Digital Colonialism, a series co-produced by NPQ and MediaJustice, explores how the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) data centers is reshaping communities across the United States.
Americans are experiencing high utility bills, extreme weather patterns, and a political system that continues to double down on oil and gas, even waging new wars to secure it. Now, AI data centers are locking us into another cycle of environmental degradation, one that further threatens our water, our air, and our communities.
In my own backyard here in Sacramento, CA, the corporate playbook is currently unfolding. Developers promise “community investments,” downtown revitalization, and a new “AI Center.” What they don’t say is that this development comes tethered to a massive resource-intensive data center that will cost billions, create pollution, and concentrate profits for the corporations and CEOs at the top—not the surrounding communities. This is not innovation, it’s exploitation.
The NAACP released the nation’s first environmental and climate justice-focused data center principles, the Frontline Framework.
If an AI data center is not yet being proposed in your community, chances are it may be in the future. For some, this moment feels unprecedented. For Black communities and frontline organizers, it feels painfully familiar as corporate greed, weak government oversight, and an inequitable legal system have long defined how environmental harm is distributed in this country.
Black people understand this history intimately—we know what happens when industries are allowed to extract wealth and leave pollution behind. We know how communities are harmed, and we know we must fight back. The AI data center boom is following the same pattern of degrading Black communities, increasing our vulnerability, and pushing us out of the places we call home. This is a long battle that the NAACP is gearing up to fight.
A New Frontline Framework
The NAACP got involved when hyperscale AI data centers started spreading across the country. The organization and its partners, Southern Environmental Law Center and Earthjustice, have already taken decisive action, including filing a notice of intent to sue xAI, Elon Musk’s data center operations in South Memphis, TN, and Southaven, MS. The intent to sue highlights that the , a bedrock law in environmental protection, is implicated every time xAI operates these facilities as is. After the notice was filed, xAI added safety controls to its current turbines and took down unregulated turbines.
No billionaire should be able to ignore the law and pollute in frontline communities with impunity. In consultation with other community groups, the NAACP released the nation’s first climate justice-focused principles on data centers: the Frontline Framework, modeled after the Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing Environmental Justice.
The framework’s nine principles are:
- Our health and the environment are sacred.
- Communities most affected must lead.
- Jobs cannot justify harm.
- Accountability must be enforceable.
- We reject false solutions and fossil fuel dependency.
- Infrastructure must be community-led.
- Interconnected harms require interconnected solutions.
- Solidarity builds power.
- We walk our talk.
The reality of [data centers] is water scarcity and contamination, worsening air quality, strained energy grids, and quality of life concerns to the communities who live nearby.The NAACP’s Environmental and Climate Justice Program, along with other NAACP staff and local chapters, is supporting hyperlocal fights and equipping communities with tools like our 2026 Playbook to demand transparency, accountability, and justice. If a locale is facing a proposed data center or if one has already been built, we’ve outlined steps that can help protect that community.
For example, our 2026 Playbook highlights a proactive approach to fighting back, such as community moratoriums, which force development to pause when there isn’t enough information about the proposed data center, and demand transparency at all stages. Another important resource we’ve created is how to negotiate for a community benefits agreement to ensure measurable, enforceable benefits go to host communities.
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Familiar Harms
Data center developers make grand promises of a better future, but the reality of these facilities is water scarcity and contamination, worsening air quality, strained energy grids, and quality of life concerns to the communities who live nearby. The only thing new is the scale. The boom is so widespread that it has forced broader public concern about practices that Black and frontline communities have been fighting for generations.
In 2022, at the height of the Jackson, MS, water crisis, I testified before the House Committee on Homeland Security regarding the importance of centering Black communities, specifically for their disproportionate experience of the state’s aging water infrastructure, and generally for their overall exposure to more frequent and severe climate-related disasters. After Governor Tate Reeves deepened those water concerns by positioning the state as an AI hub, the state is now considering hyperscale data centers across Mississippi.
Indiana has also been a focus for data center buildout. Last year, the Indiana State Conference of the NAACP and the NAACP Center for Environmental and Climate Justice opposed a Google data center construction in Fort Wayne, calling for additional public agency engagement and hosting a public town hall to bring awareness to the issue. The 12-building campus spans approximately 700 acres, with proposed additional expansion on protected wetlands, a vital resource for public health and environmental resilience.
We can disrupt the cycle of systemic racism, corporate greed, and structural disinvestment in sacrifice zones and beyond.
Filling these wetlands for industrial expansion is to sacrifice irreplaceable natural infrastructure. The company promised to somehow create “offsets” in another location, but such an approach fails to account for the local, site-specific functions of these wetlands. The “benefits” proposed would not restore the local ecological needs or create local community benefits. For consultation on building a transmission line to carry electricity and signal to the new facility, Google brought in the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), which determined that, since no “dredging” would occur, a permit was no longer needed for the transmission line. This is troubling and illustrates how agencies like USACE may parachute into state and local data center fights to expedite project construction.
Air quality issues, water depletion, the strain on energy grids and utilities, and the cost to utility ratepayers also remain top concerns for communities around hyperscale data centers. And some states that were planning to retire fossil fuel plants are now bringing them back online, demonstrating that as a result of this boom, past concerns are resurfacing once again.
In many ways what we are seeing in data center development mirrors a corporate playbook used in sacrifice zones in many previous waves of energy expansion, including cryptomining, power plant buildouts, and fracking.
Nearly 15 years ago, I was finishing law school and began to see how the establishment of the fracking industry shaped up in frontline communities. Migrant community members feared their bosses would weaponize their legal residence status to keep them silent about the impacts, which include methane gas pollution, radioactive wastewater, and birth defects. Then, local officials took deals, school investments, and small payouts from these billion-dollar companies—pennies relative to the true cost of harm that they caused communities. The fossil fuel industry also lobbied Congress for loopholes in environmental laws, and the Trump White House, prioritizing profits for those companies, has consistently championed expediting coal and natural gas projects.
Disrupting the Playbook
Despite the recent AI data center boom, there is an opportunity to disrupt this playbook. Civil rights and environmental justice movements have seen these patterns show up for centuries, but the environmental and climate impacts of AI data centers are no longer confined to traditional sacrifice zones. They are becoming impossible for the world to ignore. We must mold our tactics to reach broader audiences, but the foundational strategy is clear.
By listening to groups who have been impacted in the past, investing in Black-led organizing and frontline strategies, and showing up with a united front, we can disrupt the cycle of systemic racism, corporate greed, and structural disinvestment in sacrifice zones and beyond.
