AI’s rapid data center buildout is creating real risks and real opportunities for communities across the Great Lakes region and beyond. Fresh Coast Climate Solutions has spent the past year and a half engaging over 100 stakeholders to understand the landscape, and has now launched Bridged, the Great Lakes Consortium for Responsible Digital Infrastructure, to help stakeholders coordinate on sustainable, community-informed solutions.
The whirlwind of AI and its unprecedented buildout of data centers have spun us into a period of economic, environmental, and social disruption. There are massive changes happening, along with short- to long-term opportunities and risks for communities, the economy, the environment, our climate, and even in how we interact, think, and learn in our daily lives. While the challenges make most of the headlines, there are also significant reasons to be hopeful.
As a climate and sustainability focused consulting firm, Fresh Coast Climate Solutions is on the leading edge of a massive and growing response movement which seeks to understand data center risks and opportunities and foster solutions that better balance economic, environmental, and social goals. Over the past year and a half, we’ve been in conversation with over 100 diverse data center stakeholders, including community and environmentally-focused NGOs and foundations, academic departments, local and state governmental staff, tribal authorities, utilities, infrastructure and clean technology providers, data center developers, real estate investors, and big tech firms. Together, we are compiling, creating, and sharing new information so communities, counties, states, and regions of the US and abroad can make more informed decisions.
Since early 2025, we’ve seen an enormous increase in public awareness, concern, and most notably, active responses to data centers. Public engagement on the topic rivals the environmental movement of the 1970s — community members are attending public meetings and learning the mechanics of local, county, and state decision-making as they seek to understand and influence outcomes. Currently elected and prospective politicians must now stake out informed policy positions. Policy approaches have been implemented and have already evolved, from offering and then reconsidering tax incentives, to establishing requirements to measure and mitigate impacts in high-priority areas like energy, water, and the grid, to policies that address a myriad of other impact areas. Communities and even entire states like New York have issued data center moratoria to buy time for policy planning.
Thanks to funding and partnership with the Joyce Foundation, the Fresh Coast team has focused on the complex, evolving landscape of data centers in the US and Great Lakes region. To date we have produced thirty-two intelligence reports and five webinars and presentations covering major data center themes: economics, policy, technology, social and environmental impacts, and identifying better sustainability principles, policies, and practices. Public and private organizations across the Great Lakes region and beyond are using the insights from these reports to make more informed decisions.
This movement of diverse stakeholders, working groups, and initiatives has already influenced more sustainable policies and more collective benefits. We’re engaged with several great organizations, including the Midwest Climate Collaborative’s Data Center Forum, the Great Plains Institute’s Data Center Sprint Team and Resource Hub, and Michigan State University’s Data Center Working Group. Many groups are compiling inventories of new data center information to inform decision-making. So far, we’ve catalogued over 100 environmental, policy, legal, technology, and community roadmaps, guidebooks, checklists, and other resources, which we use to inform our recommendations to decision-makers. A few worth noting are Alliance for the Great Lakes’ “Regional Playbook for Managing Data Center Impacts in the Great Lakes”, Citizen Research Council’s “Data Centers in Michigan Report”, Cuyahoga County’s “Data Center Development Guide”, and the City of Chicago’s “Sustainable Data Centers Report”.
As with any market or societal disruption, a surge of human creativity and innovation follows. This holds true with data centers. New energy-related innovations and research efforts are gaining traction across the globe, from less power-hungry AI chips and advanced cooling technologies to enhanced geothermal, small modular nuclear, and grid enhanced power systems. We’ve also seen an influx of new flexible load management and energy and water efficiency technologies. Smart, distributed, and renewable energy management tactics successfully deployed in recent decades are also being applied to data centers, and a major re-investment in renewables and batteries is occurring despite a federal pullback.
Admittedly, we’ve also seen a rapid build-out of new natural gas for on-site, backup, and off-site power and coal plant extensions, which puts local environments, air quality, and climate goals in question. However, efforts to provide information on the environmental, social, and economic costs and benefits of clean energy versus fossil fuels for data centers are happening in parallel and also influencing technology and policy decisions.
These responses to data center buildouts have been relatively swift compared to other complex technological and public policy issues; however, we still see two big challenges standing in the way of sustainable data centers. First is the speed at which industry is moving. Despite pushback, industry stakeholders are still racing to build data centers to stay competitive, and are investing significantly; the public, policymakers, and sustainability stakeholders are playing catch-up, and with more limited funding, to understand how best to mitigate impacts and maximize benefits. Second is that while there are many stakeholders engaged, no one entity is expert across all the impact and opportunity areas. Non-industry stakeholders consistently tell us they are overwhelmed with requests from communities and policymakers that want to better understand the landscape of impacts and opportunities and strategies for sustainable data centers, and that disseminating insights more broadly is needed. Industry stakeholders consistently tell us they want to distinguish themselves as sustainable partners with concrete policies and actions.
As a result of these challenges, there is a patchwork of approaches and strategies being investigated and deployed. What’s missing is a shared framework with solutions that approach data center issues and opportunities holistically rather than project-by-project, using the same comprehensive, sustainability-and-community-benefits lens that NGOs, academics, and some policymakers are already applying.
In response, Fresh Coast has launched Bridged, the Great Lakes Consortium for Responsible Digital Infrastructure. It’s a first-in-the-US effort to convene diverse data center stakeholders, build comprehensive understanding of impacts and opportunities, better inform responsible decision-making and developments, and advance new solutions and collective benefits. Our vision is to ensure participants can make well-informed, responsible decisions and that data centers are built and operated to the highest environmental, social, and economic standards in the Great Lakes region. We’re hosting virtual workshops and in-person convenings and covering topics prioritized by members and subject matter experts. The benefits of joining include working with community, policy, and industry decision-makers; accessing new relationships, reducing costs, generating new revenue, and establishing the best practices that turn an ordinary organization into a data center thought leader. This month we kicked off the Consortium with 16 diverse and engaged Founding Members along with representatives from community, environmental, and academic organizations; state and tribal governments; and industry, including sustainable technology providers and data center developers.
The disruptions with AI and data centers are large, but so is the movement of experts working to figure out how to meet sustainability and climate goals while ensuring local economies and communities don’t get left behind. If you, too, are working on the data center sustainability puzzle, we invite you to engage with us via the form on our Consortium website and to share your thinking in our stakeholder survey. Join us to foster more informed data center decision making, responsible development, and collective benefits for the Great Lakes region. Years from now we want to look back with pride that we took collective action for a more sustainable future. Let’s chart these sustainable paths forward, together.
