Photo: Rob Wilson
Big Green groups taking millions from Big Tech have abandoned vulnerable communities to become accomplices in data center proliferation rather than opponents.
“We refer here to the struggle against our own weaknesses. Obviously, other cases differ from that of Guinea; but our experience has shown us that in the general framework of daily struggle this battle against ourselves — no matter what difficulties the enemy may create — is the most difficult of all, whether for the present or the future of our peoples.” – Amilcar Cabral
As David Holt, Mayor of Oklahoma City, remarked to Politico last month, “ If you had asked me about data centers five months ago, I would have said: ‘What’s a data center?” He continued, “Now it’s everywhere. So that’s a short amount of time to fully formulate what you think about it.” While it’s true that data centers to power artificial intelligence (AI) are a ubiquitous aspect of the current U.S. lexicon, the idea that positions on data centers have not been fully formulated is questionable. Clearly, Big Tech corporations are solid in their position that they need as much influence over the government and other decision makers to proliferate their data center infrastructure wherever they want and as quickly as they want. This, in part, explains why Big Tech corporations including Amazon, Google, Meta, and Apple were among the largest donors to President Trump’s “renovations” to the East Wing of the White [people’s] House, as well as why many of these same corporations, along with a handful of CEOs representing AI firms, also dolled out millions of dollars to fund activities and events associated with Trump’s second inauguration. The president has repaid his Big Tech donors with a series of favorable policies designed to fast track the approval and construction of data centers, and get them connected to the grid with equal haste, most demonstrated by an Executive Order entitled, Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure.
The term “techlash” is widely attributed to Adriene Woolridge, who first used the term in a 2013 article in the publication The Economist to describe growing public discontent with the Big Tech sector and the Silicon Valley elite. At one point in the article, Woolridge suggests, “[Silicon Valley] Geeks have turned out to be some of the most ruthless capitalists around. They are increasingly renouncing their Spartan past and instead making a splash with their money.” No one understands the growing techlash in the country due to data centers than Big Tech corporations. As Black Alliance for Peace National Co-Coordinator, Austin Cole, pointed out earlier this year, “We already see certain corporate actors trying to maintain their ability to construct data centers as they see fit, with Microsoft recently releasing a “Community First AI Plan” that co-opts social justice language and makes data center construction seem inevitable.” But Big Tech has found another entity to co-opt social justice language and promote the idea that the masses can live with these energy hungry, water draining, and highly emitting data centers, and it’s a guild that is less surprising than many elements of the masses may realize – larger, historically white-led environmental groups.
Source: Data Center Watch, 2025
The push back against the placement of data centers in communities has seen a meteoric rise in the last year alone. According to the publication Data Center Watch, in the second quarter of 2025 approximately 20 data center projects were blocked or delayed due to local resistance, costing the Big Tech sector an estimated $98 billion in investments. And these communities are not homogenous politically or geographically as they represent both rural and urban areas, as well as “red” and “blue” congressional districts. But rather than joining these communities in preventing the construction and operation of data centers, large environmental groups are choosing instead to find ways to accommodate them in ways that they believe these communities can live with, which has surfaced tensions between the people on the ground who would have to live with data centers if approved, and Washington, D.C. based environmental groups that are mostly just talking and theorizing about them through a metaphysical lens.
It’s no secret that there have been historic tensions between frontline, environmental justice communities and grassroots organizations and the larger, historically white-led environmental groups commonly referred to as “Big Green.” These tensions are largely due to the outsize influence the Big Green groups have on the development of environmental/climate change policies – many that are antithetical to the Principles of Environmental Justice that are championed by groups representing and accountable to Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor communities – as well as the iniquitous imbalance in the amount of philanthropic support these groups enjoy compared to smaller, local grassroots climate/environmental justice organizations. For instance, in 2023 the Yale School for the Environment reported, “Foundations have given more money to individual green groups, including the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, and The Nature Conservancy, than to every U.S. environmental justice group put together.” It turns out that Big Tech has not just been throwing its money at the Trump administration and other lawmakers from both “major” political parties to secure favorable data center/AI policies, they have also been using their own foundations to invest in certain Big Green groups who have signaled a willingness to capitulate to data center construction and promote policies to facilitate their proliferation under the guise of “sustainability.”
The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), one of the larger Big Green groups in the U.S., recently signaled its support for re-opening a nuclear power plant in Iowa to provide power for a data center owned by Google. In comments NRDC submitted to support this move, the group stated, “NRDC’s preliminary view is that the plant’s restart is likely to have both climate and environmental benefits and consumer benefits.” Their President and CEO, Manish Bapna noted, “This is unprecedented for us because it marks the first time in our history that we have taken action in support of an individual nuclear power plant.” This is a curious stance considering the fact that NRDC publicly purports to adhere to the 1991 Principles of Environmental Justice on the section of its website dedicated to “Equity and Justice.” It would appear that NRDC needs a refresher on these principles as the group clearly neglected Principle #4, “Environmental Justice calls for universal protection from nuclear testing, extraction, production and disposal of toxic/hazardous wastes and poisons and nuclear testing that threaten the fundamental right to clean air, land, water, and food.”
So the question becomes why would a “leading” environmental organization that claims to be in solidarity with environmental justice communities take a public stance calling for re-opening a nuclear power plant to accommodate Google, a corporation whose greenhouse gas emissions have increased by 51% in the last six years? The answer is simple – money. Google furnished NRDC with an estimated $2.5 million over a three year period, and also furnished the group with approximately $5.3 million in “advertising value” as part of the Google for NonProfits initiative. Given NRDC’s promotion of nuclear energy and support for reopening a previously shuttered nuclear plant, despite documented risks to public health and the physical environment of such an action, it can be argued that Google didn’t provide NRDC with a donation as much as it made an investment in the organization – and the return on investment comes in the form of giving a Big Tech corporation cover and reputational capital that portrays them as environmental stewards.
NRDC is not the only Big Green group actively promoting myopic and egregious ideas/policy proposals to accommodate data centers rather than stop them outright. Take the Sierra Club, the organization founded by white supremacist John Muir, whose viewpoints were so racist the organization publicly apologized for them in 2020 while also committing to, “re-examine [their] substantial role in perpetuating white supremacy.” It appears that the Sierra Club has forgotten this commitment based on its promotion of renewable energy as a “solution” for the profligate amount of energy required to power data centers. And the Sierra Club is not alone as numerous historically white-led environmental groups are also calling for Big Tech to utilize renewable energy in lieu of fossil fuels to run their data centers – much to the chagrin of climate and environmental justice organizations. For instance, the Climate Justice Alliance (CJA) recently drafted a letter calling out the Energy Foundation’s “Clean Data Center Campaign,” noting, “Building more data centers, even when powered by “clean” renewables, without zoning regulations that require actual community approval, enforceable checks on water and energy use, strict environmental standards, and genuine accountability, risks repeating the exact same mistakes we saw with the fossil fuel industry.” The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), The Nature Conservancy, Evergreen Action, and other larger environmental groups also share the approach that renewable energy can act as some sort of sustainability panacea that would assuage the myriad environmental, climate change, and public health concerns associated with data centers. What these groups also have in common is the large largesse they receive from Big Tech corporations, which likely explains why rather than calling for a moratorium on data centers, they are instead greenwashing them in an attempt to beguile the masses.
At the height of the Indigenous-led resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline, you would be hard pressed to find a Big Green group that didn’t embrace the slogan, “Mni Wiconi,” a Lakota phrase meaning “water is life,” affirming the idea that water is not just a resource, but a sacred living being that is essential to all existence as we know it. A convenient amnesia seems to be preventing groups pushing to power data centers with renewables from accounting for the adverse impacts to water associated with the extractive process of critical mineral mining, which disproportionately impacts Indigenous communities domestically and globally. For instance, the “Lithium Triangle,” which encompasses the South American nations of Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia, accounts for roughly half of global lithium supply that is held in brine pools situated beneath the region’s salt flats. Miners pump the brine into large pools of water on the surface of the flats, where the water evaporates out resulting in lithium carbonate, which is then used for producing clean energy technologies. According to a report by the World Resources Institute, the process for producing lithium carbonate uses up to half a million gallons of brine water to extract one ton of lithium. The brine water is not fit for drinking or agricultural use and, based on some reports, the withdrawal of such high amounts of water may lead to the mixing of freshwater with salt water while also accelerating the depletion of surface and groundwater supplies in the region. In Chile alone, it is estimated that copper and lithium extraction has consumed nearly 65% of the local water supply, which has led to widespread challenges for local Indigenous communities.
But let’s say that these Big Green groups are able to rationalize the implications for water resources associated with mineral extraction – they still have to contend with profligate water use of data centers in order for them to function. According to California’s Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory, data centers, nationally, are using approximately 627 million gallons of water per day for consumptive use – water that isn’t returned to its source. To put this in perspective, the roughly 150.4 billion gallons of water expected to be consumed by data centers over a five year period in the Great Lakes region alone is equivalent to the annual water withdrawals of 4.6 million U.S. households, which is more than 2.5 times the number of households in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and Grand Rapids combined. As such, for Big Green groups to be so cavalier about an issue like water, a resource that is absolutely necessary to sustain the functions of the planet that, in turn, sustain all life as we know it, is reckless, irresponsible, and perniciously close to the same attitude held by many polluters who view natural resources as nothing more than instruments to increase profit. And the fact that the United Nations has declared that the world has entered an era of “global water bankruptcy” accentuates how derelict many of these environmental organizations are by willfully overlooking the salient issue of data centers and water usage.
And it’s not just the issue of water consumption and depletion. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) admonishes, “Powering data centers with solar or wind requires significantly higher initial amounts of critical minerals (such as copper, lithium, nickel, and rare earth elements) per unit of energy capacity compared to traditional fossil fuel power plants.” Further, scientists Laura J. Sonter, Marie C. Dade, James E.M. Watson, and Rick K. Valenta warned, as part of a study they conducted, “Mining threats to biodiversity will increase as more mines target materials for renewable energy production and, without strategic planning, these new threats to biodiversity may surpass those averted by climate change mitigation.” The journal, Science Direct, further notes that the regions of the world including Africa, South America, and the United States with the highest abundance of critical mineral resources, “…face elevated risks of environmental injustice, particularly where mining takes place on or near indigenous lands,” and added, “In many cases, local communities endure significant environmental degradation.” Additionally, Science Direct points out that regions with an abundance of critical minerals also have long histories of extractive colonialism that are being exacerbated by intensified competition over natural resources. This is a key point given that the Trump administration is utilizing soft imperialism to coerce Global South nations to increase access to critical minerals for U.S. based corporations under the threat of higher tariffs.
It’s bad enough that these nations are being exploited for minerals needed to produce AI software chips, yet powering data centers with renewable energy would only exacerbate the need for critical minerals potentially making them the new fossil fuels. At a time when the world is currently navigating fossil fueled-wars/conflicts in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa as well as fossil-fueled imperialism in Latin America, it’s not far fetched to conclude that the U.S. and other Western colonial nations would apply the same imperial machinations to control the global supply of critical minerals. In fact, we don’t even need to imagine this scenario as the Trump administration threatened military force against a NATO ally as part of a conquest for critical minerals on the island nation of Greenland, and also shook down Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy for access to the nation’s critical minerals as a condition for continued U.S. military aid and support.
In sum, the confluence of Big Tech and Big Green is an equation that will result in more environmental racism and environmental injustices, as well as potentially more militarism and Western imperialism. As such, it’s a sadistic irony that one day employees of these Big Green groups are taking part in land acknowledgements on their multiple daily zoom call meetings, and the next day they are pushing ideas that will increase pollution on these lands while also deracinating the very concept of Indigenous and tribal sovereignty of their lands. Some refer to this as the “sustainability paradox,” but we need to call it what it really is – a banal continuation of capitalism under a false flag of sustainability.
As author and scholar Olufemi Taiwo names in his book Elite Capture, “In the absence of the right kind of checks or constraints, the subgroup of people with power over and access to the resources used to describe, define, and create political realities – in other words, the elites – will capture the group’s values, forcing people to coordinate on a narrow social project that disproportionately represents elite interests.” Big Green groups pushing renewable energy to power data centers have been willingly captured by the Big Tech corporations they take large amounts of money from, which, in part, may explain why they are acting no different than capitalist corporations that have no concerns for expanding the domestic and global periphery in service to a smaller core – these are their values, which now appear to also be the values of Big Green groups. Taiwo also notes, “When elites run the show, the interests of the group get whittled down to what they have in common with those at the top, at best. At worst, elites fight for their own narrow interests using the banner of group solidarity.” This adroitly describes the approach of these non-profiteering bourgeois Big Green groups who are pushing for renewable energy for data centers that use more energy than entire cities, rather than putting forth a full throated effort to transition these cities from fossil fuels to renewable energy in ways that are just, equitable, and affirm the self-determination, people(s)-centered human rights, and sovereignty of Indigenous and environmental justice/disadvantaged communities domestically and globally.
By aligning with Big Tech corporations, Big Green groups have also signaled a willingness, like most corporations, to prioritize their profits over the material conditions of the masses. This represents an internal weakness of the larger global climate community that must be confronted and vanquished. As Amilcar Cabral diagnoses this internal weakness that requires a daily battle against ourselves, “…no matter what difficulties the enemy may create — is the most difficult of all, whether for the present or the future of our peoples.” Perhaps it will become easier to wage these battles when we collectively come to the conclusion that the Big Green groups who, by aligning with the wealthiest corporations in the world, are willing to continue pursuing a feckless idea that the planet can be saved by tinkering with and reforming capitalism are, in the words of Kendrick Lamar, “Not Like Us,” the global masses who are fighting for our lives as opposed to the next check from philanthropic foundations.
No Compromise
No Retreat