"For journalists, this moment of ballooning investment and aggressive rural land acquisition by tech companies presents an opportunity — and a responsibility — to investigate. Data centers drive climate change by burning fossil fuels, using large amounts of electricity, and requiring up to five million gallons of water a day to fuel cooling systems. Research has shown these facilities can harm the health of local residents through air and noise pollution, while providing minimal long-term job stimulus. Despite subsidies from national and local governments, many proposed data centers have been criticized for hiding the projected impacts on local communities under the guise of “trade secrets.”
“If you’re a tech journalist, you can go in. If you’re a climate journalist, you can also go in. If you cover business or energy or if you’re a very local journalist — there’s a story for you,” said Laís Martins, an investigative journalist at Intercept Brasil who published a series of major stories on data centers in Brazil over the past year. (Martins and Nieman Lab’s Andrew Deck previously worked together as reporters at the nonprofit publication Rest of World.)
First-time data center reporters may find the topic intimidatingly technical and challenging to humanize. From the outside, facilities may not look like anything more than windowless warehouses stocked with whirring machines. But major investigations over the past year have shown how many grounded stories and novel reporting strategies are emerging on the data center beat."
