Story at a Glance:

•Harmful products are rarely removed because of the harm they cause; they are removed once an equally profitable alternative exists. This article applies that principle to the largest deployment of capital in American history, the AI data center buildout.

•Communities next to data centers are reporting a cluster of health complaints that closely matches what electrically sensitive people have described for decades. A Bloomberg analysis of 770,000 home sensors suggests why: data centers inject enormous amounts of “dirty electricity” back onto the grid, and the worst power distortion in the country clusters within 20 miles of them.

•Since so much money is behind the buildout, a potential solution to this quandary is to make it cheaper to build somewhere data centers do not impact communities, and the unprecedented need for power creates the first real chance in fifty years to bring a cheap, safe, and abundant form of nuclear energy to market.

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The Buildout

Because data centers need city-sized amounts of power, land, and fiber, many are being placed in less affluent communities (including throughout the Midwest, which is a large part of why I wrote this). Residents there are experiencing rising electricity bills (as grid upgrade costs get passed to ratepayers; the clearest documented case being the PJM grid serving the mid-Atlantic, whose independent monitor attributed most of a ten-fold jump in capacity prices to data center demand),¹ large water draws for cooling,¹ constant noise from cooling systems and generators, and air pollution from onsite turbines.¹

As a result, local politicians who approved data centers over vocal opposition have been recalled,¹ more than 300 state bills targeting data centers were filed in the first six weeks of 2026,¹ New York enacted the nation’s first statewide moratorium,¹ and in March 2026, 71% of Americans opposed data centers being constructed in their areas. The response from the administration and much of the conservative media has been to characterize this opposition as helping China, and while that is likely true to some degree, it does not negate the fact that what motivates most of the opposition is the impact the centers are having on communities. More importantly, framing the issue this way skips the actual question, which is why the centers are making people sick.

The Bell Curve of Sensitivity

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Given this, the symptoms people reported from living next to data centers (which were attributed to the noise) caught my eye. Beyond the constant hum, vibration and generator fumes, residents consistently report sleep disruption, headaches or migraines, feeling constantly on edge, fatigue and poor concentration, nausea, dizziness or vertigo, ear pressure or fullness, tinnitus, and feeling the sound in the head or chest,¹,²,³ along with pets becoming restless and birds disappearing. Many of these (headaches, sleep disruption, fatigue, brain fog, anxiety, nausea, dizziness, tinnitus) overlap with what individuals with electromagnetic hypersensitivity report,¹,² and already EMF sensitive individuals report some of their other symptoms (e.g., burning skin) near data centers.

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Sound Toxicity

However, infrasound did not explain the rest of what people were reporting, and I did not see why a data center would need to emit massive amounts of microwave radiation into its vicinity (which is typically generated by cell phones, WIFI, bluetooth or radar).

Dirty Electricity

With EMFs, the greatest effects people experience are typically from microwave sources. However, the fields generated by electrical wiring also cause issues, particularly when “dirty electricity” (high-frequency electrical noise riding on household 50/60 Hz wiring) is present,¹,²,³ which is often due to devices within the home (e.g., solar inverters¹ or certain bulbs that sometimes need to be removed to provide sensitive individuals with relief).

From looking this up, I discovered the actual issue appears to be that data centers draw their power through enormous non-linear loads (tens of thousands of switched-mode server power supplies, uninterruptible power systems, and variable-speed cooling), which inject harmonics and high-frequency voltage distortion back onto the grid. But rather than a few low-output devices creating it, something which draws 10,000 times as much power as a house is doing it and affecting everything around it.

In December 2024, Bloomberg News published a remarkable study of 770,000 home power-quality sensors made by Whisker Labs (which are dense enough that nearly 90% of American homes are within half a mile of one), cross-referenced against the locations of nearly 1,500 data centers. Using the 8% total harmonic distortion threshold the IEEE considers damaging to equipment, Bloomberg found:

-More than three-quarters of the highly distorted readings in the country were within 50 miles of significant data center activity, and more than half of the households with the worst distortion were within 20 miles. The sensors with the cleanest power were typically at least 87 miles from any major data center. About 3.7 million Americans live in the most affected areas.

-In Loudoun County, Virginia (home to “data center alley”), the share of sensors exceeding the 8% threshold was more than four times the national average, and around one newly opened facility nearby, 78% of sensors were above the limit.

-The worst distortions occurred at night, when data centers make up a larger share of total demand (i.e., when everyone else is asleep and the servers are not).

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Bloomberg’s concern was electronics (appliances running hot, motors rattling, lights flickering, increased fire risk, and billions in cumulative damage to home appliances and grid equipment). However, as a limited body of research on dirty electricity has shown, there are also consequences for human beings, including many of the exact same symptoms individuals living near data centers report (sleep disruption, headaches, irritability, anxiety, fatigue, brain fog, dizziness, tinnitus, worsened asthma, and nausea).¹,²,³ Animal studies corroborate this (e.g., a study of 1,705 cows across 12 dairy farms found milk production fell in proportion to the transients and harmonics on the farms’ power, and that the distortion was coming from the utility lines rather than the farms).

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Solving the Data Center Dilemma

The AI sector faces a few critical bottlenecks: shortages of chips, insufficient energy (Musk recently cited a consensus estimate of at least a 15-gigawatt power shortfall for AI chips in 2027),¹ a grid that cannot sustain the loads, and public pushback that can block construction or shift elections. Given the law of displacement, I believe these pressures will force the industry to find a way to scale without harming anyone, and the ideal site for a data center is not hard to describe: cold (so cooling costs largely disappear), on U.S. soil, sparsely populated (so the noise, water, and dirty electricity land on no one), rich in energy that can be used on site rather than pulled off a residential grid, and wanted by its state government.

Alaska meets every one of those criteria. Its mean annual temperature is about 35°F against Texas’s 65°F (and the North Slope averages 14°F), which the governor has said saves a one-gigawatt campus on the order of $150 million a year in cooling.¹ It has 740,000 people on a landmass larger than Texas, California, and Montana combined. The state has issued a preliminary decision to lease North Slope land for a 1–3 gigawatt campus disconnected from the grid,¹ and the North Slope holds 37 trillion cubic feet of natural gas that has been stranded for fifty years because no pipeline was ever built to move it.¹

The model that works in Alaska is the one the lower 48 states lack and will likely soon need (and the one figures like JD Vance have begun calling for in response to the pushback): generation built next to the servers, consumed behind the meter, and never touching a residential wire. This matters because the harmonics a data center produces travel along whatever wiring connects it to everyone else, so a campus on its own generation keeps its dirty electricity to itself rather than pushing it onto homes twenty miles away. Likewise, Alaska is already built on the principle that resource extraction pays the public, so a lease written with a percentage of receipts flowing to residents turns the host from a victim into a shareholder.

The Thorium Opportunity

This is also what makes Alaska the natural home for something I have waited decades to see. I care immensely about the health of the earth, and after looking at every alternative energy option, I long ago concluded “green nuclear power” was the most viable one we had, then watched the promising designs go nowhere. The most promising is thorium: there is 3–4 times as much of it in the earth as uranium¹ (and since it occurs alongside the rare earths America is now scrambling to secure, we already extract it and then throw it away as radioactive waste), all of it can be used as fuel (rather than the 0.72% of uranium that can, which leaves behind mountains of depleted waste), the molten-salt designs it is paired with have no solid core to melt (if they overheat, the salt expands, the reaction slows, and the fuel drains into a tank without pumps), they produce far less long-lived waste, and they greatly reduce the risk of weapons proliferation, since no enrichment plants are needed.

This raises the obvious question of why it was never adopted. Simply put, the entire American nuclear complex was built as a weapons program with a civilian branch attached, and uranium was the fuel that made weapons. Oak Ridge demonstrated a working molten salt reactor in the 1960s, but in the early 1970s the Atomic Energy Commission committed the country to a plutonium breeder instead, its director Alvin Weinberg was pushed out after eighteen years for continuing to argue his reactor was the safer path, and the program was cancelled in 1973.¹,² Thorium’s low proliferation risk, now its great selling point, at the time simply meant it did not offer what the nuclear establishment wanted. After that, the industry became large enough to keep competitors from getting off the ground (mirroring what I have watched happen with countless forgotten medical technologies).

The result is that the technology now requires a supply chain that does not exist, so two things are needed: a relaxing of regulatory restrictions (which began in May 2025, when Trump signed executive orders setting a goal of quadrupling nuclear capacity by 2050 and ordering the NRC to decide new reactor applications within 18 months)¹ and a very large investment, which is now possible for the first time, as an industry has emerged that needs enormous amounts of power and is willing to pay almost anything for it. The published models place thorium power among the cheapest sources of electricity ($20–55 per megawatt hour),¹,² a fraction of what new conventional nuclear plants cost ($175–255).¹

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