In 2000, Erin Brockovich was famously portrayed by Julia Roberts in a film named for her, fighting for environmental justice in a denim miniskirt. The real Brockovich secured $330 million for residents of Hinkley, California over PG&E’s groundwater contamination. In the years following, she continued advocating for victims of environmental damage around the country.
If you haven’t heard from Brockovich in a while, you might not know about her current cause: the proliferation of data centers across the U.S. She’s running a project called Brockovich AI Data Center Reporting. My colleague Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez explored this work in a recent piece for Fortune.
Brockovich has a Substack newsletter where she is chronicling the project. And she says that more than water usage, noise, and rising utility bills, the biggest concern people have in communities where data centers are being built is transparency. Her project has received 4,000 submissions across 50 states, from Holly Ridge, Louisiana to the data-center hub of Loudon County, Virginia.
She’s pushing for companies to inform residents of their projects before they start, not when they’re already underway. “Transparency means notifying residents before decisions are made, not after. It means public hearings with real, complete information about energy consumption, water use, noise levels, and effects on local infrastructure,” she wrote recently. “It means elected officials who answer to their constituents first, not to the corporations seeking tax breaks and zoning variances.”
