From Mississippi to Maryland, Black Communities Are Taking On Big Tech

When word spread through Bessemer, Alabama, earlier this year that a tech giant was eyeing hundreds of pine-covered acres at the city’s edge, Benard Simelton’s phone wouldn’t stop ringing. The longtime NAACP leader had fielded calls about toxic air and shuttered steel mills before, but this, he said, was new to him.

At first, the renderings looked like progress for the majority-Black town: glass-and-concrete buildings promising jobs, innovation, and a future rooted in Big Tech. But the fine print told a different story: a complex that would level 700 acres of forest, swallow nearly 2 million gallons of water a day, and draw enough electricity to power a city the size of Seattle. 

What officials pitched as transformation began to feel, to Simelton, like extraction.

Behind closed doors, city leaders had inked nondisclosure agreements tied to the nearly $15 billion plan. Then came a zoning change that allows industrial facilities to now be built on farmland, stripping away oversight and clearing the path for potentially even more sprawling data centers to be built in the city with little public input.

Now, residents are asking what “progress” means when the future demands so much from those who already have so little.

“They’re not telling us much,” Simelton said. “If this was really good for the community, why all the secrecy?”

There are roughly 3,000 data centers operating nationwide, with an additional 1,000 estimated in the construction pipeline. The South is facing the largest impacts, according to residents and multiple analyses. 

Across the South, data centers — the high-tech warehouses behind artificial intelligence — are rising on the fault lines of environmental injustice, according to MediaJustice, a nonprofit organization advocating for community ownership of media infrastructure. 

A MediaJustice review found more than $200 billion in planned data infrastructure across Southern states. The report found that these projects are often landing in communities long treated as sacrifice zones, where vulnerable residents already face increased health and economic harm.

The funders of data centers promise high-paying tech jobs and local investment. But advocates say they see a familiar pattern: exclusion from decision-making, environmental risk, and benefits that rarely reach those most affected. As Big Tech collects hundreds of millions in tax breaks, residents and newfound tech activists are saying it leaves residents with higher light bills, reduced drinking water, and deepening inequality.

From Texas to Virginia and everywhere in between, Black residents are confronting these projects in different ways: packing city council and county commissioner meetings, gathering tens of thousands of signatures, filing environmental impact complaints, and leveraging local ordinances to delay approval. 

“Today, Big Tech is following in the footsteps of Big Oil as this industry deliberately builds data centers in the South, banking on disempowered cities and towns with large Black populations to not have the local power to fight back,” MediaJustice researchers wrote in the September report. “But from Bessemer, Alabama, to Memphis, Tennessee, local communities are showing up to call out the public health, environmental, and economic harms of data centers and the bulldozing of democratic processes to greenlight them.”

How data centers may harm Black communities

In towns where residents already face rising utility costs, data centers now account for up to 70% of new energy demand, and since 2020, people who live near them have seen an increase in electricity costs of as much as 267%.

In more rural communities, residents near data centers are reporting that the water in their taps is brown and murky or does not drip out at all. The centers are also leading to at least 200 new power plants being built to meet the new energy demands of AI, according to an analysis of permit applications. Studies show that power plants are most likely to be constructed in Black neighborhoods and worsen the risks of cancer and respiratory disease.

Researchers from Majority Action, an advocacy group focused on increasing sustainable economic investments, have concluded that the growth of data centers is also worsening climate change. 

“The AI data center boom is accelerating climate change by increasing our reliance on fossil fuels and deepening inequality by burdening communities with poor air quality and higher utility rates,” wrote Majority Action researchers in a policy report.

But across the country, community members say they are learning from one another’s playbooks to slow or stop massive data-center projects. According to Data Center Watch, a research firm that tracks the growing opposition to these projects, roughly $64 billion worth of U.S. data‑center projects have been delayed or shelved after such actions. From door‑to‑door campaigns to courtroom appeals, these networks of residents, environmental groups, and city council allies are hoping to turn local hearings into national battlegrounds over AI’s physical footprint.

“They’re not telling us much. If this was really good for the community, why all the secrecy?”

Benard Simelton

In College Station, Texas, residents organized a six-hour public hearing that drew more than 5,000 petition signatures and 75 speakers. Their activism convinced the city council to unanimously reject a 600‑megawatt complex. 

Similar efforts in North Carolina, Michigan, and Arizona involve organizing neighborhood canvasses, filing open-records requests, and coordinating with local officials to push for moratoriums. 

“With these projects, the public interest has to actually be about the public. It can’t keep operating under this idea that industry will save a community,” said Davante Lewis, an elected member of Louisiana’s Public Service Commission tasked with regulating industry. 

Lewis, the only Black official on the commission, was the only member to vote against a new data center owned by Meta, the parent company of Facebook. The center will be the biggest in North America upon completion. 

“People still have immense power, and they should use it,” he added. “If officials aren’t acting in your best interest, you have the right to take that power back.”

Fighting rising costs in Baltimore

In Maryland, there is frustration over soaring power bills that has evolved into local action. With a $5 billion data center proposed in Baltimore, residents like Kevin Stanley of Broadway East — who said his energy costs are up nearly 80% in three years — have joined neighborhood organizers and legal advocates pressing the Maryland Public Service Commission to investigate whether data center power demand is inflating household rates. 

Consumer advocates and the Office of People’s Counsel are urging state regulators to require utilities to disclose how much of recent hikes stem from transmission upgrades linked to data centers in nearby Virginia. Community meetings in Baltimore’s Greenmount East and Charles Village have drawn residents who say they’re cutting back on groceries to keep their lights on every month.

“It is bad enough that Maryland residential customers are already paying the price of policies that have them subsidizing some of the world’s wealthiest corporations,” David Lapp, People’s Counsel for the state of Maryland, said in a statement to Capital B. “They shouldn’t have to pay for inflated estimates of projected growth that is unlikely to ever occur.”

Storming council meetings in Bessemer 

Back in Alabama, one of the most visible forms of activism in Bessemer is the “Wear Red” coalition, led by the Alabama Rivers Alliance, neighborhood organizers, and the state NAACP. In recent weeks, they have turned city council meetings into a sea of red shirts — a sign of collective resistance to the $15 billion Project Marvel data center. 

The coalition’s campaign combines the pressure at council meetings by sharing digital petitions that have collected thousands of signatures. Residents are also canvassing door‑to‑door and staging teach‑ins across the city in Black churches and community halls to explain how the project could drive up energy prices and drain local water supplies. 

Simelton, the NAACP leader, said that tech companies “believe that if they can get the political leaders on their side, they feel they won’t have people beating on their doors demanding answers — that’s why they choose low‑income Black communities.” 

“But we’re here to fight,” he said. 

In a press release issued earlier this month, the Bessemer City Council reaffirmed its full support for the data center as a “tremendous investment” and said they are “fully committed to moving it forward.”

Alongside calls for environmental review and disclosure of nondisclosure agreements, organizers are now drafting a community benefits agreement proposal — a legally binding contract that ensures developers share tangible benefits with local residents — that could require the builders of the data center to invest in local water infrastructure, job training, and health monitoring before a single shovel hits the ground. Such agreements, however, have at times delivered uneven results, with promises proving difficult to enforce or falling short of community expectations.

Power struggle in South Fulton

In South Fulton, Georgia, residents are confronting a wave of data center expansion that they said threatens to upend their neighborhoods. At a September community meeting, dozens of people gathered in the Etris Community Center in neighboring Union City to demand answers about projects that one advocate described are “reshaping communities without their input.” 

Organizer Wanda Mosley with the Black Voters Matter Fund has been leading a grassroots education effort by hosting meetings and distributing information to residents who she said are often left out of zoning discussions. 

Advocates said they are also drawing attention to the broader pattern of inequity, warning that Black communities in southern Fulton County have long been burdened with industrial development that officials often routinely reject in whiter and wealthier parts of the region. 

“The city needs to think about the history of environmental racism, because it plays a role here,” Yvonne Cole Boone told Capital B Atlanta.

As rural and urban Black communities across Georgia organize, residents are demanding transparency, better land‑use decisions, and an end to what Mosley calls a pattern of “being used as a dumping ground.”

MediaJustice researchers echo that belief in the report: “Tech corporations are marketing data center projects as ‘progress,’ but the reality is that tech giants like Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta are quietly draining the South — economically and environmentally.”

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