More Anti-Datacenter Funding From Google's Schmidt
In December of 2025, a coalition of environmental groups signed a letter to Congress calling for a moratorium on construction of datacenters in the United States. Besides that, there have been various bills to shut down datacenter construction at the local, state, and national level as well as debates and protests.
On May 16th, Cleveland, Ohio voted to stop the $1.6 billion Slavic Village datacenter project from moving forward. The Box Elder datacenter campus in Utah has seen intense backlash, some of it over the confusion about how many acres of land it would encompass.
Criticism of the projects has largely hinged on environmental issues related to the large amounts of water used for cooling, electricity consumption, costs to ratepayers, carbon and heat generation, and their use for A.I.
The scale of the outrage targeted at datacenters appears out of place. While they use large amounts of water for cooling, so do many other industries—factories, farms, golf courses—that generate far less tax revenue for the areas they are located in.
In response, the pro-energy group American Energy Institute (AEI) published a report showing the foreign funding of nonprofits advocating against datacenter development. According to a report from Americans for Public Trust, environmental groups like 350.org and Greenpeace receive substantial sums from foreign investors like the Oak Foundation—headquartered in Switzerland and run by a British citizen Alan Parker—as well as the Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss through the Wyss Foundation and Berger Action Fund, the British hedge fund manager Chris Hohn, the UK-based Quadrature Climate foundation, and the Denmark-based KR Foundation.
In February, Nebraska attorney general Mike Hilgers requested the Department of Justice investigate a collection of foreign entities funding U.S. environmental groups under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA), some of which like 350.org are actively advocating against datacenters.
But besides 350.org and Greenpeace, many of the environmental groups funded by foreign entities detailed in the AEI report don’t appear to be active in anti-datacenter advocacy.
Interestingly enough another large funder of groups advocating against datacenters is the Schmidt Family Foundation. The 501(c)3 group created by Google ex-CEO Eric Schmidt heavily funds the nonprofit Food and Water Watch at the center of the activism and organizer of the letter to Congress.
The irony of course is that Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is heavily invested, if not one of the largest American investors in datacenters. Through the Schmidt Family Foundation it appears that they might be funding their own opposition.
Based on 2024 filings, the foundation holds almost $1 billion in Alphabet stock, and it gave at least $3.75 million to the signatories of the 2025 anti-datacenter letter including $1.2 million to the letter’s coordinator, Food and Water Watch along with others like Columbia Riverkeeper, FracTracker Alliance, and Physicians for Social Responsibility. In total, the Schmidt Family Foundation handed out $195 million that year to a larger number of nonprofit groups that could also be advocating against datacenters in other ways.
For example, the Google datacenter in Dalles, Oregon is at the center of a battle over water usage. The Google datacenter there currently uses in the range of 500 million gallons a year, and the city is pushing to fund improvements to the nearby Crow Creek Dam. Resident water bills could potentially double as a result.
But while Google is a large source of the town’s water consumption, the city would likely need to make the improvements no matter what, and Google already paid for a new water storage system and will likely pay millions for further upgrades including the Crow Creek Dam, as well as expenditures for ongoing water consumption.
Schmidt’s funding of FractTracker Alliance and Frack Action—two of a number of anti-natural gas fracturing nonprofits that signed the letter—is also interesting as Google is invested in numerous datacenter projects connected to natural gas plants sourcing their energy from fracking.
In 2026, Google announced the Goodnight project in conjunction with the Texas’ Crusoe energy for a datacenter in Armstrong County. Crusoe sources much of their energy from methane flaring and hydrologic fracturing, originally as a way to fund bitcoin mining. Google is also connected to other datacenter projects with attached natural gas plants in Illinois and Nebraska.
A previous Investigative Economics story detailed how Google funded the opposition to a nuclear powered datacenter in Georgia despite Google itself involved in nuclear-powered datacenters in other parts of the country.
