in this country is always on the backs of black and brown folks, right?

21:27Sherrell: And so they as an organization has been at the forefront of that fight for justice and civil rights, voting rights, right, environmental justice. And so they were brought in to provide some report on this effort to fight the data center because we've been working with them to fight data centers in other parts of the country. And we've been working together since last summer to do air quality monitoring and advocacy work around the Colossus data center, AXR data center, Elon Musk's facility Colossus 1, which is in southwest Memphis, and Colossus 2, which is in south of Mississippi. Colossal Zeta Center in Southwest Memphis is in and this is a primarily black community.

22:06Sherrell: You see all this stuff in the news about what's happening with the redistricting and the gerrymandering and that fight. So that's what you see in South. So LLCP has been part of that fight. So they've been a partner. So they were brought in to help us with this report and help us raise these issues nationally. It's a framework for how we should move forward by having authentic and meaningful engagement, are things that meaningful involvement of those residents have been most impacted. We've seen this story before. We have been here before. Black folk, brown folk have been here before with industrial revolution stuff, with industrial hazards.

22:40They don't want to see it repeated with data centers. Please kind of help us to understand that the NAACP is kind of coming in from the civil rights perspective, addressing these zoning economic development issues. issues what does this tell us about how power is operating here it tells us that power is

23:02Sherrell: operating the way it always operates right in my opinion i would say that you have a you know it's always this kind of josh this environment argument right oh we are a poor community we need jobs and the people you elect they have these people who come to them about these opportunities and they start whispering sweet nothings in their ear it's the same old same old and then the community gets sold a bill of goods oh you can get all these jobs in the end because i have a weak community benefits agreement that's not real jobs it's not living waste jobs it's not jobs going to address the wealth gap right it's not a job that's going to create opportunity it's not jobs you're going to be able to have real air property to give to your kids right so your kids can be better than you so it's not intergenerational justice intergenerational economic justice right so you have that so it's the same thing that happens time and time again and i think folks are just over it.

23:53Sherrell: And I mean, you think about where we are in the country right now, the erosion of, you know, the American dream. Data centers are part of that because we're targeting communities for these data centers. They're the avenue of the least resistance. Hi, this is Brooke DeVard from Naked Beauty. I am always looking for ways to elevate our daily rituals. And the Kohler Smart Toilet is proof that design changes everything. It's this stunning sculptural piece that feels like quiet luxury for your bathroom. It totally transforms your daily ritual into something elevated with customizable cleansing and touchscreen controls.

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25:54I really appreciate that. I think especially because we do know that, you know, businesses, but particularly sometimes the tech industry can respond with this idea that community benefit agreements or promises around energy efficiencies or workforce development programs sort of trump potentially some of the issues that might be associated with these facilities.

26:15Sherrell: Let me respond to that real quick before you go on. If you are bringing in outside workers, right, that's not from the local community. You got to train them first to do that work. So you're not going to train those folks. You're bringing outside. So for example, I mean, this is a separate example. My father who's passed, my father was a pipe fitter, right? so when i was looking at the public health impacts of fracking in maryland that we've been fracking in maryland some years ago i was in west virginia doing research on the environmental impacts of fracking and the social impacts of fracking my dad was in the man camp building a pipeline wow did that money stay in west virginia no i'm from mississippi y 'all that money was sent back home in mississippi but it's similar you bring these folks in with expertise to build the operation facility and it's built and that's construction phase that they lead that money doesn't cycle 20 30 times in that community so that's part of the lot that's been sold to politicians and what and the policies are selling it to the residents and also on the community benefits agreement what ends up happening is folks will get a soccer field they get some t-shirts some scholarships i call it getting turkeys and trinkets they're not getting real benefits right so that's both a representative justice issue with in this discussion we're talking about it's also a distributional justice you know we want to minimize the harms and maximize the benefits the most of the benefits are going to the politicians some benefits may be going to the counties but limited benefits go to the actual defense line community who's hosting the operation who's being impacted by air pollution who's being impacted by water by the water pollution right So they're internalizing all the externalities, but they're not getting any of the benefits.

27:53Sherrell: So that's a distributional justice issue again. Now, Dr. Wilson, if a community somewhere else in this country is watching data center proposals start to move through their local government right now, what should they be doing this week to get organized or to be ready to ask critical questions? Yeah, I think they should look at our joint report with NWCP, our data center report. would be great. You can go to CEEJH.org to download the report. There's a number of recommendations about, you know, related to air quality, water quality, energy issues. But I would say talk to your mayor, your county executive, the county council.

28:30Sherrell: Your planning commission has a huge role in pushing these data centers or any type of industrial development through. So I would say try to get a moratorium in first and then work with the folks in leadership to make sure there's a data center ordinance. And make sure that ordinance covers the types of data centers that you want to bring in, the size of data centers. Like we do not want hyperscale data centers in our community. So we have some frameworks, some restrictions, some boundaries on the types of data centers. There's setback distances, right? The type of water they use, ensuring that they use renewables, making sure they're not going to add to the heat issues, so any climate impacts, making sure they also have monitoring, addressing a tax subsidy reform that they shouldn't, they cannot tax breaks, you know, subsidizing them.

29:19Sherrell: So there's a number of things you can do to put into the ordinance or into the county's development plan. This may be even putting this in the comprehensive plan, in the master plan for your county or your city having some language in the code about data centers so bacon and so if there's another center that comes in that you don't you're not gonna get caught off guard so just to recap talk to your local officials making sure they know what you want to see having a moratorium developing the ordinance and adding some language in your conference plan or your master plan that's what that pertains to development around data centers and also holding your planning commission accountable because a lot of these behind-door deals and the lack of transparency happens because of the planning commission in your community.

30:01You know, as we close, you know, you spent your career at this intersection of science and policy as well as community advocacy. What gives you hope that this fight is winnable?

30:13Sherrell: Oh, yeah, thanks. That's a great question. I know I talked about environmental justice in this conversation. I talked a lot about these issues from a perspective of Black folk, brown folk. I do a lot of work, you know, supporting communities of color and doing empowerment science, liberation science, right? that focuses on those populations. But data center fight, you know, data centers don't know across racial lines, across class lines, you know, religious lines, political lines. There are folks that fight in data centers from all across the country. People are winning. I mean, you've got to celebrate the fact that people are organizing and coming together around data centers.

30:45Sherrell: It's a bridge issue. It's a great organizing issue. It's a great issue to get people out to vote and show like the power of your vote. So that's what gives me hope that folks are fighting back. People are winning against data centers around the country, and we can use this as a tool, as an opportunity to show what America is really about. Coming together, regardless of your race, your class, your creed, your religion, your language, all those things that divide us, those things are actually things that make us stronger together. So that's the message I'd like to leave the audience. We are so grateful to have you in this conversation and to have your expertise also here at the table and on the TED Tech podcast.

31:23And we are looking forward to just continuing to see how this storyline continues to expand. So thank you for your time.

31:34Sherrell: Thank you. That was Dr. Shakobi Wilson, Director of the Center for Engagement, Environmental Justice and Health at the University of Maryland. This is the first episode in our special series on data centers, the physical infrastructure powering the AI economy and the communities being asked to host it. Next week, we're heading to Memphis, Tennessee, where residents are fighting a different version of the same fight. That's our show. Thanks for listening. TED Tech is a podcast from TED. This episode was produced by Rahima Nasa. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar, and the show is fact-checked by Julia Dickerson.

32:18Special thanks to Constanza, Gallardo, Daniela, Belarreso, Maria Latias, Tanzika Sangmanivan, and Roxanne Hilash. If you're enjoying the show, make sure to subscribe and leave us a review so other people can find us too. I'm Sherelle Dorsey. Let's keep digging into the future. Join me next week for more.

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