Lina Moe is a PhD Candidate in Urban Planning and Public Policy at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers–New Brunswick. Her research focuses on the governance of emerging technologies and infrastructure siting, with particular attention to how communities exercise democratic power over large-scale energy and data center development. She has produced policy analysis for the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities on community benefits frameworks and has studied the spatial distribution of data centers relative to overburdened communities as part of her research at the Center for Urban Policy Research. Her work has been published in Energy Policy and Environmental Research: Energy.

Who Decides Where AI Lives? Community Power and the Democratic Politics of Data Center Siting in New Jersey

AI is a white-hot topic of growing confusion, concern, and resistance. The large data centers undergirding generative AI are among the fastest-growing categories of infrastructure being sited in American communities. Like much large-scale infrastructure, they concentrate costs locally while benefits flow to distant shareholders and global users. AI may live in the cloud, but AI infrastructure consumes land, electricity, and water, produces noise and raises utility prices. I will be studying a hyperscale facility in Vineland, NJ designed to reach 300 MW, which is nearly double the entire municipality's total electricity consumption. This project focuses on AI's physical footprint. I will investigate: how does the proliferation of the physical infrastructure of AI affect democratic governance in the communities where AI physically lives?