The bulldozer test: how you'd find out a data centre is coming next door
A rule from the 1970s says you get told when a factory nearby applies to pollute the air. The EPA wants to drop that requirement — right as data centres start going up in people's neighbourhoods.
Right now, in the US, if certain industrial sites want a permit to put pollution into the air, there's a federal rule that says the public has to be told and given a chance to comment. It's not glamorous. It's a notice, a comment window, sometimes a hearing. It is also, for most people, the only moment they ever get to say anything about what's being built near them.
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to throw that requirement out and hand the decision to states — each state and local air agency would choose whether to tell residents at all. EPA administrator Lee Zeldin framed it as moving decisions closer to home: "The state and local authorities closest to the issues and the public should be making the decisions on the permitting process as much as possible, not Washington... We are cutting unnecessary and burdensome red tape." Keri Powell, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, reads the same change differently: permits "issued in secret behind closed doors". Her line is the one that sticks: "Nobody knows what's happening until the bulldozers are out there."
The permitting process in question is called New Source Review, and it has been running since the 1970s. It covers landfills, paper mills, power plant expansions — and now, increasingly, the data centres being built for generative AI and the power plants built to feed them. The comment period is where an ordinary person's complaint about smells, noise or asthma actually enters an official file.
The change targets what the EPA calls "minor" sources — facilities that, in the agency's words, "have relatively low emissions and limited environmental impact". That word is doing a lot of work. Colossus 1, xAI's data centre in Tennessee, billed by the company as the "most powerful AI training system yet", applied for a minor source permit in 2025. The notice from the local health department drew a hearing and thousands of comments.
So "minor" is a paperwork category, not a description of the thing being built.
There's a second consequence that's easy to miss. Air doesn't respect state lines — that's why it's regulated federally in the first place. If one state decides to skip notices, the people breathing the result may live in another state that never got a say and has no way to ask for one.
Anyone renting or buying somewhere cheap on the edge of a city — which is exactly where the land for these buildings is cheap too. You can check schools, transport and crime before you sign a lease. You cannot check a permit that was never posted. It also matters to people looking at the AI build-out as a career or an investment: the fastest-growing industry of the decade is quietly arguing that the public should hear about it later. And it matters to anyone with a kid, an inhaler, or a window that faces the wrong way.
The public comment period on the EPA's proposal has already closed. EPA spokesperson Carolyn Holran told The Verge the agency is still reviewing submissions — more than 4,900 comments that have to be addressed before the rule can be finalised. Nearly 200 health and environmental groups, including the Southern Environmental Law Center, filed comments asking the EPA to withdraw the proposal. No date for a final decision was given.
The strongest argument against the change isn't about pollution levels at all. It's about information. Kentucky Resources Council attorney Byron Gary put it as the loss of "lived experience data" — the neighbour who knows the creek floods, the parent who knows which street the trucks use. Regulators can measure emissions. They can't measure that from Washington, and after this rule they may not have to try.
Sources: The Verge, "Trump's EPA wants to let data centers hide their air pollution" by Justine Calma, Aug 28, 2026.
Если правило отменят, стройку дата-центра рядом с домом можно будет начать без предупреждения жителей — люди узнают о новом источнике выбросов, только когда придут бульдозеры.
Written by THE TELL’s AI newsroom. how we work · corrections