Still image from The Data Center Frontier webinar recording, depicting panelist Krystal Two Bulls, Executive Director of Honor the Earth.
Panelist Krystal Two Bulls speaks at The Data Center Frontier webinar.

The Data Center Frontier: Video & Highlights

  • Apr 27, 2026
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Our recent roundtable, The Data Center Frontier, took on one of the fastest-growing and most consequential infrastructure build-outs of our time: the global data center boom, driven by AI, cloud computing, and speculative tech investment. 

Communities living near these systems are bearing the costs, including noise, light, and air pollution, water depletion, rising energy costs, and the consolidation of land and resources in the hands of a small number of tech billionaires—all in the name of a technological future that is being sold to us as inevitable. 

What’s equally striking is the movement taking shape in response. From Tucson to Tennessee to the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, communities are pushing back. Our speakers explored insights from these emergent fights, and from the long history of Indigenous-led resistance to extractive infrastructure. 

Watch the full recording, read key highlights, and explore a curated set of resources for the AI infrastructure fight below.

Event Date: April 15, 2026

Speakers:  

  • Jordan B. Kinder (Métis), Red Natural History Fellow, author of Petroturfing: Refining Canadian Oil through Social Media (2024), and curator of the roundtable.
  • Krystal Two Bulls (Oglala Lakota/Cheyenne), Executive Director of Honor the Earth
  • Thea Riofrancos, Scholar and author of Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism (2025)
  • Vivek Bharathan, Technologist, No Desert Data Center Coalition organizer, and MediaJustice Data Center Fellow

Moderators:

  • Beka Economopoulos, Executive Director, The Natural History Museum
  • Steve Lyons, Research Director, The Natural History Museum

The Data Center Frontier was the first event of our new programming series, Natural History From the Other Side, curated by the 2026–2028 cohort of Red Natural History Fellows. Made possible with support from the Henry Luce Foundation and 4Culture.

Roundtable Highlights

While often framed as symbols of technological innovation, AI data centers are deeply embedded in older extractive systems. Moving between global supply chains and immediate environmental harms, this event traced the material connections linking AI data centers to the mines, pipelines, refineries, and other industrial sectors that make them possible. 

At the same time, it highlighted how communities are connecting local fights against data center buildouts to broader struggles against extraction, surveillance, militarism, and land dispossession—revealing these conflicts as one front in a many-sided struggle for the world we share in common.

Jordan B. Kinder set the stage by mapping the terrain of these conflicts and underscoring their place within a broader landscape of anti-extraction resistance. 

Krystal Two Bulls spoke to the stakes of Honor the Earth’s “No Data Center Coalition,” which is bringing together water protectors across Turtle Island to resist the siting of new AI infrastructure on or near Native lands. 

Vivek Bharathan offered a compelling case study in local organizing, detailing how the No Desert Data Center Coalition was able to halt Amazon’s Project Blue—a provisional victory that was overturned by the Pima County court only two weeks ago. 

And finally, Thea Riofrancos situated these struggles within a wider frame, unpacking the critical mineral supply chains that underpin the AI buildout.

Throughout the conversation, the idea of “connecting the dots” surfaced again and again. For Riofrancos, this meant tracing the spatial and material links between minerals and their end uses. For Bharathan, it meant shifting perspective—helping people see concerns like water scarcity and affordability as part of a larger struggle, where local residents could begin to “understand these data centers as facilitating the greatest transfer of wealth in recent human history, all in service of the cruelty industry, surveillance and genocide.” 

For Kinder, the very project of political education that each of our panelists are committed to directly confronted one of the AI industry’s most insidious aims: to turn “intellectual capacity into a resource,” rewiring our brains, so to speak, to depend on their services. As he emphasized, “The future that’s being offered to us by big tech makes this commodification of critical thinking seem inevitable. But it’s not inevitable. We can build our own future.”

Two Bulls highlighted how such a future can only be built if we get to the root of the problem. In her words:

“Every one of our struggles needs to be situated within the long history of settler colonialism, because until we go to the root of the problem, we’re going to continue to fight these same fights over and over again. Data centers are symptoms. The entire extraction industry is a symptom. For me, that’s the fundamental lesson that needs to be learned from Indigenous peoples, who have been fighting these fights since before pipelines were a thing.”

But naming the problem was only part of the conversation. The panelists were equally committed to highlighting the power of those organizing on the ground, using this work of “connecting the dots” not just to diagnose the crisis, but to reveal a durable basis for solidarity across places and issues. As Riofrancos explained:

“When we zoom out to the whole supply chain, we see a labor struggle here, a community struggle there, a frontline struggle in a third place, and they are connected materially, ideologically, in all sorts of ways under global capitalism. Seeing those connections can empower all of our movements to fight for a broader future that includes all of those nodes and dots.”

Resources & Learn More

Data Center Trackers

Articles and Blog Posts

  • “The SPEED Act and the Pandora’s Box of Permitting Reform,” an article in Counterpunch on the SPEED Act, which is slated to weaken core environmental review protections under NEPA—restricting public input, limiting judicial oversight, and potentially opening the door to unchecked approval of fossil fuel, mining, and other extractive projects.
  • An article in Truthout about the Tonawanda Seneca Nation’s fight against a Data Center Backed by Apollo Global Management, one of the world’s biggest private equity firms and a key Trump ally.
  • A report profiling a major tech CEO’s prediction that data centers will not be profitable.
  • Julia Velkova’s “Thermopolitics of Data: Cloud Infrastructures and Energy Futures” (2021) analyzes the ways in which the materialities of heat and data get mobilized by different actors to produce a new object—the data centre as a thermal urban infrastructure (library access).
  • Anne Pasek’s “AI is Trash” (2025), a provocative short text on AI and waste (library access).
  • Patrick Brodie’s “Data Infrastructure Studies on an Unequal Planet” (2023) explores the planetary environmental impacts of digital data, underscoring how data centers ultimately reproduce uneven systems of capitalism (library access).

Books

  • Petroturfing: Refining Canadian Oil through Social Media (2024), by Jordan B. Kinder, critically examines how the pro-oil movement in Canada took shape on social media throughout the 2010s in the setting of a handful of proposed, highly contested oil sands pipeline projects.
  • Digital Energetics (2023) is a free book on media and energy, featuring Jordan B. Kinder’s writing on energy and data centers among many other essays.
  • Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism (2024), Thea Riofrancos’ in-depth analysis of the growing industry of green technologies and the environmental, social, and political consequences of the mining it requires. 

Videos

  • Abby Martin’s latest documentary “Earth’s Greatest Enemy” is a must see for those interested in understanding how much the industrial military complex is the main driver of ecological disasters on a global scale. What’s made clear is that the US military has absolutely no interest  in exploring “alternative” energy. 

Fact Sheets & Toolkits 

Campaigns & Coalitions 

  • Honor the Earth’s “No Data Centers on Native Land” campaign, which brings together the No Data Center Coalition, led by Water Protectors from across the movement, providing tools for the frontline resistance to AI infrastructure.
  • No Desert Data Center Coalition is a coalition that is dedicated to protecting water, desert, and community from the Project Blue data center + other extractive industry in and near Tucson, Arizona.
  • Halt the Harm Network works with communities fighting bad centers in their communities. Check out the Stop Bad Data Centers Platform, a hub with resources, policy tracker, mapping with their partner from FracTracker, webinars/events, and networking opportunities.
  • Securing Indigenous Peoples’ Rights in the Green Economy (SIRGE) Coalition implements transformative solutions to secure the rights of Indigenous Peoples in the global transition to a green economy. With respect to the transition mineral supply chain, SIRGE Coalition focuses on the urgent need to operationalize Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) as enumerated in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.