Jenna Bynum, Mother, teacher, Tennessee Valley

I live three miles from a data center.

I know this because I can see the cooling towers from my kitchen window. I know this because my electric bill went up $40 a month after it opened. And because my daughter has been to the emergency room twice this year for asthma attacks. She is seven years old. She had no history of respiratory problems before 2025.

I am not a scientist. I am not a policy expert. I am a person who grew up in this neighborhood, raised my kids in this neighborhood, and watched this neighborhood spend twenty years slowly getting its air back.

We had made real progress. Anybody who lived here through the bad years knows what that meant. You could go outside in the morning without your eyes burning. Kids could run at recess without inhalers in their backpacks. It wasn’t perfect. It was never perfect. But it was better. Measurably better.

That progress is now being completely dismantled to power servers.

Around 60% of the fossil fuel plants scheduled for retirement across the country’s largest power grid have postponed or canceled those plans — most of them the oldest and dirtiest plants in the system — because data centers need the power. The plant near my neighborhood that was supposed to close came back online. Nobody asked how I felt about that.

I did some reading. I found out that the health costs from AI data center air pollution are projected to reach $20 billion a year in the United States by 2028. Twenty billion dollars. That number exists in a research paper. It does not exist in any conversation anyones having publicly. It does not appear in corporation reports, which will tell you that their operations are carbon neutral.

They are carbon neutral because they bought a certificate from a wind farm somewhere else. The wind farm is real. The certificate is real. The peaker plant outside my window is also real. My daughter’s emergency room copay is real.

A UCLA study found that residents of historically redlined communities are 53% more likely to live near peaker plants than those in non-redlined areas. The neighborhoods that were systematically denied investment for decades are now the neighborhoods absorbing the health costs of a technological revolution that will make other people extraordinarily wealthy.

We are, again, the infrastructure. We are the sacrifice zone dressed up in the language of innovation.

And the water. A single large AI data center can use 1 to 2 billion gallons of water annually for cooling. In a region already fighting over drought allocations, already watching agriculture shrink, already watching dry lake beds turn to particulate matter that blows into our lungs — that water is not neutral. That water was doing something before the servers arrived. Now it’s gone.

I want to be clear about what I am asking for. I am not asking for the data centers to close. I am not against technology.

I am against the premise that my neighborhood’s air, my neighborhood’s water, and my daughter’s lungs are an acceptable operating cost for an industry that could afford to do this differently and has chosen not to.

I am asking for health impact assessments before permits are approved. I am asking for location-based emissions accountability — not credits purchased somewhere else, but clean power at the actual site. I am asking for the communities bearing these costs to have a seat in the decisions that create them.

Then we can have innovation without sacrificing public health.