What Fracking Taught Planners That Data Center Communities Need to Learn

Something Wired This Way Comes: What Fracking Taught Planners That Data Center Communities Need to Learn

Austin Zwick

Journal of the American Planning Association, August 2024

Austin Zwick

Policy Studies Undergraduate Program

Artificial Intelligence

Infrastructure

State & Local Government

United States

Journal of the American Planning Association

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) data centers impose the same externalities on local communities that hydraulic fracturing did a decade ago: massive water consumption, continuous noise, construction road damage, thin permanent employment, and fiscal mismatches that leave municipalities bearing infrastructure costs while states capture revenue through tax abatements.

Drawing on field work with municipal planners across five Marcellus Shale states, I argue in this Viewpoint that planners should treat data centers as heavy industrial uses and apply the targeted regulatory tools that fracking communities developed through hard experience. Outright bans invite state preemption; targeted regulation has proved durable. The analogy has limits, but the governance playbook transfers.