The piece argues that large, often AI-focused data centers are being built with too little transparency about who pays the real costs.
I note three core infrastructure concerns: huge power demand that can drive new grid investments and higher retail electricity bills, heavy water use for cooling that can stress local lakes and aquifers, and tax breaks that shift funding away from schools and services.
These are the key items reiterated over and over in local data center news articles. Whether or not they are true doesn’t matter at this point, the perception is mostly solidified.
From an AI infra lens, this is about GPU-hungry facilities externalizing energy and cooling costs onto ratepayers while keeping contracts and usage data opaque.
The article also questions the claimed economic upside, pointing out that hyperscale sites are highly automated and create few well-paying local jobs compared with their footprint and subsidies.
Operationally, it calls for public disclosure of power and water consumption, terms with utilities, and the scale of tax incentives so communities can weigh AI data center benefits against environmental and financial risk.
For anyone planning or operating AI infrastructure, this is a reminder that community trust, transparent resource use, and fair cost-sharing are now as critical as rack density and PUE.
The full story is worth a read for how it links neighborhood-level impacts to the broader AI data center buildout.
Source: Memorable story of 2025: Your Right to Know: Data center secrecy is unacceptable
