Article by Stefaan Verhulst and Claudia Chwalisz: “The race to build the infrastructure of artificial intelligence is accelerating. Across the world, fields, industrial parks, and suburban edges are being transformed into data centers — vast, warehouse-like facilities that power everything from cloud storage to large language models.
For technology companies, this expansion is claimed to be essential. For the communities where these facilities are built, it is becoming increasingly contentious.
Recent reporting in The New York Times and elsewhere has captured the growing unease. Residents are questioning the scale of water consumption required to cool servers, the strain on local energy grids, and the transformation of landscapes once defined by entirely different economic and environmental logics. In many cases, the promised benefits — jobs, investment, growth — feel limited when set against the demands these facilities place on shared resources.
What is emerging is not simply a series of local disputes. It is a broader challenge of legitimacy.
There is a concept for this, though it predates the digital economy. In the 1990s, mining and energy companies (often called extractive industries) began to recognize that regulatory approval was no longer sufficient to ensure that projects could proceed smoothly. Communities could — and did — push back against developments that were fully legal but widely perceived as unfair or harmful. The term that emerged to describe what was missing was “a social license to operate”.
A social license is not granted by governments. It is conferred, informally but powerfully, by the people who live with the consequences of a project. It depends on trust, on transparency, and on a sense that the balance between costs and benefits is acceptable. Crucially, it is not static. It can be strengthened over time — or withdrawn.
Data centers are now encountering this reality…(More)”.
