This article was originally published by Truthout
Organizers from Tennessee, Wisconsin, and Arizona share strategies for resisting data centers in other communities.
The prolific construction of massive data centers that house the physical computing power for artificial intelligence (AI) is galvanizing resistance in localities across the United States. Communities are fighting back against the billionaire tech and financial power behind these projects and their numerous harms, from their noise and pollution to their hyperconsumption of water and electricity.
Truthout has been covering the corporate interests behind the data center boom and local resistance to data centers. In this roundtable, we brought together representatives from three campaigns across the U.S. to share their experiences and lessons from taking on data centers and AI infrastructure in their areas.
KeShaun Pearson is the leader of Memphis Community Against Pollution (MCAP), based in Memphis, Tennessee, which is focused on fighting for environmental and climate justice in the predominantly Black community of southwest Memphis that’s most impacted by the concentrated pollution from nearby toxic release facilities. MCAP is currently campaigning against Elon Musk’s polluting xAI Colossus supercomputer. Tricia Boehlke is an organizer with No Data Center in DeForest, which recently succeeded in halting a proposed data center that was pushed by a private equity-owned company in a small town outside of Madison, Wisconsin. Lee Ziesche organizes with the Tucson Democratic Socialists of America and the No Desert Data Center Coalition, which has been taking on Project Blue, a huge data center proposed in the Tucson, Arizona, area. The campaign against Project Blue won a victory when Amazon recently pulled out of the project, but its developers are again trying to advance it.
This roundtable has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Derek Seidman: What’s some initial advice you’d offer to people looking to organize against a proposed data center in their area?
KeShaun Pearson: Activate your community as quickly as you possibly can and inform as many people as possible. These projects move with an urgency and speed by developers that we haven’t seen before. They’re steamrolling our communities and our elected officials. Also, if they’re talking about one data center, remember that it’ll likely be two or three. That’s something I wish Memphis Community Against Pollution knew earlier, because now there are three sites for the xAI project here.
Tricia Boehlke: The number one thing is to start going to public meetings. You need to get ahead of it. Get open records requests as soon as you can, because you don’t know what’s happening behind closed doors. Talk to your board