In March, the leaders of the artificial intelligence (AI) boom — including Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon — signed Trump’s “ratepayer protection pledge,”  promising to build, provide, or buy the electricity their AI data centers may need. This is the latest in a long list of misleading ruses to make data centers more palatable, while doubling down on the construction of these water-guzzling, energy-hungry, climate-wrecking facilities.

While Trump’s ratepayer protection pledge might sound good on paper, it’s not binding. It also comes with the dubious but nevertheless alarming promise that the federal government will speed up approval processes for data center power plants to as little as two weeks. 

Big Tech wants us to believe that its AI technology and the data centers that power it are “inevitable.” Elected leaders are buying into the narrative, suggesting that the best thing we can do is soften the blow. As grassroots movements against data centers grow, tech behemoths and their allies are suggesting ways to assuage environmental and economic concerns. 

They’ve proposed schemes like closed-loop cooling and “bring your own power” to make data centers seem less threatening. But these are more scams than solutions. These schemes will fail to mitigate the dangers of data centers, introduce new dangers, or both. Here’s the truth behind seven of these greenwashing ploys.

1. Powering Data Centers With Renewables Isn’t a Solution

Right now, fossil fuels power the vast majority of data centers, contributing to their pollution, climate harms, and water use (generating electricity with fossil fuels consumes exponentially more water than doing so with renewable energy). Some developers are promising to power data centers with renewables. But that doesn’t solve the problem. 

We need renewable energy everywhere. However, powering the massive energy demand of data centers with renewables, without limiting fossil fuel development elsewhere, will push dirty energy into other industries. We need to deploy renewable energy to meet all of our electricity needs, not just the ambitions of Big Tech. 

As data centers suck up the available supplies of renewable energy infrastructure, the cost of renewable energy will also go up for other sectors of the economy. Trump administration policies that threaten progress for renewable energy will only worsen this problem. 

Tech giants will be all too happy to greenwash themselves with renewable energy, while pretending the broader impacts of data centers don’t exist.

2. Wastewater Recycling Won’t Save Our Water

Another major concern with data centers is their water consumption. Along with all the water they demand for electricity generation (which makes up 71% of their water needs), data centers also guzzle water for cooling their super-hot servers, which threatens local water supplies.

For example, Elon Musk’s xAI Colossus supercomputers in Memphis, TN draws 30,000 gallons a day from the Memphis Sand Aquifer, a precious source of underground water that is essentially non-renewable.

xAI has broken ground on a graywater project to meet some of its water needs. It sounds like a good thing — cleaning and reusing wastewater — but Big Tech is really just greenwashing and making false promises. xAI’s graywater project, for instance, would only reduce overall withdrawals from the aquifer by 9%, and the company recently put the project on indefinite hold.

Moreover, wastewater recycling uses a lot of energy, so it may increase the amount of indirect water that a data center consumes through increased reliance on fossil fuel-powered energy. Any corporation promising wastewater recycling as the solution is fooling you.

3. “Closed-loop Cooling” Is a Marketing Gimmick

Some industry leaders have also touted their use of closed-loop cooling systems that “consume zero water” (meaning that none of the water withdrawn is discharged back into the environment). However, this is just clever advertising. 

Closed-loop systems can use either air cooling (requiring giant fans) or evaporation to some degree, and it’s not uncommon for them to lose 25% of their water volume per month.

Since cooling systems require a level of clean water for efficiency, closed-loop systems also introduce a cocktail of noxious chemicals into cooling water to prevent bacterial growth and corrosion — which will eventually be released when the water systems are flushed.

Finally, systems that rely on air cooling end up consuming more energy, especially in hot climates — and, as we know, electricity generation incurs its own massive water footprint when fueled by fossil fuels. Closed-loop cooling doesn’t even come close to addressing data centers’ outsized water demands.

4. “Bring Your Own Power” Won’t Keep Electricity Affordable

In part to smooth over concerns about data centers’ impact on electricity prices, developers and boosters have turned to “Bring Your Own Power” schemes. In such schemes (which vary widely in scope and detail), data centers wouldn’t be connected to the grid; they’d be connected directly to new power plants or existing ones.

But despite what the industry would have us believe, “Bring Your Own Power” doesn’t guarantee lower electricity prices for us. In fact, pulling an existing power plant off the grid to power a data center saddles customers with the cost of the existing infrastructure, on top of potentially new transmission infrastructure to fill in the gaps.

“Bring Your Own Power” doesn’t change the inherent costs of rapidly growing the United States’ overall electricity demand. Competition for the materials used to build power plants raises the cost for all new power plants and grid infrastructure, increasing electricity prices for everyone. Meanwhile, communities closest to polluting fossil electricity generation will pay the health and environmental costs of Big Tech’s expansion.

Even data centers powered by new renewable energy sources are hogging renewables that, if they’d been connected to the grid, could have allowed for the closure of expensive fossil fuel generating power. 

5. The Carbon Capture Scam Is an Empty Promise

The fossil fuel industry is partnering with Big Tech to pair carbon capture scams with data centers, claiming it will reduce their climate pollution. But we know carbon capture is a scam. 

These projects — which promise to suck carbon dioxide from smokestacks or from the air and store it deep underground — have failed over and over again and wasted billions of taxpayer dollars, while giving license to the fossil fuel industry to continue their polluting business-as-usual. And worse yet, the vast majority of carbon captured in the U.S. has been used to drill for more oil. 

Nevertheless, Big Tech and Big Oil are pushing forward with carbon capture in the hopes of greenwashing their polluting operations. Exxon is negotiating with utilities and Big Tech companies to offer natural gas with carbon capture for powering data centers, claiming to meet the demand for “low emission facilities.”

Google is pursuing massive data centers powered by gas with carbon capture. Meta, meanwhile, has proposed seven new gas-fired power plants to power a 4-million-square-foot data center, dangling the prospect of adding carbon capture in the future. 

Despite what these corporations would have you believe, carbon capture won’t reduce data centers’ pollution or climate impact.

6.“Biogas” Intertwines Data Centers with Polluting Factory Farms

Already, the biogas industry is looking toward the data center boom — and accompanying energy demand — with dollar signs in its eyes. 

We already know this gas is a greenwashed dirty energy. So-called “biogas” is extracted from trash in landfills and manure from factory farms. It is methane, chemically identical to the methane in fracked gas, and the growth of the industry is driving more and bigger factory farms across the country. 

Boosters will try to sell this as a “green” solution to data centers’ energy demand. But what it really means is more polluting data centers and more polluting factory farms.

7. Generative AI Will Not Help Us Fight Climate Change

You might have heard the claim that AI will help us solve climate change, issuing innovative solutions like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Tech leaders have pointed to the possibility as though it could outweigh data centers’ environmental harms. But the truth is, claims of AI’s usefulness to the climate fight are vastly overstated. 

As a recent report explains, “virtually all stated climate benefits relate to ‘traditional’ AI” — not the generative tools like chatbots and image creators that are driving the industry’s recent growth. 

Moreover, claimed benefits are seldom based on research or real-world uses. In other words, Big Tech says AI is an important tool to fight climate change, while virtually none of the generative AI driving the boom is actually being used to fight climate change.

Half-Measures on Data Centers Are Not Enough — We Need to Stop Them Now!

People across the country are seeing data centers for what they are — Big Tech’s leeches, guzzling our water and burning polluting fossil fuels for the industry’s profits. 

Our leaders are starting to respond. But right now, many of these efforts are utterly haphazard and insufficient given the scale of the problem. They’re putting the cart before the horse, trying to regulate these facilities as developers pour the foundations.

While Trump throws his weight behind the AI industry, many state leaders have failed to step in and pass meaningful protections. Vague promises to protect affordable electricity — while failing to account for data centers’ various other harms — have come from leaders like Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and New York Governor Kathy Hochul. 

And while leaders hand-wave at regulations, developers are breaking ground, taps are running dry, and communities are breathing in noxious pollution.

As the movement against data centers continues to grow, Big Tech and its partners will push new lies and greenwashing schemes. We can’t fall for them, and we can’t allow our leaders to fall for them. 

Ultimately, we don’t yet know if — never mind how — data centers can ever operate in ways that protect people, society, or the environment. Until we have a comprehensive regulatory framework that addresses data centers’ harms, we need to hit the brakes nationwide.