IF YOU BELIEVE the boosters, the artificial intelligence boom is poised to remake our economy and society. Whether or not AI is coming for our jobs, one thing is clear: This AI future will demand more and larger data centers. Unless we have a seat at the table to set regulations, the data center boom will hurt Black and brown frontline communities like mine in Roxbury first and worst.

The AI boom is causing real harm, today, in our communities — and it’s poised to do much worse. Companies like Microsoft, Meta (Facebook), and Google require almost unthinkably large amounts of electricity to create and run their language models. The Department of Energy expects data centers to triple their electric consumption by 2028, using one-eighth of all electricity in the country. 

As the leader of Alternatives for Community and Environment (ACE), Boston’s Black-led environmental justice organization, it’s my job to defend Black, brown, immigrant, and low-income communities like ours in Roxbury. Here in Massachusetts, AI data centers threaten our communities in three ways: increasing climate-fueled disasters, spiking higher energy costs, and worsening local air pollution. 

Let’s dig into these three threats to frontline communities like Roxbury: 

First, data centers are accelerating climate chaos. Nationwide, AI investment is funding new gas pipelines and gas-burning power plants, propping up coal mines and coal-burning generators, and restarting old nuclear plants. Chevron and Exxon are publicly touting their plans to build new gas plants adjacent to data centers. Meta’s new data center in Louisiana will be powered by another new gas plant. And Microsoft paid to restart the 51-year-old nuclear plant at Three Mile Island. 

Second, adding new data centers to the energy grid is also certain to drive up prices. Boston already has among the highest levels of energy cost burdened residents of any city. Increasing power demand will drive prices up even faster than currently anticipated, which means more families struggling to pay the bills, especially low-income folks.

And last, we’ll see unhealthier air, with carcinogenic pollution exacerbating asthma, lung disease, and heart disease. That’s true for communities adjacent to fossil-fueled power plants (like the new plant in Peabody), but it’s equally true for anyone downwind of a data center. Data centers are typically co-located with backup, diesel-burning generators. The largest data center in Boston, Markley Group’s Downtown Crossing center, claims 30 megawatts of on-site generation, enough to power 24,000 homes. That’s a lot of diesel exhaust that could stream into Chinatown, the South End, Roxbury, or South Boston. 

The threat to Black and brown neighborhoods isn’t speculative: Elon Musk’s new xAI data center sits in Boxtown, the historically Black Memphis neighborhood. It runs on mobile gas-burning generators in a neighborhood that ranks among the worst in the country when it comes to levels of local air pollution. Nationally, it’s estimated that data-center-driven air pollution will kill 1,300 Americans a year by 2030.

As we consider these three risks, we don’t have to speculate about how AI data centers might affect Massachusetts. Consider Ireland, a country with a similar population size, where AI has driven a data center boom. Warehouses full of servers are on pace to use one-third of Ireland’s electricity, drawing from fossil-fuel power plants and wind farms alike. That keeps old, dirty plants on the grid, sucks up renewable energy that otherwise would help replace fossil fuels, and drives up costs for everyone. The Irish pay among Europe’s highest electric bills.

We don’t have to look overseas to see the impacts of a rapidly warming climate. In Boston this past summer, extreme heat slammed our city, resulting in five deaths. Like all climate impacts, it didn’t hit evenly across neighborhoods: redlined neighborhoods were hotter. Our neighborhoods are less resilient to heat, and suffered more from related diseases and hospitalization. And of course, wildfires and floods have dominated the headlines nationwide in recent months.

ACE has been building power in Roxbury for more than 30 years. We’ve seen that environmental harms like diesel pollution, extreme heat, and chronic illnesses accumulate among Black, brown, immigrant, and low-income populations because of systemic and individual racism. AI data centers stand poised to exacerbate these trends, but it may not be too late to reverse course.

Instead of a rapid transition to clean energy, AI-fueled data centers are unraveling the progress already made to reduce pollution and limit climate-fueled disasters like forest fires, floods, and deadly heat waves.

Despite these harms, Massachusetts leaders are heading the wrong way. Late last year, they rolled out the red carpet for AI businesses: Gov. Healey’s AI Task Force hopes to write a $100 million check to AI businesses in an industry led by some of the richest people in the world, and she’s asking the people of Massachusetts to foot the bill without transparency about the real costs. Meanwhile, a newly signed law gives data centers all kinds of tax breaks, and municipalities are offering them discounts on energy prices, rather than doing anything to account for their harms.

It’s time for Massachusetts leaders to take the adverse impacts of AI seriously:

  • Put frontline communities at the table. For example, the AI Task Force should include representatives from the communities most at risk from climate chaos, pollution, and energy burden. Boston’s governance council for its building-emission reduction, BERDO 2.0, could be a model for community-governed pollution reduction.
  • Data centers’ impacts must be limited, and Massachusetts should lead the way. This means mandating transparency on the costs they’re imposing on communities in terms of energy prices, pollution, and climate impact. (We shouldn’t fall for a false solution like energy offsets, which tend to accumulate harm in neighborhoods like ours.)
  • Our elected officials should support federal efforts to regulate tech companies’ use of AI based on the true social costs they impose.

If we don’t act, we’ll see more climate-driven disasters, more air pollution, and higher energy costs. And we know that these impacts all hit our communities the hardest.

But if we rise to this challenge, Massachusetts can lead the way toward community governance over AI, limiting its harm and mapping a path toward a future where technology helps improve our society and address deep-seated injustice.

Dwaign Tyndal is executive director of Alternatives for Community and Environment.