1,300 deaths by 2028: the bill for AI data centres nobody put on a screen
A group of former EPA officials counted 30 federal actions since January 2025 that loosen pollution rules in the name of building AI faster. Their point: you don't have to live near a data centre to breathe the result.
Everyone has been arguing about who pays for the AI build-out — power bills, chip money, electricity prices. This week a group of people who used to run parts of the US Environmental Protection Agency put a different invoice on the table. They counted 30 federal actions since January 2025 that, in their reading, make the air and water around this build-out worse. 17 of those 30 specifically mention AI or target data centres.
The number they attached to it comes from a study by UC Riverside, Caltech and the Rochester Institute of Technology: air pollution associated with AI could lead to up to 1,300 premature deaths and more than $20 billion in public health costs by 2028. The former officials say the toll could be even larger once the policy changes in their own report are factored in. The EPA's response, sent to The Verge by spokesperson Cora Mandy, was that the agency has simply returned the rules to "the best reading" of the Clean Air Act "after years of overreach by previous administrations."
The instinct is to think this is a local story — a town with a big grey building and humming fans. It isn't. The pollution doesn't mainly come out of the server hall. It comes from what feeds it: gas turbines installed on-site, power plants built specifically to serve tech companies, and the factories making the advanced chips. Lynn Goldman, a pediatrician and former EPA assistant administrator, put it plainly: "You do not need to be near a data centre to be affected, because the pollution doesn't just come from the data centres themselves."
So the mechanism is this. Building a data centre fast means getting permits fast. Getting permits fast means thinning the rules that slow permits down — which is exactly what Trump's AI Action Plan, released in July 2025, recommended: "streamlining or reducing regulations" under the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and Superfund law. Add to that the exemptions for existing power plants and factories the report describes, and the cost of the build-out stops showing up as a line item on anyone's bill. It shows up in hospitals, years later, in places that never hosted a server.
The cheapest way to build anything fast is to let someone else absorb the cost. Here, the someone else is whoever breathes downwind.
One more thread worth pulling: demand for the advanced chips that generative AI needs is reviving production of what the report calls forever chemicals — substances that don't break down easily and build up in the environment and in human bodies. The chatbot, the image generator, the coding assistant: none of that runs on nothing. It runs on chips, and chips come out of factories.
Anyone weighing where to move for a job or cheap rent — data centre country is currently expanding, and the report's argument is that the pollution travels beyond the county line anyway. Parents deciding whether a neighbourhood is fine for a kid with asthma. And the much larger group: people who use AI tools daily and have never once thought about where the electricity and the chips come from. The former officials are describing a cost that never appears on your subscription receipt.
The Environmental Protection Network is urging the president to adopt a "Data Center Health Protection Pledge" — Marc Boom, the group's senior director of public affairs, said in practice it should mean the EPA measures how the build-out changes pollution, who is exposed, what it means for their health, and makes all of that public. Whether that happens is entirely up to the administration, and the source names no deadline and no scheduled decision. The EPA's emailed reply gave no indication it plans to. So the honest answer: nobody has said what comes next, and the only date on the table is 2028 — the year the 1,300 figure points to.
Goldman said the quiet part: "You would think that an industry buildout of this magnitude, billed as a revolution, would mean more vigilance from EPA." A revolution usually arrives with more scrutiny, not less. This one arrived with 30 rule changes going the other way. Boom's line is the one to keep: "A more polluting AI buildout is not inevitable. It depends on the choices government makes now."
Sources: The Verge, "Trump is giving data centers a pass to pollute" by Justine Calma, September 12, 2026; report by the Environmental Protection Network cited therein.
Стройка дата-центров оплачивается не только счетами за свет: бывшие чиновники EPA насчитали 30 послаблений с января 2025 года и оценивают цену в 1300 преждевременных смертей и $20 млрд расходов на здравоохранение к 2028 году — причём дышать этим будут и те, кто живёт далеко от серверных залов.
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