The Teens Taking On A.I. Data Centers

When Sadie Cisneros first heard about ChatGPT a couple of years ago, she figured it was harmless. Like many other high school students, Cisneros, 17, began using the chatbot regularly as a search engine and study aid.

Then she saw something alarming on a friend’s Instagram story. A 300,000-square-foot data center — the sort of hulking, humming facility that powers A.I. technology — was slated to be built near her neighborhood in Pittsburg, Calif., on the eastern edge of the Bay Area.

As she read more about the project, she grew concerned about the amount of water it would consume and the potential for it to worsen the area’s air pollution. She worried that incessant noise from the data center would disrupt students at the middle school less than half a mile away from the proposed site.

So she wrote down her objections and read them aloud in a three-minute speech during a Pittsburg City Council meeting last month — her first real brush with civic engagement.

“I came in there with pink hair, I came in there dressed like a teenager,” she said in an interview last month. “I don’t think they expected me to actually bring up real stuff that’s going on.”

Close to a decade ago, Gen Z activists walked out of school to demand action on climate change and marched to protest gun violence. Some of today’s high school activists are taking on a new foe: the proliferation of A.I. data centers, which they argue pose health and environmental threats that are being ignored in an effort to keep up with the country’s rapacious demand for computing power.

These students are joining a wave of local opposition to data centers that stretches from coast to coast and encompasses Americans of vastly different backgrounds and political beliefs. And young adults tend to have more negative views of data centers than their elders do, according to data from Pew Research Center.

But many are also wrestling with their personal reliance on the chatbots that require data centers to keep chugging along. More than half of Gen Z-ers living in the United States use generative A.I. regularly, according to a survey conducted this spring by Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation. For some of these young people, getting involved in the fight against data centers has raised a thorny question: Can you protest the physical footprint of A.I. while still taking advantage of the technology?

Cisneros is now a regular at community meetings and rallies against the planned data center in Pittsburg, which was approved in 2024. She posts videos on social media urging other young people to get involved; one of her TikToks demonstrating how to speak at a City Council meeting has been viewed more than 10 million times.

“This is real influence!” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, wrote in the comments of one Instagram post, adding three flame emojis.

A representative for Avaio Digital, the developer of the Pittsburg project, said in a statement that many of the objections to the project were a result of misunderstandings of the center’s closed-loop cooling system, which continuously recirculates water, as well as Avaio’s efforts to limit noise pollution.

Cisneros has tried to cut back on her use of A.I. She downloaded a browser that does not preface search results with A.I. summaries, and has stopped plugging offhand questions into ChatGPT. “I didn’t even need A.I. for half the stuff that I was using A.I. for,” she said.

Kyle McGuffey, a 14-year-old in Colorado Springs, said that anyone who has a smartphone is already relying on A.I. in countless ways, not all of them obvious. In iPhoto, for example, the technology is used to identify landmarks and plants.

“A.I. is already a part of our lives, and something we can’t reverse,” McGuffey said. “My concern is that it’s advancing way too quickly and without public oversight.”

McGuffey spent most of his summer break between middle and high school submitting public records requests related to Project Taurus, an A.I. data center project that was approved for construction about three miles from his home. He had a lot of questions that he said he couldn’t find convincing answers to online: Were there plans to mitigate the noise or evaluate the effects on local wildlife? What would happen in the case of a water leak?

In May, he received two dozen pages of planning documents and email communications related to the project that he had requested through the Colorado Open Records Act. They included an early report suggesting that the site could have higher power demands than had been publicly advertised — 300 megawatts, as opposed to 50. He shared the records with two opposition groups; at least one of them ended up using his research in an appeal filed against the data center.

Jason Green, the co-founder and president of Raeden, the company responsible for Project Taurus, said in a phone interview that the company had gone to great lengths to address the community’s concerns, including redesigning the data center’s walls to mitigate as much noise as possible. The document McGuffey found was from before formal diligence began on the site, he said, and the final development plan approved by the city allows for only 50 megawatts.

“I applaud the interest, even if it’s critical of what we’re doing,” Green said.

Rachel Janfaza, founder of the Up and Up, a research and media firm focused on Gen Z, said she had been hearing spirited debates about data centers since January in the focus groups she conducts with members of the generation. Many young people feel as if their age group was already a guinea pig for Big Tech once with the advent of social media: They do not want to repeat history with A.I.

“People sleep on Gen Z’s appetite for, and interest in, local politics,” she said, adding, “For them, the creation of data centers in their communities is something that they’re not only deeply aware of, but also understand that they are going to be the ones who are affected by it.”

Young people appear bearish on how artificial intelligence will affect their lives in the long term. At graduation ceremonies around the country this spring, college students showered boos on commencement speakers who shared optimism about A.I. Less than 20 percent of Gen Z respondents in the Gallup survey said they felt hopeful about the technology — a sharp decline from the previous year.

If data centers are a potent, concrete target for Gen Z’s broader feelings of unease about artificial intelligence, they may also be a common enemy for a generation with deep political divides. Last month Marco Sanchez, a 15-year-old in El Paso, Texas, started the El Paso Youth Alliance to organize teenagers in opposition to the multibillion-dollar data center being built by Meta there.

Close to 100 high school students in the area have joined so far, he said — and there’s no political litmus test to participate. “I don’t care if someone disagrees with me on who should be the next president if we both agree that the data center is bad,” Sanchez said.

When he first heard that a data center was being built in El Paso, he was hopeful that it would be the start of a meaningful investment in the city and its residents. His feelings shifted when he learned of the 80 percent property-tax break that Meta received for building there. He now worries that the project will drive up energy costs and increase pollution while Meta reaps the benefits.

“You’re screwing over working families while you give Mark Zuckerberg’s company hundreds of millions of dollars in tax rebates,” Sanchez said.

In response to a recent article about pollution associated with the rapid development of A.I. data centers, a spokesman for Meta told The New York Times that the company was “committed to offsetting 100 percent of our electricity use in El Paso with clean and renewable energy,” and that Meta “will not pass those costs on to Texans.”

Some Gen Z-ers have been learning about the costs and benefits of data centers for practically their entire lives. Mihir Nimkar, 17, grew up in Loudoun County, Va., home to a region known as Data Center Alley for its density of facilities that support internet traffic and cloud computing. Data centers are necessary for pretty much everything we like about digital life, he said during a video interview: “Without them, we couldn’t be having this call.”

Still, he has been frustrated by what he sees as the poor planning of a recent data center construction that has been supercharged by A.I. Last year, a local utility proposed a route for new high-voltage power lines that runs directly across the property of Nimkar’s high school.

In response, he and a friend, Josh Weber, formed a club called Students Against High-Voltage Expansion. It encouraged teenagers to pass out fliers and pack school board meetings. (The project, which has faced fierce local resistance, is headed to the Virginia Supreme Court.)

Nimkar still uses A.I. for feedback on his writing and to quiz himself before tests at school. No matter what happens with the power lines, he thinks the fight has complicated the commonly held assumption that A.I. is some kind of magic, blinking cursor that frictionlessly spits out answers.

“I’ve definitely become more cognizant of what it is that happens when I use A.I.,” Nimkar said. “There are so many consequences that you don’t see.”