Hyperscale Data Centers on Native Lands: What is Happening and What We Can Do
I. The Dilemma
A shift of this speed demands attention, not deference.
On April 22, 2026 — Earth Day — Democracy Now! aired an interview with Krystal Two Bulls, an Oglala Lakota and Northern Cheyenne activist who directs Honor the Earth. Her organization has launched the No Data Center Coalition and is tracking more than a hundred proposed hyperscale data centers — the warehouse-sized computing facilities that power artificial intelligence — on or adjacent to Native lands. Their crowd-sourced map shows the density clearly: Oklahoma, the Great Plains, the Four Corners.
Two Bulls calls this pattern data colonialism. She describes it as a modern iteration of settler colonialism — the two-century process by which the United States seized Indigenous land, water, and minerals by force, by treaty violation, and by the steady pressure of what was called progress. The vocabulary has changed. The pattern has not.
The mechanism is worth laying out plainly. According to Two Bulls, the hyperscale corporations — Microsoft, Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon, and others — rarely approach tribal nations directly. They approach through subsidiaries, sometimes through Native-owned energy companies serving as intermediaries. They come with a modest opening proposal, often for solar panels. They come with a non-disclosure agreement, or NDA — a legal document that prevents the signer from discussing what was said. Once the NDA is signed, the proposal changes. Solar becomes hyperscale. Small becomes enormous. Tribal leadership, bound by the NDA, cannot consult with the people they represent. Tribal members often learn of the project from a press release.
The costs fall on the land and the people. Water drawn from aquifers in millions of gallons per year. Electricity demand so great that local grid costs rise by more than two hundred percent. Noise at ninety-seven decibels near some proposed sites, loud enough with continuous exposure to cause permanent hearing loss. Local temperature rises of sixteen degrees around facilities, enough to collapse surrounding ecosystems. Respiratory illnesses. Promised jobs that arrive during construction and disappear when construction ends. Taxes rising on local residents to finance infrastructure the facility requires.
Native lands have been targeted for centuries. The 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie guaranteed the Black Hills to the Lakota in perpetuity; gold was discovered, and within a decade the land was seized. The pattern has not stopped. What has changed is its reach. The current land grab is not only targeting Native lands — it is reaching into every community whose political representation is fractured enough to be exploited.
On the same Earth Day broadcast, Democracy Now! covered Elon Musk’s xAI data centers in Memphis, Tennessee — facilities called Colossus 1 and Colossus 2, powered by more than two dozen methane gas turbines operating without legal permits, located in majority-Black neighborhoods. The NAACP has sued xAI under the Clean Air Act. KeShaun Pearson, who directs Memphis Community Against Pollution, drew an explicit line to 1968, when Martin Luther King came to Memphis to march with sanitation workers. That march was environmental justice work. So is this.
The dilemma, then, is this. A new and enormous economic force is being directed at communities that have historically borne the cost of national expansion. The force arrives through mechanisms — subsidiaries, NDAs, opacity — specifically designed to prevent resistance from forming before the decision is made. And it arrives wrapped in language — jobs, investment, development, opportunity — that makes refusal sound like backwardness.
The question is what a person outside these communities can do to help, and the question is also what the communities themselves need from allies and from each other.
II. How to Help
The people closest to the struggle are the ones who know best what helps. What follows is drawn from what Two Bulls, Pearson, and their organizations have said publicly about what support looks like.
Move resources to the people already doing the work. The fight requires lawyers, organizers, air-quality monitors, mapping software, travel to tribal council meetings, food at town halls, signage, legal filings, and the paid labor of full-time organizers. Donations to frontline organizations are the fastest and most direct help most outsiders can provide.
Do not centralize the struggle around outside analysis. The communities affected have their own leadership, their own historians, their own lawyers, their own organizers. The role of an outside ally is not to explain the struggle to the communities fighting it. The role is to amplify their voices, share their materials, and direct resources toward their work.
Support counter-mapping and public documentation. The Honor the Earth data center map exists because the official record was designed to be illegible to the people most affected by it. Similar documentation efforts are underway in Memphis, in Tennessee more broadly, in the Dakotas, and in Oklahoma. Sharing these maps widely, linking to them, citing them, and contributing to their funding are all forms of help.
Build coalitions across the usual lines. Two Bulls has been explicit: Honor the Earth’s organizers in Oklahoma are working with ranchers, landowners, and agricultural communities — people who are not tribal members but who share the same ground, the same water, the same grid. A hyperscale facility that drains the aquifer drains it for everyone. Coalitions that recognize this are harder for corporations to split.
Bring pressure at the regulatory level. The sacrifice-zone logic works because regulation has not caught up to the specific harms of hyperscale facilities — grid strain, aquifer draw, noise at sustained levels, localized temperature rise. Maine passed the nation’s first statewide moratorium on data center development in April 2026. Other states can follow. Public comment periods, city council meetings, utility commission hearings, and state legislative sessions are all sites where pressure can be applied.
Refuse the NDA culture. The NDA is the apparatus’s most important single tool. Any community considering a hyperscale facility can insist on refusing NDAs at the outset, requiring public disclosure of all proposals, and keeping tribal leadership accountable to the tribal community rather than to the corporation.
III. Where to Send a Dollar
These 501(c)(3) nonprofits are doing the work this essay describes.
Honor the Earth — honorearth.org. Indigenous-led. Krystal Two Bulls’s organization. Runs the No Data Center Coalition and the crowd-sourced map.
NDN Collective — ndncollective.org. Indigenous-led, based in Rapid City, South Dakota. Funds frontline Indigenous organizing across more than 200 partner groups.
Memphis Community Against Pollution — memphiscap.org. KeShaun Pearson’s organization. Fighting the xAI Colossus facilities and the broader pattern of environmental injustice in Southwest Memphis.
Indigenous Environmental Network — ienearth.org. Founded in 1990. Grassroots network supporting tribal sovereignty and opposing extractive industry.
Southern Environmental Law Center — selc.org. Legal representation in the Memphis case and other environmental justice fights across the South.
IV. My Own Complicity
Before going further, a harder matter. The hyperscale data center is not being built to serve a distant population. It is being built to serve people like me.
I use cloud storage. I stream video. I carry a smartphone. I have backed up thousands of photos without thinking about where they went. I use an AI system to help with research and writing, including for this essay. Every one of those habits is a small, steady draw on the infrastructure being installed near Two Bulls’s reservation and Pearson’s neighborhood. The apparatus is not separate from me. It runs in part on my consumption.
This essay is being written on a laptop, with AI help, stored in a cloud, intended for a website hosted on servers I do not own. I am not standing outside what I am describing. I am inside it. Naming the apparatus as if it were someone else’s would be dishonest.
I do not know yet what to do about that. I am not ready to give up the tools I rely on, and I am not ready to pretend that using them costs nothing. What I can do is keep the cost in view and keep asking what it would take to reduce it. That is where I am right now.
V. Two Tools
Knowledge is power. Two thinkers give us what we need.
Michel Foucault said modern power is rarely held by one visible ruler. It runs through many small parts at once — subsidiaries, contracts, procedures, experts, the quiet authority of what gets treated as normal. No single villain. An apparatus. The data center is exactly that kind of apparatus. See it as an apparatus, and you can fight it.
Sometimes, of course, the villains are visible. Elon Musk bought the Memphis facility, rolled in the methane turbines, and pointed them at a Black neighborhood. The Trump administration’s AI Action Plan, released July 23, 2025, together with the executive order Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure, directs agencies to create new categorical exclusions under the National Environmental Policy Act — meaning hyperscale projects can be exempted from environmental review — and opens federal lands, Brownfield sites, and Superfund sites for data center construction. Named people signing their names to the thing. But most of the apparatus works the other way. Most of it is designed so that no single name can be named, and the harm spreads out across subsidiaries and contracts until nobody is responsible. That is the part Foucault helps us see.
George Lakoff said political fights are won and lost at the level of the frame — the word or phrase that shapes what the fight is called before anyone argues the facts. “Economic development” is a frame. “Data colonialism” is a counter-frame. Two Bulls chose the second on purpose. It names what is actually happening. The frame is the fight.
That is what to do. See the apparatus. Name the frame. Refuse the one the corporation brought. Insist on the one that tells the truth.
VI. A Note on the Tool in My Hand
I used an AI system to help write this essay. The system runs on the kind of infrastructure this essay is about. I have kept that in view the whole time, because you cannot honestly write about the apparatus while pretending to stand outside it. Whether a writer can use this tool without betraying the struggle depends on three things: keeping the frame in the writer’s hands, bringing real knowledge to the work, and naming the tool for what it is. That is the most I can offer. The communities on the ground will decide the rest.
A shift of this speed demands attention, not deference. The map is clear. The dots are where the dots are. The frames are up for grabs. The struggle is already underway. Bring what you can.
Sources
Krystal Two Bulls, interviewed by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!, April 22, 2026. KeShaun Pearson, interviewed by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!, April 22, 2026. Honor the Earth Data Center Map, honorearth.org. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge (Pantheon, 1980). George Lakoff, Don’t Think of an Elephant! (Chelsea Green, 2004).