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Data Center Violations (and how they're being handled)

  • opalanie777
  • 6 days ago
  • 5 min read


  • META (Financial Express July 9, 2026): A massive AI data centre backed by Mark Zuckerberg has come under fire in Wyoming after a rare bacterium was detected in industrial wastewater linked to the construction site.


The incident was reported at Meta’s Project Cosmo, an 800,000-square-foot (74,322.4-square-metre) AI data centre under construction in Cheyenne’s High Plains Business Park. City officials say contaminated wastewater generated during construction entered Cheyenne’s sewer system, leading authorities to investigate the source.

Rare deadly bacterium found during routine testing


The issue came to light in February when routine wastewater testing detected Cupriavidus gilardii, a naturally occurring bacterium, in water flowing into the city’s sanitary sewer system. Officials traced the discharge to Goat Systems LLC, a contractor working on Zuckerberg’s Meta data centre.


According to authorities, the wastewater had been used during a “fill and flush” process to clean the site’s closed-loop cooling system before it became operational.


Following the discovery, the Cheyenne Board of Public Utilities permanently revoked the contractor’s permission to discharge wastewater into the city’s treatment facilities.

The contamination also forced two water reclamation plants offline while crews began an extensive cleaning process expected to take several months.


Unlike drinking water facilities, Cheyenne’s reclaimed water is treated and reused to irrigate parks, golf courses and other public green spaces. Officials said this raised additional concerns because spraying reclaimed water could potentially aerosolise contaminants.


While authorities have repeatedly confirmed that residents’ drinking water remained safe throughout the incident, the discovery has intensified scrutiny of the environmental footprint of Zuckerberg’s rapidly expanding AI infrastructure as Meta continues to invest heavily in large-scale data centres.



  • xAI Colussus (Tech Insider May 14, 2026): On April 14, 2026, the Mississippi State Conference of the NAACP and a coalition of environmental groups filed a Clean Air Act lawsuit against Elon Musk’s xAI, alleging the company illegally operates 27 unpermitted methane gas turbines at its Colossus 2 data center in Southaven, Mississippi – a roughly 200-megawatt makeshift power plant feeding Grok’s training cluster without a single federal air permit.


The complaint, brought by the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) and Earthjustice on behalf of the NAACP, transforms a year-long environmental-justice dispute over South Memphis air quality into the first major federal test of how the AI industry’s compute hunger collides with the Clean Air Act’s 1970-vintage permitting regime.


The filing lands at a brutal inflection point for xAI Colossus. Just two miles north of the new turbines, xAI’s original Colossus 1 facility – the 100,000-H100 supercomputer that trained Grok 3 and Grok 4 – has been the subject of community complaints since mid-2024. Colossus 2, which xAI executives have publicly called a stepping stone toward a million-GPU training cluster, accelerated the timeline. Plaintiffs now say the company added roughly a dozen more trailer-mounted turbines in the first quarter of 2026 alone, even as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ruled in January 2026 that such “mobile” units are in fact stationary sources requiring federal Title V permits. The lawsuit seeks an injunction, civil penalties, and a court order forcing xAI to install modern emission controls or shut the units down.


The legal theory rests on three pillars. First, that the 35 to 46 General Electric and Solar Turbines units currently humming behind chain-link fencing at the Southaven site qualify as a “major stationary source” under §111 and §165 of the Clean Air Act because they have been permanently fixed in place for more than 12 months. Second, that xAI’s reliance on Mississippi’s “portable equipment” exemption – designed for construction-site generators – is a sham, since the trailers have been welded to concrete pads, hardwired into the data center’s switchgear, and connected to a permanent natural-gas trunk line. Third, that emissions already exceed federal Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) thresholds of 250 tons per year for any single regulated pollutant.


“What xAI has built in Southaven is not a temporary backup,” said Amanda Garcia, senior attorney at SELC, in a press briefing on April 14. “It is a 420-megawatt fossil-fueled power station hiding behind a parking-brake exemption written for road graders. The Clean Air Act does not have an Elon Musk exception.”



  • DataOne (SNJ April 24, 2026): A massive AI data center in South Jersey is drawing a wave of noise complaints, environmental concerns, and growing anger over a process that left many nearby residents entirely out of the loop. The DataOne facility at the corner of Lincoln and Sheridan avenues spans 2.6 million square feet, is backed by a multibillion-dollar AI deal tied to Microsoft, and is expected to eventually draw as much as 300 megawatts of power.


For residents living near the site, the most immediate consequence has been noise. Scott Montgomery, a Vineland resident, said the hum is felt as much as heard. “You can’t sleep. You can’t fall asleep right away. It wakes you up,” he said. “We like to sleep or be here with windows open because it got nice out. It was a brutal winter. And you could just feel it pulsating through the house.” Theresa Lewis, who lives within eyesight of the data center, described the sound as a low, unbroken drone, like a plane that never moves on. Several residents said that they have lived in Vineland for years and only began hearing the noise recently.


The approval process itself has drawn criticism. Because the property sits in an Urban Enterprise Zone, residents nearby were not legally required to be notified before the project received approval, and Pinelands Alliance pointed out that many locals only discovered the facility after construction was already underway. DataOne Vineland CEO Charles Antoine Beyney addressed community concerns at a Vineland town hall in late January, which Pinelands Alliance described as “too late.”


At that town hall, Beyney said that after an initial draw of millions of gallons from the city’s municipal water supply to start the system, the center would generate its own water by pulling moisture from the atmosphere through exhaust condensation. Skeptics have countered that during drought or extreme heat, the system would still place strain on regional water resources.


That concern carries added weight because the facility sits directly above the Kirkwood-Cohansey aquifer, which provides drinking water to approximately one million people, supports agriculture, and sustains the region’s ecosystems. The site is also approximately 200 feet from sensitive wetlands near Manantico Creek. Sierra Club New Jersey argued that the gas engines, beyond the noise they produce, will generate new air pollution. The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection confirmed it has not received any permit applications for water use or water allocation related to the facility, and that a draft air permit application is currently under review. Critics also reacted to the five-year property tax exemption developers received. The DataOne PILOT deal (payment in lieu of taxes) was approved at a Vineland City Council meeting in February, as reported by Vineland Voice, at the same session that granted a similar deal to a new golf course owned by pro baseball player and Vineland native Mike Trout. PILOT agreements are a common tool used by New Jersey municipalities to attract development.


The subsidy question has a parallel playing out near the state border. A JPMorgan data center expansion in Orangeburg received $77 million in tax breaks while committing to create just one permanent job, a ratio the New York Focus described as potentially the largest subsidy-to-jobs ratio in the country. The deal came primarily in the form of sales tax exemptions, with $40 million benefiting the state directly and the remainder going to localities. The pre-buildout project had already received $35 million in prior tax advantages and currently employs 25 permanent on-site workers.



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