Data centers loom over houses in Aldie, Virginia, in 2023. As the centers expand nationwide, concerns over their health impacts are growing.
Photo by Jahi Chikwendiu, courtesy The Washington Post/Getty Images
“Data centers are being built at a rapid pace, without the general public's consent, and without giving us a chance to pause and think through the societal ramifications of this technology.”
— Mar Zepeda
In Loudoun County, Virginia, the cloud is leaving a footprint. It rises from former farmland and office parks in the form of massive, windowless buildings filled with servers. It hums behind fences, draws power from the grid and helps move the emails, internet searches, videos, text messages, streaming channels and artificial intelligence tools that have become part of daily life.
But just across the Potomac River in Montgomery County, Maryland, officials are hitting pause. In June, county leaders ordered a temporary hold on new data center permits while they study the facts, including implications for energy use, water demand, land, climate goals and nearby neighborhoods.
The contrast foreshadows a tale of two counties: one that rides the data center boom, and another questioning its harms.
“We've seen too many examples in government where development outpaces policy,” Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich told The Nation's Health. “The responsible approach is to establish the rules, understand the impacts and then make decisions within a clear framework. The welfare of our residents, whether it is public health or environmental impacts, is paramount.”
As artificial intelligence and growing computing needs drive a rapid expansion of data centers nationwide, public health experts say communities need to look beyond jobs and tax revenue. Data centers raise electricity demand and utility costs, strain the power grid, increase emissions from fossil fuel energy and backup generators, consume large amounts of water, add noise and heat, and reshape land use. The impacts fall hardest on people who are already most vulnerable to energy bills, air pollution, heat, water stress and environmental hazards.
“Data centers are being built at a rapid pace, without the general public's consent, and without giving us a chance to pause and think through the societal ramifications of this technology,” Mar Zepeda, legislative director for the Climate Justice Alliance, told The Nation's Health. “We deserve more than a public hearing after the deal is already done.”
The U.S. is home to more than 3,000 operational data centers, and that number is expected to grow substantially, according to a recent Pew Research Center analysis. About 38% of Americans live within five miles of at least one operational data center, and more than 1,500 new data centers are in various stages of development across the country. Nearly 70% of those proposed facilities will be in rural areas, mainly in the South and Midwest. Virginia has the largest number of data centers, followed by Texas and California.
A data center abuts homes in Lowell, Massachusetts, in May. The U.S. is home to more than 3,000 operational data centers, which are linked to noise, pollution and increased water and energy use.
Photo by Danielle Parhizkaran, courtesy The Boston Globe/Getty Images
The question, environmental experts say, is whether the infrastructure behind that data can be built in ways that protect health.
Noise can begin before a data center opens. Construction can mean months of truck traffic, heavy machinery and other loud activity. Once facilities are operating, residents may hear the round-the-clock sound of cooling systems, ventilation equipment and backup diesel generators. In some cases, noise inside or near data centers can reach levels high enough to raise hearing concerns for workers. For people nearby, lower but constant noise can still disrupt sleep, increase stress and affect quality of life.
Data centers can also add to light pollution. Large campuses often need nighttime security lighting, adding another disruption for nearby homes and for wildlife that depends on darkness to migrate, feed or reproduce.
Large facilities can replace trees or open land with buildings, pavement and power infrastructure, adding to stormwater runoff and neighborhood heat. The heat impacts associated with data centers were largely unexplored until recently, said David Sailor, PhD, MS, professor and director of the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University.
“A small ‘data center heat island' surrounds most data centers,” Sailor told The Nation's Health. “As we build more hyperscale data centers in cities, these heat islands will grow and overlap with the prospect of creating citywide effects.”
Combined with the significant amounts of heat already being put into the atmosphere by electric customers, heat from large facilities could have implications for weather and precipitation patterns in cities, a topic scientists are only beginning to explore, Sailor said. Heat emissions from cities can rise into the atmosphere, cool and condense, forming clouds, he said. Many large-load facilities in a city could accentuate that effect.
Electricity demand is another major concern. New research from North Carolina State University, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Toronto suggests that rising electricity demand from data centers could significantly raise power costs in some parts of the country by 2030. Some regions could see increases as high as 57%, according to the analysis.
Advocates call for a moratorium on new data centers in Minnesota during an April rally at the state Capital in St. Paul.
Photo by Michael Siluk, courtesy UCG/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
Rising power costs have public health implications. When electricity bills increase, low-income families may have to choose between cooling their homes, buying food or paying for medicine. During heat waves, people may avoid using air conditioning because they fear the cost. That can increase the risk of heat illness, especially among older adults, young children and people with chronic health conditions.
Water use is another growing concern. Data centers need large amounts of water to cool servers that run around the clock, and demand can be especially troubling in communities already facing drought, aging water systems or competition among homes, farms and industry. Recent estimates project that by 2028, AI-related data centers in the U.S. could require up to 32 billion gallons of water annually — enough to support 360,000 households' indoor water use.
But of all the potential health concerns tied to data centers, air pollution may be the biggest threat, environmental experts say. Data centers need enormous amounts of electricity to run servers and cooling systems 24 hours a day. When that power comes from fossil fuels, or when facilities rely on diesel backup generators, they can add to the pollution that is linked to some of the nation's most serious health problems. Natural gas power and diesel generators can release nitrogen oxides, methane, volatile organic compounds and fine particulate matter — pollutants associated with respiratory disease, heart problems and cancer risk.
One analysis estimated that by 2030, air pollution tied to U.S. data centers could contribute to about 600,000 cases of asthma symptoms and 1,300 premature deaths. The researchers estimated the related public health burden could exceed $20 billion, with the greatest risks falling on communities near power plants, generators or other pollution sources that support data center operations.
The burden may also fall on communities downwind of power plants or generators, not only on people living near the data center, according to Shaolei Ren, PhD, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California-Riverside.
“Permitting decisions should consider not only the amount of emissions, but also the health impacts, because the same emissions can have very different consequences depending on where and when they occur,” Ren told The Nation's Health.
Right now, many permitting decisions are being made without a clear accounting of public health costs, which means health damages are systematically left out of those decisions, said Michael Cork, PhD, MPH, a public health scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and co-founder of EmPower Analytics Group, an independent firm that produces science-based analyses of the health and economic impacts of AI infrastructure.
“Burning fossil fuels produces fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, an air pollutant that penetrates deep into the lungs and enters the bloodstream,” Cork told The Nation's Health. “Decades of research link it to heart disease, respiratory illness, hospitalizations and premature death. So the health risk isn't the data center itself — it's how we choose to power it.”
Volunteers hand out signs opposing a data center complex in Tucker County, West Virginia, in June 2025. Residents said they were concerned about air, noise and light pollution and other impacts.
Photo by Ulysse Bellier, courtesy AFP/Getty Images
In his analysis of a single data center in Loudoun County, Virginia, Cork estimated as much as $99 million per year in health damages could occur when running at its permitted pollution limit, with additional premature deaths.
Children, older adults and people with pre-existing heart and lung conditions are most vulnerable, Cork said. Many of the communities facing new energy infrastructure already carry elevated pollution burdens and higher rates of asthma, cardiovascular disease and hypertension.
“From a public health standpoint, adding combustion emissions to communities like that raises real concerns about disproportionate impacts,” Cork said.
The Trump administration has put the federal government firmly behind the rapid expansion of AI data centers. A July 2025 executive order tells agencies to make it easier to move such projects forward by reducing federal regulatory hurdles, raising concerns that environmental reviews, climate protections and community challenges could carry less weight as projects are approved.
Environmental justice leaders say the AI buildout is following the same inequitable infrastructure siting patterns that have left residents with higher rates of asthma, heart disease and other chronic illnesses.
“The communities that are already being harmed by data centers and their energy infrastructure are the same communities that have always borne the brunt of polluting facilities and their impacts: Black, brown, low-income, Indigenous, fenceline communities,” Zepeda of the Climate Justice Alliance said. “These communities are being asked to sacrifice their health to benefit an elite few.”
That concern, she said, is playing out in places such as Memphis, Tennessee's Boxtown, a historically Black community that has long been surrounded by industrial pollution and now sits near Elon Musk's Grok AI data center, a coal ash site and a Tennessee Valley Authority power plant. The community has a cancer rate far above the national average.
“No community should be treated as a sacrifice zone for the digital economy,” Zepeda said.
Yet the nation's governmental public health departments have largely been absent from data center siting and permitting decisions. State or local health departments have yet to play a major role in reviewing the health impacts of proposed data centers before approval.
State and local health departments should be at the table from the beginning — not brought in after a permit is already moving, Cork said.
“Right now, siting and permitting are largely treated as zoning, utility and air-permit questions, with public health on the sidelines,” Cork said. “Health departments have the expertise to evaluate those, and they should be formally part of the decisionmaking process. These departments exist to protect community health, and siting decisions of this scale are exactly where that mandate applies.”
For more information on the impact of data centers, visit www.pewresearch.org and www.climatejusticealliance.org.
- Copyright The Nation’s Health, American Public Health Association
