Big Tech’s AI boom and Big Oil’s fossil fuel expansion are one fight. Data centers need enormous amounts of electricity, and the fossil fuel industry is ready to supply it through new gas plants, pipelines, and carbon capture projects. In places like Cancer Alley in Louisiana and the 500-mile pipeline Green Chile Project in New Mexico, the data center and the pollution powering it arrive together.
We’ve all heard the statistics, but we haven’t always heard from the culture keepers and care workers who tend to the people that the industry has chosen to sacrifice to scale. That’s the conversation we had on October 22nd in our movement education event, Big Tech’s Biggest Enablers, with guests Mar Zepeda (Climate Justice Alliance), Feleecia Guillen (New Mexico No False Solutions), and Dorothy Slater (Revolving Door Project).
Dorothy is an oncology nurse in Louisiana’s “cancer alley,” an 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River lined with roughly 200 petrochemical facilities. The cancer rates are off the charts where she works, and she regularly sees patients who have lived healthy lifestyles except for the fact that they can’t escape the gas plants nearby. Her patients can see black clouds billowing out of plants powering AI data centers from their hospital rooms. As a part-time organizer, Dorothy has written that Meta’s incursion into the region is an insult to injury.
Feleecia’s organizing network of movement elders, youth and Indigenous leaders is fighting a 17-mile natural gas pipeline called the Green Chile Project. The pipeline will feed Project Jupiter, a power plant for OpenAI and Oracle’s Stargate data centers. She spoke about the dark irony that Big Tech is using New Mexico’s most culturally relevant crop as a label for its modern day extraction.
Contextualizing these stories with analysis, Mar Zepeda with Climate Justice Alliance laid bare the collusion between industry and politicians, naming the proposed permitting bill BAAJA as an example of how Big Tech and Big Oil are expanding upon the deep history of stripping and extracting resources from Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities. CJA’s Just Transitions framework preconditions climate justice on Indigenous solidarity and promotes a vision of care and sacredness.
As the data center resistance enters its next phase, MediaJustice is bringing with us principles of collective care, Indigenous sovereignty, feminist praxis, and a commitment to mutual aid. We are grateful to our partners in the environmental justice movement for joining MediaJustice in developing shared analysis and rooting our demands in the experiences of real people, their families, and communities on the front lines of the supply chain for hyperscale data centers.
Check out the slides from our webinar, and the case study Big Tech and Big Oil: Thick as Thieves
Watch all of our Brobots vs People webinars on our YouTube channel. And we hope you’ll join us for the final episode of our movement education series, “What the Midterms Mean for Our Future,” on November 12th at 6PM ET | 3PM PT.
