A new report warns that Big Tech’s rapid buildout of data centers across the South could usher in a new wave of environmental and economic harms for Black and working-class communities, drawing parallels to Louisiana’s infamous Cancer Alley, the infamous span of petrochemical plants belching toxic smoke.
“Today, Big Tech is following in the footsteps of Big Oil, as they deliberately build data centers in the South, banking on disempowered cities and towns with large Black populations to not have the local power to fight back,” writes grassroots coalition MediaJustice.
There are more than $200 billion planned or ongoing data center projects across Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Virginia, and the rest of the South, according to the MediaJustice’s new report, “The People Say No: Resisting Data Centers in the South.”
The buildout of high-tech data centers, framed as “progress” by companies like Meta, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, will leave residents with higher utility bills, water scarcity, and increased pollution in the long haul, advocates warn.
Louisiana at the Epicenter
Louisiana is emerging as a new flashpoint in the South.
Entergy will use three new methane-gas plants to power Meta’s biggest data center to date, the $10 billion Hyperion project in Richland Parish, in northeastern Louisiana, according to the report. State regulators approved new Entergy infrastructure to support the facility, which is now under construction.
“This is not just about building warehouses full of computers,” said Davante Lewis, a member of the Louisiana Public Service Commission who cast the sole vote against Entergy’s plans to power the Richland Parish data center. “The real health risks come from the utilities rushing to build more gas plants and delaying renewable energy commitments,” he said. “That locks our communities into decades of pollution and higher bills.”
Currently, there are 10 operation data centers in Louisiana, with four more under construction and about eight more scheduled for the future, according to Arterio, a data analytics company. It’s estimated that the data center load will increase Entergy’s electrical needs by 30%.
The expansion deepens environmental injustice, critics say, especially in majority-Black and working-class communities already burdened by petrochemical plants. Along Cancer Alley, for instance, cancer risks soar to 50 times the national average in some parishes.
Hidden Costs: Energy, Water, and Transparency
Data centers demand staggering energy and water resources, as described within the report:
In 2023, data centers consumed about 4.4% of U.S. electricity. They are projected to reach 7–12% by 2028, according to a December 2024 report from the U.S. Department of Energy. About 56% of that will be powered by fossil fuels.
In South Carolina, regulators approved a discounted rate for the Google corporation, which pays less than half the rate of residential customers while accounting for the bulk of new energy demand.
These deals are frequently negotiated under nondisclosure agreements. In Bessemer, Alabama, $14.5 billion in farmland was rezoned without public notice. “These companies are undermining democracy by negotiating in secret and keeping our communities in the dark,” the report contends.
To cool data-center servers, facilities also may require millions of gallons each day. A proposed center in Georgia could consume nine million gallons a day—a third of one county’s entire water supply. Once used, much of the cooling water used in data centers is lost to evaporation with limited volumes returned to the water supply, WABE TV in Atlanta reported.
Few Jobs, Big Subsidies
Despite billion-dollar price tags, most data-center sites employ fewer than 150 workers.. Because of the massive size of the data center currently being built at Hyperion in Richland Parish, Louisiana is projecting roughly 500 new workers will be hired. That creates high hopes.
The data center, said Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell, “will be as important to North Louisiana as the Superdome is to New Orleans.”
The reality is that data-center specialists are typically recruited from out of the state, researchers have found. Louisiana residents, meanwhile, face higher bills and foregone public revenues to support the data centers. Some states are trying to lure corporations that own data centers by offering massive tax breaks—what experts call “a transfer of wealth from taxpayers to shareholders,” according to MediaJustice.
“We have to be honest,” said Lewis, the commissioner. “Most of these jobs are not going to local people. And we’re sacrificing long-term community needs for short-term promises that rarely materialize.”
Grassroots Resistance Increasing
Communities across the South are beginning to push back. Between May 2024 and March 2025, activists delayed or blocked $64 billion worth of data center projects in Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina, and Alabama, according to the report.
In Louisiana, environmental advocates warn that without strong resistance, new projects could cement the state as a digital “sacrifice zone,” a familiar term to the poor communities in the South that often shoulder pollution and other industry burdens.
“Not all economic development is good economic development,” Lewis said. “We need community benefit agreements.”
The state’s residents could end up paying “hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars” in costs associated with powering the Richland Parish data center, an analysis by Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) concluded.
A Legacy Repeating
From cotton plantations to petrochemicals, Louisiana has long been treated as a resource colony. say critics who characterize data centers as a form of digital colonialism—extracting land, water, and power for Big Tech’s global ambitions while leaving locals behind.
A spokesperson with Eyes on Surveillance, a New Orleans-based advocacy group, made the following statement to MediaJustice in the report:
“We have to realize that at the core of the expansion of data centers and AI facial recognition, we find Big Tech profiting from the suffering and destruction of the livelihoods of people of color.”
The group also sees a connection between the technological buildup and excessive police surveillance.
“Our fight here in New Orleans against dangerous facial recognition tech is the same fight against data centers,” the spokesperson said. “Facial recognition requires data centers to exist, so we have a system of racist technology that destroys our lives through criminalization and over-policing, through the polluting of our water and air, through the depletion of our resources, and ultimately, through the dehumanization of our lives.”
The South knows this story well. The question is whether the region will allow another chapter of exploitation—or whether resistance can turn the page toward something different, data-center critics say.
Though Lewis at the moment stands as the sole critic on this issue on the public-service commission, he still believes that a broader pushback could materialize — if people begin to see it as a way to safeguard the area’s future, in case the AI bubble bursts, as some predict it will.
If that happens, opponents say, it would be easy for Meta to take a $10 million loss and walk away, leaving the data-center project as a burden on local taxpayers.
“We can’t just be blinded by the shiny moment,” Lewis said. “These industries promise tax revenue and jobs, but 15 or 20 years from now, what will the real cost be to our communities? A $10 billion loss might sound huge to us, but to (Meta CEO) Mark Zuckerberg, it’s like buying a round of drinks at the bar.”