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.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the new wave of extractive history here in the United States. It is no coincidence that AI data centers are expanding in areas that experience some of the most acute environmental injustice and public health concerns. Many of these areas are rural and economically challenged, and often have lax environmental regulatory polices along with tax incentives that data centers have taken advantage of.
To deeply study and organize around this issue, MediaJustice—a national organization helping communities build power to challenge how government and corporations use technology and media to shape our collective future—published a groundbreaking report on the expansion of data centers in the South.
The People Say No: Resisting Data Centers in the South, focuses on how tech corporations are creating their own version of “sacrifice zones” through rapid AI data center development. This expansion comes at a huge cost to the Southern communities where many of the centers are located, including Louisiana, Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina.
The report contextualizes the US AI race as a form of environmental injustice and environmental racism. To fully understand the cost of data center expansion, MediaJustice draws lessons from the disproportionate impacts on Black Southerners of Hurricane Katrina and Cancer Alley, an 85-mile stretch of industrialized land along the Mississippi River.
While Big Tech touts “visions for the future” and pushes the need to expand these data centers to keep up with the AI demand, organizers and communities across the US are sharing widespread alarm. Communities of color, low-income White communities, and environmentally vulnerable areas are currently being poisoned and robbed of their resources as a result of this expansion.
MediaJustice’s report points to the fact that since the Trump administration took office, the federal government has actively advanced the tech industry’s profit-driven interests over the lives of everyday people. Big Tech has quickly advanced a powerful right-wing agenda, focused on mass surveillance. According to a report by Public Citizen, “Tech corporations, along with their executives and investors, collectively spent $1.2 million on political influence during and since the 2024 elections.”
In short, the United States has become a tech-governed oligarchy.
Where Is AI Headed?
Over the next five years, companies such as Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft plan to spend $400 billion on AI efforts alone, The Wall Street Journal reported, with data center hubs built or planned in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Phoenix, and many other cities.
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The Trump administration has paved the way for this development by eroding government agencies whose purpose is to regulate independently and without bias, including the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). And recently Trump has floated an executive order to block state-level AI regulations, which would cede more power to tech companies in the name of “innovation.”
With over 5,400 data centers, the United States has more data centers than any other country, and “roughly 40% of data centers in the US are in ‘water stressed’ areas of the country,” the report noted. Texas, for example, is projected to use 49 billion gallons of water this year to power data centers despite a quarter of the state facing water restrictions due to drought. Alongside rampant water extraction, the cost of energy is now being passed down to rate payers.
How Can We Fight Back?
Opposition to data centers is steadily increasing across the United States, particularly in the South. Complementing the MediaJustice report is a toolkit that provides case studies, a data fact sheet, an interactive gallery walk showcasing advocacy around the country, among other resources. The toolkit aims to help communities build knowledge and skills to resist data center buildouts. Currently, 142 activist groups across 24 states are organizing to stop expansion.
The first way to oppose these centers is to demand a public planning process. Local elected officials, who are elected to work in their constituents’ best interest, must be called upon to get data centers negotiated in the public eye.
Corporate greenwashing of data centers needs to be called out for what it is: a false solution. Greenwashing obscures the true demand for water and energy, as well as the ecological and health impacts that data centers bring to a community.
It is also critical to push back against constant surveillance and the collection of our data. As the authors of the report wrote, “Opposing surveillance and opposing data centers is part of the same fight to protect our people from corporate and State harm.”
MediaJustice prompts us to stay mindful and aware of AI’s rapid expansion into our everyday lives and what it means for communities already dealing with the lasting impacts of environmental injustice. The battle is just beginning, but people power gives us a fighting chance.
