TED Talks Daily
Sunday Pick: The Data Center Next Door with Dr. Jacoby Wilson | from TED Tech
14 Jun 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What are the environmental impacts of data centers on neighborhoods?
Happy Sunday, y'all. Elise Hugh here. Today, we're bringing you a Sunday Pick, where we share an episode of another podcast from TED, handpicked by us for you. Imagine if one day your quiet neighborhood came alive with a steady hum and it never went away.
All throughout the U.S., data centers are popping up next door and in your backyards, and these buildings guzzle millions of gallons of water, cause noise pollution that doesn't stop, and are raising homeowners' utility bills. Today, I'm sharing a special episode from the TED Tech podcast.
the first of a four-part series happening on TED Tech, where host Sherelle Dorsey talks with scientists, organizers, and local leaders to uncover what AI's infrastructure is really doing to our water, our power grid, and the people who are already living with the consequences.
In this episode, you'll hear from environmental health scientist Dr. Jacoby Wilson on what happens when data centers infiltrate a neighborhood. They discuss why data centers disproportionately undermine working class communities and how Dr. Wilson is developing ordinances to better regulate data centers and hold planning commissions more accountable.
You can hear the other episodes of this series on data centers on TED Tech, wherever you get your podcasts.
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Chapter 2: How do data centers affect working-class communities?
or at podcasts.ted.com. Now onto the episode after a short break.
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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.
Chapter 3: What is the significance of the People's Report in this context?
Instead, this building houses rows and rows of servers stretching ceiling to floor, cooled by enough water to serve thousands of homes. It 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. This 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. This 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?
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Chapter 4: What are the health risks associated with data centers?
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. Prince 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.
Residents 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.
Chapter 5: How can communities advocate against harmful data center developments?
She's seen stories like this unfold time and time again in communities of color across the country.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 6: What role does environmental justice play in the fight against data centers?
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.
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. No 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. Understanding 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.
Hi, I'm Dr. Jacoby 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, embodied people.
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Chapter 7: How does the data center crisis connect to broader civil rights issues?
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.
The 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.
Now we're talking about digital sacrifice zones. We're talking about digital sacrifice zones. So when you think about 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've got combustion byproducts like particulate matter, dust in the air.
You have volatilizing compounds. So you think about you've got your new car, the new car smell. I always tell people to hold your breath. VOCs, you're not supposed to breathe that stuff in. You have sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide. All these pollutants are harmful to your health.
A particular matter by itself can elevate your blood pressure, impact birth, so outcomes, so infant mortality, birth defects, low birth weight babies.
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Chapter 8: What actions can local governments take to regulate data centers effectively?
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. It's a water quality issue.
OK, then you have the issues of energy justice. You got folks in this country right now who had to choose between paying for the energy bill, paying for the medicine, paying for that 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. So 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. How do you go from, you know, server racks that are powering our day-to-day technology use to into this now being a civil rights issue. I wanna connect the threads.
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's gonna 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 this space, data center space. A lot of these folks are signing NDAs. So mayors, county officials, they're signing NDAs. And a part of this, okay, 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 company's voice is heard in decision making. So this all connects back to civil rights.
This all connects to the rights of the people. 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 who 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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