Data Centers Are Someone's Neighbors: The View From Next Door
About the Session
Every projection of AI's growing energy demand eventually lands somewhere specific: a county, a substation, a watershed, a town.
As data center development accelerates, communities are being asked to host the physical infrastructure behind the AI boom. That can bring investment, jobs, and tax revenue. It can also bring significant demands on electricity, water, land, local infrastructure, and public services. Increasingly, these tradeoffs are playing out in rural communities, including across Appalachia and the rural South.
Too much of the AI-and-climate debate remains at the level of megawatts and emissions. But what does the buildout look like from the perspective of the people living next door? What are communities actually being promised? What costs are they being asked to absorb? How should impacts on water, grid capacity, health, land, and local economies be evaluated? And at what point in the development process should residents have a meaningful say?
This session will explore what responsible data center development looks like when communities are treated as participants rather than simply host locations. It will examine community engagement, impact evaluation, environmental tradeoffs, and the possibility of stronger community benefit standards shaped by the people who will live with these investments for decades.
Discussion Group Leaders
A. Toni Young is Founder at A Global Firm & Community Education Group, advancing community-centered standards that ensure communities benefit from the growth of AI infrastructure and its supply chain.
Gaby Brink is President & Chief Designer at Tomorrow Partners, advancing human-centered design and innovation to help organizations address complex social and environmental challenges.
Stephen Chmelewski is a Graduate Student in Technology Policy at Columbia SIPA, exploring how emerging technologies shape human connection, community, and the ways people create meaning in their lives
What to Expect
A grounded conversation that moves the AI infrastructure debate from megawatts to municipalities. Appalachia and the rural South will provide a concrete lens for examining what happens when rapidly growing infrastructure meets communities, local systems, and finite natural resources.
Participants will compare perspectives across community organizations, philanthropy, technology, climate, business, and civil society, with a particular focus on what meaningful engagement and credible evaluation should look like before, during, and after development.
Who This Is For
This session is for community leaders, technology and data center companies, policymakers, utilities, investors, philanthropists, climate and environmental organizations, researchers, public health practitioners, and others involved in decisions about AI infrastructure and the places that host it.
What You Will Get Out of It
A community-level view of the environmental and social impacts of data center development
Better questions for evaluating impacts on water, energy, land, health, and local infrastructure
Approaches to engaging communities earlier and more meaningfully in development decisions
Perspectives on what credible community benefit standards could include
A clearer understanding of how AI's environmental tradeoffs play out in specific places