AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Georgia is one of the states where companies are keen to build data centers, thanks to generous incentives and a strong fiber infrastructure, especially around Atlanta. Many of those centers are popping up in the Atlanta suburbs - especially, as DorMiya Vance of member station WABE in Atlanta reports, majority-Black ones on the south side.
DORMIYA VANCE, BYLINE: Driving down a dusty back road in Fayetteville, Georgia, about 40 minutes south of downtown Atlanta, you find large parcels of greenery and suburban homes. The drive is serene, but then...
(SOUNDBITE OF HEAVY MACHINERY)
DIANA DIETZ: You can't go out without seeing several of those huge construction vehicles on the roads.
VANCE: Diana Dietz has lived here since the '90s and now tracks data center growth in the area. We stop at a construction site where miles of trees have been cleared. Dietz engages with the worker on the site.
DIETZ: Interesting. I never thought about any of this stuff until they started building a bunch of...
UNIDENTIFIED CONSTRUCTION WORKER: And a lot of it is just to feed the QTS thing over there.
DIETZ: Just to feed QTS?
VANCE: QTS is the latest data center going up here - a 600-acre campus.
KECIA SCOTT: I have seen all of the what used to be cozy, quaint, wooded kind of area completely change.
VANCE: Kecia Scott lives in Planters Ridge, a predominantly Black middle-class subdivision. Her house is now right across the street from the new data center. She says she didn't know about the project until after moving in.
SCOTT: And so now I have to come to terms with the fact that what I once thought would be my life here now has significantly changed.
VANCE: Besides the changing landscape, residents like Scott worry about environmental impacts and the large amount of water and electricity needed to run data centers. Georgia has at least a hundred of them in operation, most located south of Atlanta. That's because despite its growing suburbs, there's still more rural land available than in other parts of metro Atlanta, says Lynn McKee. He teaches real estate at Georgia State University.
LYNN MCKEE: People don't want these big data centers near their houses. But you go out and you go to South Atlanta or into rural Georgia, there's just land, land, land.
VANCE: More land is open on the south side. But that's not the only reason for the growth, says Georgia Tech professor Ahmed Saeed.
AHMED SAEED: Georgia is making it very attractive to build data centers here.
VANCE: That's because of lucrative tax incentives to the industry supported by Georgia's Republican governor, Brian Kemp. He vetoed a bill last year that would have paused the tax exemptions. Residents on the south side are starting to speak out about the impact of data centers in Black neighborhoods. And some Republicans want more protections for communities, like state Senator Chuck Hufstetler.
CHUCK HUFSTETLER: You know, there are some people that want to give away the farm and others that don't want any growth. And I just want us to be smart about it.
VANCE: But his efforts to do so have stalled in the legislature. Meanwhile, Georgia Power has reversed its efforts to close two coal-fired power plants, saying it now needs them to serve customers with large energy demands.
For NPR News, I'm DorMiya Vance in Atlanta.
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