Are We Sacrificing Cemeteries for AI? 

No matter what your opinion on artificial intelligence, you can’t deny that it’s being leveraged by more and more people for a growing variety of personal and professional uses — including deathcare. But these innovative, time-saving AI tools come at a hidden cost, one that uniquely impacts the deathcare community. The AI boom has created an insatiable appetite for large, cheap, power-adjacent parcels of land, and it turns out that a fair number of those parcels are occupied, at least in part, by cemeteries.

From rural Alabama to Northern Virginia’s  “Data Center Alley”, families, historical preservation groups, and cemeterians are finding themselves negotiating (or litigating) with an industry that didn’t exist in its current form a decade ago and now needs more land, water, and electricity than most small cities. 

Location, location, location

In Muscogee County, Georgia, a proposed $5 billion-plus campus known as Project Ruby has put a 15-acre family cemetery squarely in its cites. The proposed facility could draw around 600 megawatts of power, roughly what it takes to run the city of Columbus itself, plus hundreds of thousands of gallons of water a day — and would displace 22 graves.

In Childersburg, Alabama, a data center company is currently doing due diligence on an industrial park property that butts up against five burial grounds containing 44 known graves. Although the developer said the center will not be built “on top of the graves,” residents are still working to ensure that the historic cemeteries are preserved and maintained — and that the center stays far, far away from them.

A hundred miles north in Henry County, Georgia, the bulldozers aren’t waiting on due diligence. The O’Neal AME Church Cemetery in Hampton holds graves dating back to the 1800s, many of them sunken, covered by fallen trees, and until recently, largely forgotten. Now the site sits directly beside active construction for the Hampton Technology Park, a five-building, 603-acre campus. A nonprofit organization has taken up the job of documenting graves but they’re concerned that construction activity may have already encroached on some unmarked burial sites.

Buffer zones may not be enough

Northern Virginia offers a sad preview of what fates may befall these three properties. In Loudoun County, Tippets Hill Cemetery, which, like the O’Neal property in Georgia, is a small, historically Black burial ground, now sits surrounded on all sides by data centers, with construction equipment taking up some of the cemetery’s few parking spots. 

Two counties over, in Prince William County, construction tied to an Iron Mountain data center and a nearby electrical substation came within feet of two historic cemeteries, the final resting places of more than 100 souls, despite a county-mandated 25-foot protective buffer, Required access to the sites wasn’t maintained either, and the county’s historical commission has since asked officials to make it right.

Close calls and terrible consequences

A 200-year-old cemetery in Stafford County, Virginia will enjoy a reprieve from disruption, but it’s only temporary. Local authorities recently voted to defer rezoning and permit applications for the 99-acre Potomac Creek Campus. The developer now has until October 31 to complete an archaeological investigation using a state-approved consultant before the county will revisit the applications.

The bleakest version of this story comes from Mecklenburg County, Virginia, where a 2014 Microsoft data center expansion turned up a cemetery nobody was supposed to find. A ProPublica investigation found that Microsoft, the county, and its consultants worked to downplay the historic significance of the site, even after archaeologists recommended it for the National Register of Historic Places. Workers ultimately located 37 graves, some marked only with quartz stones or yucca plants, and relocated them without notifying living descendants first.

What can deathcare do?

Sadly, some believe that the economic benefits of these AI data centers outweigh the value of a bunch of “old graves”. These centers create high-paying permanent jobs and millions of dollars in revenue to city and county governments — money that could fund everything from public parks to new jail facilities. And, of course, the more data centers are built, the more AI they can power. For many people, the potential for more tools that can make our jobs and lives easier than ever before is worth the sacrifice.

Like it or not, the servers are coming for our cemeteries. If you maintain records for a family plot, sit on a cemetery board, or field questions from families about perpetual care guarantees, this is a genuinely useful moment to double-check your own site’s documentation, registry status, and buffer protections before someone else’s due diligence process runs through them.