Nearly all of the world's ten largest producers of PFAS plan to raise their production quotas as data center construction accelerates, according to an investigation by The Guardian. The compounds, formally per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, sit in the cooling systems, the AI chips, the printed circuit boards, the fire suppression systems and the coating on the thousands of miles of cable that connect a facility's components. They barely degrade in nature and they accumulate in the body. The AI buildout has handed a chemical class that does not break down a customer whose demand curve points up.
PFAS parts are bought by many industries. What makes their use in data centers a separate concern is duty cycle. These buildings almost never stop, apart from rare maintenance windows. Components wear out quickly under that load, and operators are permanently in the business of writing off old parts and installing new ones.
When worn components are thrown out, the PFAS in them almost inevitably reaches the environment, which raises the odds of the substances entering the food chain. Consumed in contaminated plant and animal products, the forever chemicals build up in the body and have been linked to a long list of serious diseases.
Anne-Sofie Bäckar, executive director of the Swedish organization ChemSec, said the producers' expansion plans carry a clear message: unless governments and regulators demand a rapid phase-out of PFAS, the world is heading into a new wave of these substances.
PFAS is the slow version of the problem. Data centers were already named as sources of air pollution and of wastewater discharges, which sometimes turn out to contain bacteria. The fast version arrived on Monday, when Gothamist reported that almost 5,000 gallons of diesel fuel escaped an Equinix data center in Secaucus, New Jersey, for reasons still unknown. It went straight into a tributary creek in the New Jersey Meadowlands.
Ben Dziobek, executive director of the Climate Revolution Action Network, told Gothamist the incident shows that the consequences of running a data center travel well past its property line. Handing these questions to individual towns, he said, is pointless: the problems data centers create do not stop at municipal boundaries, whether that means pollution or the load on the grid that pushes up everyone's electricity bills.
Put the two stories next to each other and the asymmetry is the story. The diesel is countable. Five thousand gallons, one creek, one address, one company with its name on the building. The PFAS is not countable at all. Nothing in this reporting establishes how much of it sits in a given rack, how much leaves a facility each year in a skip of decommissioned boards and cable, or where it goes after that. The Guardian traced the supply side because the supply side is where numbers exist: production quotas get declared. Buyers declare nothing.
That absence is worth naming directly, because it determines what any future rule can do. A producer announcing a quota increase generates a public fact. An operator swapping out several thousand worn boards generates none. There is no inventory of PFAS entering data centers, no accounting of PFAS leaving them, and therefore no baseline against which a phase-out could later be measured. The reporting that exists describes an industry planning to make more of something, and an industry planning to buy more of it, with no observable quantity in between.
Bäckar's demand is aimed at governments, and that is the right address. It also arrives with the sequencing backwards. A phase-out negotiated over years would apply to chemistry that is being ordered now, installed in buildings designed to run without pause, and discarded on whatever cycle the hardware wears out on. By the time a rule names these compounds, most of what this buildout puts into the ground will already be in it.