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.”
Brockovich is tackling this issue as companies seem to be realizing their data center projects might need some PR help, at the very least. Meta recently announced the $115 million launch of a “workforce academy” that will train people to build data centers, positioning these jobs as a desirable skilled trade. And Meta had already tapped the politically hyper-connected Dina Powell McCormick as president and vice chairman, for a role that involves deploying more than $600 billion in AI infrastructure, data centers included. (Powell McCormick ranked No. 58 on the 2026 Most Powerful Women list in that job).
So while Meta and other businesses determine AI’s impact on the economy, Brockovich is busy evaluating its effects on everyday Americans and their communities. Read more about her work here.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Subscribe here.
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PARTING WORDS
"If you’re not listening to the parts of yourself that are sounding the alarm and asking for attention, then inevitably it erupts in some other way."
— Gracie Abrams on her new album's lead single "Hit the Wall," inspired by years of touring
