The AI Boom’s Blind Spot

By: Dr. Adam Gushgari, Senior Director of Emerging Contaminants, Eurofins Environment Testing

The global AI boom has been a humbling experience. You could dedicate every waking hour to staying on top of this field and still come up short. But it's worth staying attuned to. I don't think there's another single technological shift in recent memory that rivals what we're seeing today. Arguably no field has been left untouched, and some have been completely upended. And it's not just happening in the digital realm. It's happening in the real world too, in the form of data centers going up in record numbers and in record time.

Earlier this month, I read a news article about a permit application in Virginia. The report was covering a data center seeking to discharge "non-contact cooling water" into a navigable U.S. waterway. Non-contact cooling water never touches IT equipment directly, and it's treated before discharge to meet state environmental regulations. Seemingly standard – except for one detail. Environmental advocacy groups and nearby residents have raised concerns about what might be in that water that is not covered by state environmental standards, and they're not wrong to ask. We've been here before. The Minamata disaster didn't start as a crisis either, it started as industrial wastewater near a community that had no reason to think twice about it – until people started getting sick. I don't think that's paranoia. I think it's a reasonable thing to be concerned about, especially if you're raising your family in a potentially impacted area.

Mapping the Potential Sources

I want to be clear about something before we move forward. Society has made real strides in environmental and public health protection since Minamata, so that comparison only goes so far. But the AI revolution is happening fast, at the pace of a technological revolution layered on top of something akin to an international arms race. Things get missed at that speed. Not from negligence, simply from velocity. And in the field of environmental contamination, I'd rather we find the problems before they find us. So, I want to walk through where these contaminants could actually be coming from – the data centers themselves, and the industries built up to support them.

There are a number of potential contamination sources to consider when it comes to data centers themselves. One is the use of PFAS compounds in dielectric and two-phase immersion cooling fluids, as well as PFAS-containing refrigerants and fire suppressants used in these facilities. Biocides, scale inhibitors, and corrosion inhibitors are also commonly used in evaporative cooling towers, blowdown water, and water-based cooling loops. Back-up power and emergency systems, such as diesel generators or lithium-ion battery backup systems, could also theoretically contribute to environmental contamination, especially in the instance of a generator or battery fire. And a notable amount of e-waste is generated by the decommissioning of servers, hard drives, and other electronics integral to data center systems, which has the potential to leach various classes of contaminants into ecosystems adjacent to landfills. It's worth noting, though, that these considerations aren't universally applicable across the industry. Novel technologies that make data centers more energy efficient, and more environmentally responsible, continue to be developed, and not every facility carries every risk listed above.

A second, and perhaps more underappreciated, source of environmental contamination comes from the upstream industries that support data centers. Semiconductor manufacturing may be one of the largest users of PFAS compounds across the entire AI supply chain, relying on them extensively as surfactants, etchants, and photolithography aids. In some regions where data center growth has accelerated rapidly, semiconductor manufacturing has expanded right alongside it, which creates the possibility of a region-specific compounded load. PFAS is persistent enough that it eventually becomes a ubiquitous, background-level contaminant almost everywhere. But that doesn't mean exposure is evenly distributed in the meantime, and a higher local baseline could mean a higher local health risk while that distribution plays out. There are also the resins themselves to consider: PFAS production is ramping up specifically to supply data center coolant and semiconductor demand, which could introduce another potential point-source contamination pathway before the data center ever comes online.

The supporting infrastructure brings its own risks too. New substations and transmission lines built to serve data center energy loads may rely on sulfur hexafluoride as an insulating gas, a compound with a global warming potential roughly 23,500 times that of carbon dioxide and an atmospheric lifetime estimated to be thousands of years. And construction itself, of the data centers, the substations, and the transmission corridors, carries the kind of familiar industrial risk you'd expect: potential for disturbed soil, accelerated erosion, sediment-bound contaminant mobilization, and the array of emerging contaminants that show up in any large-scale construction process.

Where Eurofins Environment Testing Comes In

I want to be unequivocally clear about why I'm writing this. My purpose isn't to single out or vilify any one player in the AI supply chain, or the field itself. The early years of this technology have already shown the kind of value, societal and scientific, that's hard to overstate. But the value created and the inherent responsibility aren't in conflict here. I believe that responsibility sits with the people actually building and running this technology, the ones deciding which cooling systems get installed, where facilities get built, and what gets tested along the way. That's not a responsibility any outside party can carry for them. But it is one Eurofins Environment Testing can help them navigate.

Independent analytical testing exists for exactly this kind of moment, when an industry is moving faster than trust can be earned on word alone. Eurofins Environment Testing can work alongside the companies building this future to show their communities, with scientific data, that it's being done ethically, equitably, and with accountability. The same capability serves the public too, asking the questions and running the analyses that confirm whether that trust is actually deserved. The tools already exist, targeted LC-MS/MS analysis, non-targeted chemical screening, and so does the lab capacity to run them at the pace this industry is growing.

The window to get ahead of this is closing. With the Toxic Substances Control Act PFAS reporting deadline arriving January 31, 2027, waiting is no longer a neutral choice. If you're building, operating, or regulating in this space, Eurofins Environment Testing's team can help you build a PFAS testing plan now. Reach out to start that conversation.