Erin Brockovich just turned her famous environmental playbook on the AI build-out, and Malaysia should be paying close attention. The activist behind the Pacific Gas & Electric case has launched a public map of data centres across the United States, fed by community reports about water, power, and the secrecy that surrounds new facilities. The single complaint she says shows up more than any other is a word familiar to anyone living near Sedenak Tech Park or Iskandar Puteri.
That word is transparency.
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What Brockovich is actually doing
According to TechCrunch, Brockovich opened brockovichdatacenter.com in late April with a crowd-sourced map that now plots operational, under-construction, and community-reported facilities. Within the first week she had 1,800 submissions from 47 states. In her own Substack post she described the most common concern as transparency itself, ahead of noise, water usage and rising utility bills, then ticked off the pattern her submissions kept revealing: projects announced after permits were already secured, developers who don't return calls, and local officials who signed non-disclosure agreements before their neighbours knew a project was being considered.
Brockovich is careful to say she is not arguing against data centres or against AI itself. She is arguing against the way new facilities tend to arrive in towns, quietly, and with the paperwork already done.
Why this should land in Johor
Johor is the fastest-growing data centre hub in Southeast Asia. By November 2025 the state had approved 51 projects, with 17 operational, 11 under construction and 23 cleared to proceed. Aggregate capacity rose from roughly 10MW to about 1,500MW in three years. The state government's Special Technical Committee now reviews every proposal against Singapore-grade Water Usage Efficiency benchmarks, and earlier this year it halted approvals for the largest Tier 1 and Tier 2 facilities, citing draw rates close to 200 times higher than smaller sites.
Even with the halt, the math ahead is stark. Federal regulators have estimated that the 51 Johor facilities alone could need around 675 million litres of water a day, while the country can sustainably supply only about 142 million litres of the 808 million litres requested nationwide. The Malaysian Meteorological Department has been warning that Johor is heading into drought conditions in 2025 and 2026.
The transparency parallel
Brockovich's complaint about disclosure is the part that translates most directly to Malaysia. Communities around Sedenak, Kulai, and Iskandar Puteri have flagged the same pattern: large hyperscale clients, NDAs covering site selection, and announcements that surface only after land is bought and grid upgrades committed. The Special Technical Committee's reviews are not published. The anchor tenants on individual sites are not always disclosed. Rest of World's 2024 reporting on the Johor build-out described residents learning about specific projects from job-posting boards rather than the developers themselves.
The case for Malaysian regulators is not that Johor should slow down. It is that the United States is now several years into a wave that arrived later than ours, and the political backlash, including $64 billion in stalled or cancelled US projects tracked by Introl over the past year, is being driven by exactly the secrecy Brockovich is now mapping. Communities that find out late tend to push back hard.
What to watch next
Two practical moves would close most of the gap without slowing approvals. Publishing the Special Technical Committee's water and power assessments alongside each approval, redacted only where commercially sensitive, would give residents the same disclosure that foreign reporters already extract through second-hand sources. Publishing a quarterly count of the daily water demand from operational data centres against the state's sustainable supply would give every Johorean a number to track.
If the federal government wants Malaysia to keep its share of the regional data-centre wave through 2030, it will need to demonstrate that the construction map and the community map look the same. That is the bar Brockovich is now setting in the United States. It is a useful one for Putrajaya to import before residents start drawing their own maps.