You may have seen the viral videos of contentious city council meetings from around the nation, where data-center development is broadly under debate. The public has no shortage of questions, concerns and opinions about data centers and the impact on their communities — questions about utility costs, land grabs, freshwater depletion, contamination, and economic concerns, such as regulation and oversight, tax incentives for data-center owners, jobs during and after construction, and whether there is a net gain or loss to public benefit.
The least interesting thing about covering data centers might be the data centers themselves. “Once you’ve toured a couple, you’ve kind of seen them all,” said Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) reporter Zachary Hansen. “[That’s] the experience that I’ve had. They’re buzzing computer servers for the most part. It’s really more the ripple effects of that facility.”
Those ripple effects spurred the “Data Surge” project by Hansen and his AJC colleagues, a reporting series that won first place in the “Newspaper News Series in a Top 20 Media Market” at the National Headliner Awards this past April. The investigation looked into Atlanta data centers’ water and power consumption. Atlanta is only second to Northern Virginia as the nation’s data center capital.
Hansen recalls knowing little about the issue when he started covering economic development and commercial real estate at the AJC nearly five years ago. As his beat developed, so did the new data centers. Initially, he covered them as a novelty. Then, they kept coming.
As of Aug. 2026, Atlanta has 97 operational data centers; nine that are under construction; 37 more in the planning phase, and three that are classified as “paused or inactive,” according to the U.S. Data Center Map.
Despite Atlanta’s uniquely vast adoption of data centers, “A-Town” is just one of many experiencing this boom. Urban, suburban and rural communities alike across the country now face the realities of a massive server farm moving in as Big Tech goes all in on artificial intelligence (AI).
Data centers are broadly defined brick-and-mortar facilities built to house technological infrastructure. They long predate the release of generative artificial intelligence but now seem synonymous with powering the emerging technology. And as public outcry surrounds AI use, the land, water and energy consumed by data centers and the subsequent environmental toll face unprecedented scrutiny.
These facilities now peek between the Douglas firs of the Pacific Northwest and interrupt the Chihuahuan Desert sprawl of the southern border, rearranging entire landscapes in their wake. But they also bring promises of jobs and renewed industry to towns long past their manufacturing prime.
As data centers break new ground, so do local newsrooms. Concerns and hostility over environmental impact, AI-related job displacement and higher utility bills largely dominate the conversation today. But nobody goes to journalism school to cover data centers (at least not yet). So, reporters like Hansen now find themselves stepping up and stepping into the role from other beats and backgrounds.
“It is such a big emerging business that a couple years ago really did not exist [to this extent],” said Hansen. “And that’s kind of fascinating as a reporter to be on the early side of that. … It’s on us to see how that’s going to pan out over the next five, 10, 20 years, because there’s a lot riding on this for some communities out there.”
Accidental experts
Diego Mendoza-Moyers originally aspired to cover immigration when he enrolled at Arizona State’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. But his professional path took him to New York where he covered business at the Albany Times Union. He remained on the business beat after returning to Texas to the San Antonio Express-News, where the local oil and gas economy played a sizable role in his coverage.
Mendoza-Moyers’ true homecoming happened in 2023 when El Paso Matters came calling. The nonprofit newsroom enlisted him to cover an intersection between business, energy and environment, which ostensibly developed into a data center beat. He also points to a graduate certificate program at New Mexico State University on public utility regulation and economics for helping him understand the issue.
Today, his hometown is literally and figuratively a Wild West for data center construction. A campus from Meta, the tech developer behind Facebook and Instagram, will soon call El Paso home. Less than an hour away, New Mexico’s Project Jupiter is currently under construction and will house data center buildings for companies like Oracle and OpenAI, as well as an on-site powerplant.
“I’m officially an environment reporter [so] I try to focus on utilities and water,” said Mendoza-Moyers. “So, that naturally led to data centers. Everyone’s been up in arms about the water usage and air pollution. It just naturally progressed into covering data centers.”
Hansen recalls interviewing roughly 50 people for the first few stories in the “Data Surge” series. He says there’s no “playbook” for reporting on data centers the way there is for covering other commercial real estate issues like warehouses or apartments.
“Like all beat reporting, it just takes time and a lot of talking to people that know various aspects of this topic,” said Hansen. “And knowing that things change. The ways that I covered [data centers] two years ago might not be the approach that I [use to] cover it now. … Like any kind of beat, you have to stay curious about it.”
Mike Rogoway, a longtime business reporter for The Oregonian, also stepped into data center coverage. He usually reports on Intel, Oregon’s largest corporate employer, but found reporting on data centers a “natural fit.” The coverage is so sweeping — and there is such a demand for information by the public — that Rogoway said it could warrant a dedicated beat reporter.
“For 20 years, I've been focused on the semiconductor industry, what’s happening in Santa Clara, new manufacturing tools, EUV [Extreme Ultraviolet lithography], things like that,” said Rogoway. “But I cut my teeth reporting on school board meetings in small towns in rural Washington and in Alaska, so it’s not so strange to me to be covering a city council meeting in a city in Oregon of 12,000 people, where there’s tens of billions of dollars in data center infrastructure under discussion.
“It doesn't feel that alien to me. I have some experience doing it, so I have a sense of how decisions get made at the local level. What people look for, and what they might miss.”
Oregon’s first large-scale data center opened two decades ago when Google set sights on the City of The Dalles, an eastern city with lower drought resistance and increased dependence on Mount Hood’s melting snowpack for water. Over the years, local governments representing tiny municipalities handed unprecedentedly large tax breaks to tech companies to build more facilities.
When The Oregonian requested public records on water consumption from Google’s data centers, The Dalles sued to block their release, arguing that the records were a “trade secret” exempt from the state’s public-records law. Ultimately, the newsroom prevailed and it “set a benchmark for making that information public.” The records confirmed Google’s soaring water use in The Dalles, where a recent city advisory asked residents to voluntarily cut down on their own water use.
Emotional intelligence
Recently, both leading candidates in Oregon’s gubernatorial race — Democratic incumbent Gov. Tina Kotek and Republican challenger Christine Drazan — called for a data-center moratorium. But even with future regulations in place, the state still faces existing sites and projects greenlit for a permitting process before generative AI-related backlash exploded.
“The public is clearly leading the way on this right now, but the public had the information to address this earlier to raise these issues, and so did our government leaders,” said Rogoway. “And neither one of them did. Many of the impacts are now baked in, in terms of land availability, of power use [and] tax incentives.”
Few people noticed when El Paso approved the Meta data center campus in December 2023. Mendoza-Moyers attributes a “different environment” back then and recounts almost no public comment at the time.
Mendoza-Moyers also pointed to discrepancies between experts and public outcry for issues like rising energy costs, despite Meta potentially absorbing them. He believes a general fear of AI and contempt for “letting billionaire oligarchs shape the world” often fuel their concerns.
“The commentary from academics has been so different than the commentary from the public,” said Mendoza-Moyers. “Obviously the public is very anti-data center, very skeptical of all this stuff, for good reason. But the academics I’ve talked to are not at all and that’s been an interesting process for me to work through just from a learning perspective. … I’m trying to go to the people that know more than me and they’re not concerned, but then I talk to other people and they’re freaking out. How do I square these two things?”
One of the byproducts of reporting on data centers is that the public has become more aware of environmental issues and corporate accountability elsewhere in their communities. Mendoza-Moyers pointed to a local refinery that flew under the radar for a century but now faces scrutiny thanks to the data center issue.
For Rogoway, Pulitzer Prize-winner Russell Baker’s truism on sports reporting feels just as relevant in his work. “Everyone in the stands knows more than the people running the team,” the late New York Times columnist famously said. Data centers provide a unique pivot in tech reporting away from the Steve Jobs-era hardware demos and toward local journalism, long in the making.
“There’s been a shift that people are increasingly interested in the impacts. What does this mean? In terms of data center coverage, there’s a degree of technical knowledge that you need to have. … But probably most important is to understand that there are people at the end of this,” Rogoway said. “Technology has historically been concentrated in places like Santa Clara, Palo Alto, Seattle, but data centers by their nature are distributed. They’re taking up large tracts of land all across the country.”
Tandy Lau is an award-winning journalist currently based in Jersey City. He currently works as a staff reporter covering public safety for the New York Amsterdam News in Harlem. He can be contacted at tandylau1995@gmail.com.
Comments
No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here