The AI Industry, Data Center Buildout, and How to Take Power Back

Why It Matters

The data‑center surge jeopardizes environmental health, equity, and democratic oversight; coordinated policy action offers a tangible path to curb this unchecked expansion.

Key Takeaways

• AI industry fuels rapid data‑center construction, straining resources.
• 3,000 data centers planned for 2025 threaten water, grid, health.
• Concentrated tech power embeds bias, reduces accountability in AI tools.
• Northstar toolkit offers policy levers to halt or slow buildout.
• Community coalitions can leverage local, state, federal actions for change.

Summary

The AI Now Institute and the Data Center Working Group hosted a webinar to expose how the AI industry’s appetite for compute is driving an unprecedented data‑center buildout and to outline concrete policy tools for communities to reclaim control.

Speakers highlighted that roughly 3,000 data centers were under construction or planned for 2025, draining water supplies, inflating energy bills, destabilizing the grid, and worsening air quality. The industry projects up to $2 trillion in annual revenue, a trajectory that threatens job displacement, environmental degradation, and the concentration of wealth in a handful of tech giants.

Ama Kak, former FTC AI adviser, warned that AI concentrates power both at the point of deployment—embedding bias and obscuring accountability—and upstream, where a few firms control models, data, and infrastructure. She cited a Michigan case where an AI system falsely flagged 93 % of unemployment fraud claims, illustrating how “neutral” technology can perpetuate austerity.

The session introduced the Northstar data‑center policy toolkit, a set of zoning, water‑use, and taxation levers designed to stop or slow the buildout at local, state, and federal levels. By mobilizing community coalitions and leveraging these policy interventions, organizers aim to redirect tech infrastructure toward the public good rather than corporate profit.

Original Description

This session breaks down how the concentration of power in the AI industry is driving the data center buildout, and local, state, and federal policy strategies to push back, from AI regulation to tackling corporate capture of our democratic processes. Our organizer panel will contextualize this moment in broader histories of environmental racism and corporate extraction, and discuss strategies that frontline communities including Indigenous groups are using to contend for power. We will also demystify the technology that data centers are powering, and connect regulation of AI technologies to the need to stop the infrastructure buildout.

Speakers:

- Dwaign Tyndal, Executive Director of Alternatives for Community and Environment

- Ashley Nicole Leitka, Director of the Department of Sovereignty and Self-Determination at Honor the Earth

- Andrea Reyes, Senior Organizing Strategist at TechTonic Justice

- Amba Kak, Co-Executive Director, AI Now Institute