The revolution in artificial intelligence that promised us breakthroughs in medical research and corporate productivity seems to be running a little behind. But already A.I. has become something of a nightmare for the Americans who happen to live near one of the more than 5,000 data centers that power it and keep the cloud above our digital world running.

Across the country, from Indiana to Oregon, companies such as Amazon, Meta and Microsoft are building data centers on sites that can stretch over 1,000 acres, ringed with guard towers and razor wire fences.

People who live near one Northern Virginia center have complained that the mechanical whir of the fleet of industrial fans needed to cool the sensitive computer equipment inside can sound like a leaf blower that never turns off. Cooling the heavy equipment also diverts great volumes of water even in places where it’s scarce. And some of the costs of powering the centers are shouldered by utility customers, in the form of hundreds of dollars a year added to household energy bills.

Residents rarely learn how data centers may affect their lives until it’s too late. Big tech operators are aggressively deploying nondisclosure agreements to force local officials, construction workers and others to keep these projects under wraps.

For tech firms, the incentives to build more of these centers are immense: A McKinsey analysis projected the generative A.I. business could eventually be worth nearly $8 trillion worldwide. Tech companies don’t want to tip off rivals that might try to swoop in and steal a viable site for development. That’s part of the reason they so zealously enforce nondisclosure agreements. But it’s more than that; they also seem to want to avoid angering locals who might learn of the coming disruptions and protest zoning changes.

The tactics companies have deployed in recent years to build their massive data center networks are downright mercenary, and regulators now need to step in to make sure the communities most affected by these industrial projects can learn about and evaluate them for themselves.

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