Tech CEOs and corporations have been on a rampage in the U.S. trying to railroad data centers into every plot of land and community they can get their hands on. Their goal is to win the capitalist race to dominate AI and data center infrastructure (which powers generative AI), and then use AI to raise their profits by eliminating millions of jobs.
The future the capitalist class has in store sounds like the deafening whirring drone of turbines running in Memphis, Tennessee. It looks like the blinding light of constant construction in rural Port Washington, Wisconsin. It feels like a family home’s well running dry in Newton, Georgia. It smells like natural gas emissions for miles around in rural Missouri.
In the private hands of a few billionaires, data centers and AI promise job losses, massive water consumption, surging electricity prices, and increased CO2 emissions. In short, profits for tech oligarchs and environmental destruction for U.S. workers. But there’s a not-so-quiet rebellion emerging around the country.
People across the U.S. are gathering at local town council meetings, signing petitions to create new laws to prevent data centers from coming to their cities and towns, and organizing by the thousands to stop big tech and shape the next decade of tech’s revolution to benefit workers. This has led to, as Bloomberg recently reported, nearly half of all planned data centers in 2026 being delayed or outright cancelled.
Job losses and profit gains
When hyperscale data center developers such as Vantage, QTS (owned by multi-billion dollar investment management company Blackstone), and CoreWeave, prepare to enter communities, they promise — often without any evidence — thousands of jobs and property tax benefits to residents.
Data centers are not job creators, they’re job destroyers. With capitalists controlling AI, the temporary jobs for building trades mean permanent job losses down the road for all sectors. Once complete, data centers operate with skeleton crews, meaning hardly any permanent jobs are created by these projects. Whatever short term gains small numbers of workers might see, technology in the hands of capitalists means job loss is inevitable.
There is a cyclical nature to this dynamic: tech companies have turned toward massive investment in data centers and AI generally while at the same time cutting tens of thousands of jobs. This in turn frees up capital to be invested into more data centers. In March, tech company layoffs surpassed 45,000 jobs. These companies want to portray these layoffs as proof of their vision of AI’s “revolutionary” potential, but in reality the core logic of capitalism remains unchanged.
Tech companies are pitting blue collar workers’ livelihoods against white collar workers’ futures. All workers in this situation face the same crisis: we don’t have a say in how or what we build because we do not own the technology. If the people democratically controlled the future of AI rather than allowing Big Tech to chart the path forwards, we could use AI to lighten the workload of all workers, and use increased production and efficiency to easily provide everyone with a quality standard of living.
For example, without the burden of many menial tasks that could be automated with AI, we could focus on building new schools, roads, and hospitals, all backed by strong unions. The problem is not AI as a technology, but rather the goals and ends of those who control it. A socialist vision of AI means community control of AI and all emergent technologies. It means less work and a better standard of living. It means a genuine, democratic say in where and for what purposes data centers are built.
From de-industrialization to data centers
Under capitalism, more labor exploitation is the only thing the working class stands to receive from the data center boom. Data centers promise both urban and rural communities alike excessive water use and pollution, air pollution, and the degradation of miles of livable environment.
Hyperscale data centers guzzle resources, especially electricity. In Wisconsin alone two hyperscale data centers are expected to use up more energy than every household in the state combined. In the US, more electricity use means more CO2 emissions. About 60% of the U.S. electrical grid is powered by fossil fuel infrastructure: gas, coal, and oil. The breakneck pace to build and power new hyperscale AI data centers means pushing an already unstable climate into catastrophe.
In the US, environmental catastrophe is forced on Black and brown people first. Environmental racism is the norm from the lead water crisis in Flint Michigan to Louisiana’s cancer alley, the most oppressed people live in the sacrifice zone for air pollution and water pollution. Data center developers often target low-income and Black communities for their data centers, and the fossil fuel power plants required to meet their enormous electricity requirements.
The municipal water infrastructure and previously-bustling but now shuttered factories in these communities retained by these working class communities are deemed as ideal sites for data centers by developers. Factories, warehouses, and the municipal infrastructure that powered industry and homes are now primed for overuse by data centers, and the primarily Black residents of these communities suffer the health costs of drinking contaminated water and breathing toxic air.
This is the experience of historically Black south Memphis, Tennessee, where Elon Musk’s xAI built both their “Colossus I and II” hyperscale data centers. At these facilities, 27 unpermitted natural gas turbines run constantly, creating smog, emitting toxic fumes and dangerous chemicals such as formaldehyde into the air. Long-term exposure to these pollutants is known to cause asthma, rare forms of cancer, heart disease, among other negative health conditions.
The criticism and fight against the colossus has not convinced Musk to end the project, nor swayed the Democratic local politicians to pull the plug on Big tech’s data center project for the benefit of Memphis.
In the majority Black Prince George’s County, Maryland, communities are facing a similar fight to Memphis. Last year, Taylor Frazier McCollum started a petition against a proposed data center on the site of an abandoned mall in Landover that has garnered nearly 24,000 signatures and a statewide fight back against data centers in Maryland. The development is forwarded by Lerner Enterprises, a regional real estate development company, for a client that remains anonymous.
“The people of Landover are fighting a proposed hyperscale data center with an unknown end user.” Frazier McCollum said in an interview with Liberation News. “It doesn’t matter who plans to use it, we will fight the pollution and disruption of our community until the end. We have a temporary moratorium, but we are pushing for a permanent ban.”
The counties surrounding Washington D.C. in Maryland and Virginia have among the highest concentration of existing data centers in the country, threatening the already strained Chesapeake Bay watershed. While local politicians are looking for ways to placate public opinion while still appeasing Big Tech, Frazier McCollum says that the community is united — “AI data centers only exist to extract and surveil our communities and the buck stops here.”
But the fight for liberation and pioneering a clean, innovative future for working people across the U.S. isn’t just happening in cities.
Rural land targeted for data center development
The other prime target for data center development, when developers can’t find cities with preexisting de-industrialized infrastructure, they turn to the next best thing: paving over farmland. If they can’t inherit ready-made infrastructure, the next best thing is to buy up cheap rural land and plow it. Farmland adjacent to water is especially desirable as data centers require a reliable water source for cooling.
In Port Washington Wisconsin, a small city of 12,000 on Lake Michigan’s Shoreline, OpenAI, and Oracle plan to jointly occupy a facility that’s part of the Trump-Administration backed Project Stargate and projected to be one of the world’s largest data centers at 1200 acres of land. Since the very beginning, the project was sold as a “done deal” despite residents barely knowing anything about it. What was once a sleepy town of largely white residents shortly became dominated by 24/7 construction, and talk of $458 million in tax incentives going directly to the data center developer.
What was a pleasant and quaint tourist destination on Lake Michigan’s Southeastern shoreline is now being carved out as a data center alley, to the unanimous approval of all town officials. Unanimous approval for dumping treated, glycol-solution water, ending up in Lake Michigan, the source of Wisconsin’s potable water.
Southaven, Mississippi is experiencing similar climate degradation at the hands of xAI. Forty turbines in rural Mississippi are designed to power the Memphis data center across the border and another facility in Mississippi. This development is larger and more polluting than the xAI facility in Memphis, and the NAACP alongside several environmental legal organizations have already threatened to sue Elon Musk for violations of the Clean Air Act.
At a recent hearing, residents expressed dismay for the future of their families and the environment. The sacrifice zone of environmental destruction is expanding, just as climate change deepens and worsens across the US. As this deepens, we should be investing in solutions to the climate crisis to create a safer and brighter future for our children.
Clean energy, solar, and wind power are ready today and rather than building data centers near our best fresh water supplies or in low-income areas, they could be built in areas where they’d have far less environmental impacts on public health. The basic demands of workers and residents’ struggle against data centers can be followed. These demands are simple and yet revolutionary.
In a United States dominated by fossil fuel companies, monopoly utility companies, and big tech, the people are looking beyond the status quo and imagining a better, brighter, cleaner future. Neither party is interested in defending the environment or workers. The politicians in place cannot and will not defend us or the environment.
They work for corporations and for the capitalist system that is burning down our planet. Only our collective power can combat the power of the system.
Fighting back means fighting for socialism!
Every data center struggle is unique, but one thing is certain, when the multinational working people of the U.S. stand up, we cannot be defeated. We have immense capacity to innovate politically, and we cannot be silenced. From Port Washington to Landover to locales across the country, resentment is boiling over against not only data centers but also against complicit local utility monopolies.
Across the country a new demand is taking shape: popular control of AI.
Residents in Port Washington have sought to require a public referendum for tax incentives going to major developments such as data centers. Through a petition for direct legislation that captured 1,000 signatures in a week and was then ratified by voters in nearly 2:1 margin earlier this month, they’ve exerted an unprecedented level of community control over these massive projects.
As public opinion turns against unrestricted development of hyperscale data centers decisively, and in response to the growing nationwide mass movement, there is some discussion of introducing legislation to temporarily stop data center development. Fighting for such temporary protections is important, but history shows that once a technology is developed under capitalism, there is no going back, and neither the Democrats nor the Republicans present any real opposition to the agenda of the tech companies.
Our communities can’t afford to wait for the midterms or fall for false promises from corporate politicians, like those of Democratic minority leader Hakeem Jeffries who recently said, should the Democrats win back a majority in November, controlling AI data centers will be a “priority.” The grassroots struggles and wins across the country show that the real way to protect our communities is with people power, not empty words from the same politicians who created this crisis in the first place.
When it comes to data centers, the political power should be in the people’s hands, not in the tech billionaires and corporate politicians who will sacrifice workers, the environment, and distort the future to line their pockets. A socialist system would put workers in control of the technologies of production, like AI, and allow us to plan the economy to benefit the people and planet.
Featured image: Press conference against data centers in Landover, Maryland
