Behind Eileen Castle's house in Lowell, Massachusetts, an industrial data center's cooling towers and diesel backup generators have turned her state designated environmental justice neighborhood into a vivid flashpoint in the AI infrastructure debate.
Eileen Castle, 82, has stopped filling the backyard pool she used to open every June. The industrial air conditioners and backup diesel generators behind her house in the Sacred Heart neighborhood of Lowell, Massachusetts have made this summer's heat wave something she would rather sit out.
The refusal is small. The mechanism behind it is not, and for the first time it is visible all at once: from a backyard pool on a 90-degree afternoon in Sacred Heart, to a rare grid alert from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, to a Texas governor asking his state legislature to block new data centers in rural counties. Heat pushes the facilities into their most energy-intensive, water-intensive, and diesel-polluting operating mode, which is also when regulators and neighbors start to notice them.
Sacred Heart is a neighborhood the state has already designated as an environmental-justice community: low-income, racially diverse, working-class, and, by state Rep. Tara Hong's account, heavily Cambodian American. Hong, a Lowell Democrat, has raised concerns about the cumulative impact of the data center's cooling exhaust and generator smoke on families who did not get to vote on the facility going in. Her complaint is local. The grid stress behind it is national.
The North American Electric Reliability Corporation, the continent's grid reliability watchdog, has issued a rare Level 3 alert on data-center load-loss risk, an escalation utilities reserve for problems that can no longer be treated as hypothetical, per Utility Dive's coverage of the NERC alert. A legal read from the Morgan Lewis Power & Pipes blog treats the alert as a turn from emerging risk toward formal planning obligations, not a warning operators can absorb and move past.
Heat is what made the alert visible. Refrigeration-based cooling rises nonlinearly with outside temperature, and when the grid tightens more operators lean on diesel backup to keep server halls inside their design envelope. That is the same diesel smoke Castle smells from her kitchen, multiplied by every data center on the same heat island.
The political response is starting to match. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called this year for blocking new data centers in rural parts of the state, and a Houston Chronicle follow-up tracked the rural-data-center backlash he has been stoking. Texas built more data-center capacity than almost any state in the last two years; the governor now wants the next wave kept out of his.
The national backdrop is the AI buildout itself. Data centers have moved from a story about compute to a story about externality. Water, power, and air have become the three lines that make the buildout legible to people who do not work in it, and, as the Associated Press has reported, some tech-industry figures now acknowledge that the facilities have become a proxy for the broader AI debate.
The Lowell dispatch that opened this thread, carried by CityNews Toronto from the AP wire, sits on top of all of that. Sacred Heart is not the loudest fight over a data center in the country, but it is the one where the cost shows up in a backyard pool that did not get opened this year.