The Environmental Protection Agency looked at two new chemicals headed for semiconductor factories and wrote down what they might do to people: cancer, neurological damage, sudden death.

Then it acknowledged it didn't have enough information to know how bad the risks actually were.

Then it approved them.

On Friday, the Sierra Club and CHIPS Communities United — represented by Earthjustice — sued in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to undo those approvals.

You are not allowed to know what the chemicals are

Here is the part that should stop you.

Neither chemical has a public name. In the complaint, they appear only as EPA premanufacture notice numbers P-26-0029 and P-26-0045. Their actual identities are withheld as confidential business information.

So a federal agency has determined that two substances may cause cancer and sudden death, has admitted it doesn't fully understand the danger, has cleared them for manufacture — and the people who will live near the plants making them are not permitted to know what they are.

You cannot test your water for a chemical whose name is a trade secret. You cannot ask your doctor about an exposure you can't name. You cannot warn your neighbors.

This is what the data center boom actually looks like

Semiconductors are the physical hardware artificial intelligence runs on. Every AI data center announcement — every "we're investing $50 billion in compute" press release — resolves, eventually, into chips, and chips get made in factories, and those factories use chemicals.

The lawsuit's central point is that the harm doesn't stay inside the data center's fence line. As the groups put it, the rush to build more and more data centers is causing harm far beyond the data centers themselves — it runs the length of the semiconductor supply chain, through communities that never appear in the announcement.

And the chemistry problem isn't confined to fabrication. Data centers themselves lean on refrigerants like Freon and Opteon, Teflon coatings, Krytox and Viton. Their cooling systems consume enormous quantities of water, and immersion cooling uses PFAS — the "forever chemicals" that don't break down in a human body or in groundwater.

None of that shows up in the ribbon-cutting.

The EPA's job is the thing it declined to do

Under federal law, before a new chemical enters commerce, the EPA is supposed to determine whether it presents an unreasonable risk. That is the entire function. It is a gate.

Here the agency identified serious hazards, said out loud that it lacked sufficient information to determine the full extent of those risks, and opened the gate anyway.

"We don't know" is not a finding of safety. It is the absence of one.

A pattern of an agency that doesn't want to regulate

This is the same EPA that, when a federal judge ruled its climate grant cancellations were illegal, decided the ruling meant it had to do nothing.

The through-line is an agency that treats its own obligations as optional — court orders, risk determinations, the statutory gate on new chemicals. What stays mandatory is the approval.

Who carries the cost

Chip fabs don't get built in wealthy neighborhoods. They get built where land is cheap, water is available, and a state government has offered a tax package. The people living downwind and downstream are the ones who absorb whatever P-26-0029 and P-26-0045 turn out to be.

They didn't get a vote on the approval. They aren't allowed to know the chemical's name. And the federal agency that exists to answer "is this safe?" wrote down "possibly cancer, possibly sudden death, unclear," and signed off.

Meanwhile Republicans across the country are competing to bring data centers to their states — often, as we've documented, while taking money from the utilities and tech firms building them and telling constituents their electric bills won't go up.

The chemicals are the part of the deal nobody puts in the press release.

Source

Brett Wilkins, "Green Groups Sue Trump EPA for Approving Toxic Semiconductor Chemicals Amid AI Data Center Boom," Common Dreams, Aug. 14, 2026. Photo via Common Dreams.