Empowering Communities through Community Benefit Agreements in AI-Fueled Data Center Development
By now, we have seen countless news headlines documenting the immense environmental, economic, and social costs associated with the rapid buildout of AI data centers. For communities of color and low-income communities already contending with the consequences of decades of disinvestment, those harms can deepen existing inequities and place even greater strain on community health, infrastructure, and economic stability.
Still, the push to develop and deploy AI shows no signs of slowing. Even as public awareness of the threats and runaway risks grows, the race to advance AI continues to fuel relentless demand for more data centers in more communities.
Across the country, from rural towns to suburbs to major cities, communities are pushing back against data center developments. At the same time, the federal government and Congress continue to pass the buck, refusing to establish meaningful guardrails for the development of AI infrastructure. This leaves communities on their own to fight developments off and negotiate project details in highly localized battles. While we wait for policymakers to catch up to this reality, communities need tools to protect themselves today. Community Benefit Agreements, or CBAs, offer one possible tool for communities to protect themselves.
Community Benefit Agreements Give Communities a Tool
CBAs are a legally binding, enforceable agreement that allows communities to secure real commitments from data center developers before development proceeds. A CBA can be used to ensure adequate harm mitigation and create opportunities for communities to share in the benefits, and not just the costs, of AI infrastructure. They also have the benefit of being tailored specifically to a community’s needs.
In the absence of broader legislative and regulatory protections, CBAs are a promising and underutilized tool for communities already bearing the far-reaching costs of reckless data center buildout. When properly structured, they can turn development projects into durable community partnerships.
They can be used to:
- Establish environmental monitoring and reporting requirements more stringent than applicable permits
- Secure financial contributions to community investment funds
- Lock in local hiring commitments with specific numeric targets and apprenticeship pipelines
- Create Community Advisory Boards with real authority and ongoing oversight
- Require transparency around water consumption, energy use, tax benefits, and environmental commitments
Not a Substitute for Policy
CBAs do not require communities to support a project. They are negotiated exchanges. If a developer will not make commitments adequate to the community’s concerns, opposition – including calls for moratoriums – remains a legitimate and more appropriate response. This is precisely what gives CBA negotiations their teeth.
Still, CBAs are not a substitute for broader policy change. CBAs cannot substitute for strong environmental permitting, transparent subsidy disclosure, or robust utility regulation, and there are plenty of situations where opposition or a moratorium might be more appropriate. As we recently told POLITICO regarding CBAs, “There’s a lot of things that make it an imperfect solution, but an imperfect solution is still better than nothing.”
But because legislation and other broader reforms take time to pass and implement, CBAs can be an important short-term governance mechanism to meet the urgency of this moment.
Building Community Power in the AI Buildout
In our essay for Federation of American Scientists, Empowering Communities through Community Benefit Agreements in AI-Fueled Data Center Development, we lay out how communities and policymakers can use that leverage to secure meaningful protections and commitments, and how to know when a CBA is not the right tool.
CBAs are a tool to make different choices: to insist that the communities hosting AI infrastructure share genuinely in its benefits and shape its development. For communities of color and low-income communities that have too often borne the costs of development without sharing equitably in its benefits, that power matters. The costs of AI infrastructure, to air quality, water systems, grid reliability, and community character, should be borne by those who profit from it, not by those who simply happen to live nearby.
