Georgia is one of the fastest-growing hubs for data centers in the nation. Development in Georgia has surged by 211% since 2023, driven by insatiable demand for artificial intelligence (AI). These enormous facilities, typically powered by dirty fossil fuels, are being built to house information technology infrastructure, a.k.a. massive racks of computers.
The QTS data center, near Atlanta’s Westside, is over 1 million square feet, and that’s not unusual. With facilities this massive come growing, now commonplace, concerns from nearby residents and environmental experts, particularly in underserved communities, about significant air pollution and energy usage.
Tell Congress: Protect Families From Dangerous Data Center Air Pollution
Big tech is flocking to Georgia because the state offers a compelling package for companies: abundant land, strong fiber-optic infrastructure, and open access to power and water, plus sales and use tax exemptions. Georgia Power also gives the facilities significantly discounted electricity rates compared to what residential customers pay. The result: more than $40 billion in data center money pouring into the state in just the first seven months of 2025.
The problem of industrial facilities in residential areas
There are already more than 100 fossil-fuel-powered data centers in Georgia, mostly in and around Atlanta. In late 2025, there were five new data center projects under construction in southern Fulton County, an area that includes unincorporated areas south of Atlanta, and dozens more are being proposed.
These facilities are ending up in residential areas with large Black and Latino populations because they are overwhelmingly zoned for “light industry.” These areas have historically been where economically marginalized communities and communities of color are located.
“A lot of these data centers are going into these light industrial zoning areas when really it should be heavy industrial and manufacturing because they are emitting the pollution that a heavy industrial facility emits,” says Jessica Mason Owens, a geographic information systems and data analyst with Science for Georgia
Compounding environmental injustice for Fulton County
Wanda Mosely, Deputy Policy Director with Black Voters Matter and a resident of southern Fulton County, says the data center conversation reminds her of the fight over heavy diesel truck traffic coming in and out in her neighborhood from 2017 to 2019, a time residents also started to see reports of high asthma rates in the area.
“Apparently no one planned to have an industrial area that wouldn’t be near a residential area, or an area where there are schools, churches, and parks. These data centers are going to exacerbate those differences in air quality and health between the people who live in southern Fulton County, a predominantly Black area, versus northern Fulton County, which is predominantly white,” she says.
Wanda points out that the uptick in data centers is just the latest example of communities of color having to endure companies that put “profit over people.” “It’s as if elected officials aren’t listening to scientists. They just don’t believe them when they say that this is going to be detrimental to the clean air we need to breathe,” she says.
Preventable health consequences
Recent research on data centers from Virginia Commonwealth University found that, in some cases, these facilities not only emit toxic pollution but also exceed the harmful emissions from nearby power plants. This pollution includes carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, soot, sulfur dioxide, and volatile organic compounds, like benzene, and it can cause myriad health impacts, including increased risk of heart attacks, respiratory infections, asthma attacks, cancer, and even death.
Dr. Yolanda Whyte, a pediatrician and environmental health and special needs consultant based in Atlanta, offered expert testimony to the Atlanta City Council regarding a proposed data center in southwest Atlanta in March.
“My 20-year clinical expertise and research indicate that the current ‘infrastructure-to-injury’ pathway of these facilities poses a direct threat to the health of our residents, particularly African Americans, children, and neurodiverse individuals,” Dr. Whyte wrote in her testimony.
“Data centers in our community represent preventable corporate and environmental determinants of health,” she continued, adding that “data centers in Georgia are driving a massive 10 GW energy expansion that relies on methane-gas-burning plants, increasing nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and particulate matter (PM2.5) emissions. This strains our grid and increases our dependency on fossil fuels, worsening the climate crisis.”
Calling for transparency and clean energy
If communities want to better understand what kind of pollution the data centers are emitting, the first thing they should do is advocate for and demand transparency from the companies that operate them, according to Olivia Asher, a PhD candidate and presidential fellow in the Institute of Bioinformatics at the University of Georgia.
“A lot of times, what happens is everybody will say, ‘Oh, we have an NDA [nondisclosure agreement]. We can’t tell you where our electric power is coming from,” Olivia says. “We can’t tell you what chemicals we’re using for cooling. We can’t tell you anything. So one thing that communities could do when they develop local ordinances for their data centers is to ask for no NDAs and full transparency.”
Another avenue for better data center oversight is a state’s public utilities commission, the agency that regulates electric utilities and has major say over clean energy policy. In Georgia, this agency is officially called the Public Service Commission (PSC), and after a special election last year, it has two new members who campaigned on fighting for transparency in state energy decisions and affordability for local families: Peter Hubbard and Alicia Johnson. Commissioners have the unique power to direct utilities to prioritize cheaper cleaner energy and battery storage as they scramble to meet all these new and planned data centers’ massive electricity needs. They can set rules that shift the burden of paying for new energy infrastructure from families to the data centers themselves. They can also block or end discounted electricity rates for these energy-guzzling facilities.
Moms’ Georgia Organizer, Kiya Stanford, is fast at work helping Atlanta residents share their air quality and environmental justice concerns about the fossil-fuel-powered data center explosion at local government and PSC meetings. She says, “We need to connect the dots between industrial development, environmental pollution, and our right to breathe clean air.”
Tell Congress: Protect Families From Dangerous Data Center Air Pollution