View the full episode transcript.
Picture this… You move to a cozy home in an idyllic neighborhood: fresh air and birdsong in the morning and gorgeous sunsets at night. One day, you wake up to find an AI data center is being built right across the street. Your view of trees turns into piles of dirt, the songbird’s trill replaced by the hum of machinery. That’s the reality for many Atlanta metro area residents right now, facing an explosion of AI data center construction.
In this episode, Morgan is joined by reporters DorMiya Vance and Marlon Hyde from WABE in Atlanta. Vance and Hyde recently looked into why so many companies are targeting the Atlanta suburbs for their builds. They’ll break down what this means for the infrastructure of local energy companies, how to contextualize this trend within the historical strain placed on predominately Black communities, and what can be done to prepare for “stranded assets” if the bubble bursts.
Guests:
- DorMiya Vance, Southside reporter at WABE
- Marlon Hyde, business reporter at WABE
Further Reading/Listening:
- Data centers power our online lives. The business is growing faster in metro Atlanta than anywhere else in the US — Marlon Hyde, WABE
- South Atlanta residents brace for major data center development — DorMiya Vance, WABE
- Microsoft vows to cover full power costs for energy-hungry AI data centers — Benj Edwards, Ars Technica
- After a White Town Rejected a Data Center, Developers Targeted a Black Area — Adam Mahoney, Capital B
- A Historic Black Community Takes On the World’s Richest Man Over Environmental Racism — Adam Mahoney, Capital B
- The People Say No: Resisting Data Centers in the South — Media Justice
- Data centers spark a ‘fight for the soul’ of this mostly Black Maryland county — Lateshia Beachum, The Washington Post
- Georgia leads push to ban datacenters used to power America’s AI boom — Timothy Pratt, The Guardian
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