The Magazine

Progress or Digital Colonization? AI Data Centers Spark Debate on Native Lands

March 10, 2026
By: Jen Deerinwater & Jesse Deer In Water

A group of bundled-up protesters stands outdoors in winter, wearing coats, hats, and face masks. In the center, a person holds a cardboard sign that reads “You Can’t Drink Data” with a red heart and the words “Water Is Life” written below. Behind them, others hold signs reading “No Secret Deals for Data.” Snow and holiday lights are visible in the background. — Protesters gather outside DTE Energy headquarters in downtown Detroit during the “No Data Centers, No Secret Deals” demonstration, opposing a proposed massive data center in Saline Township, Michigan. Around 100 people attended the rally, holding signs reading “You Can’t Drink Data” and “No Secret Deals for Data” to raise concerns about water use, transparency, and public accountability in the project. Photo credit: Valerie Jean, December 16, 2025.

The recent explosion in artificial intelligence (AI) data centers has created a litany of environmental and cultural issues for Native people and Tribes across the so-called “United States.” This, in turn, has sparked intense debate and prompted conversations on tribal digital sovereignty and a call for regulation that controls the data, infrastructure, and networks.

Data centers are facilities that keep and manage internet technology infrastructure for processing, storing, and distributing large quantities of data. They are key to modern digital services, which can include AI. As AI use and data generation grow, so does the need for data centers to manage and store data. But the environmental impact is a growing concern for many, especially for Tribal Nations in the “U.S.”

Debates rage on within Native communities over concerns about the resources needed to power the centers, the environmental impacts of such centers, and the rampant cultural appropriation and creative and cultural theft predominant in AI. Some in Indian Country believe data centers can be used for the betterment of Tribes, while others are diametrically opposed.

Energy Production Ramps Up for AI

The “U.S.” is home to a third of the world’s data centers. The centers require large amounts of electricity to power them and water to cool them. On average, a single data center can consume up to 2 megawatt hours (MWh) of electricity-the amount of electricity they use per hour-approximately the equivalent power consumption of a small town. Data centers consumed more than 4% of “U.S.” electricity in 2023, with estimates suggesting a potential rise to 12% by 2028.

Bloomberg News reported in January 2026 that in areas near AI data centers, there has been a 267% increase in monthly electricity costs compared to five years ago. This increase is due to a need to expand existing regional power grids to support the centers, costs which are often passed onto consumers, including urban Native communities.

The states housing the data centers give the ok to local energy utilities to raise customers’ utility fees to pay for the massive upgrades required to power the data centers. This passes higher rates on to all customers, including urban Natives. Over 70% of the Native community in the “U.S.” lives in urban and suburban areas suffering from higher rates of poverty.

To meet this growing demand, utility companies are adding new gas plants and delaying the retirement of fossil fuels. One such company in Virginia, the “U.S.” state with the largest concentration of data centers in the world, is building a 1,000-megawatt gas plant in Chesterfield County and has gutted plans to switch to renewable energy sources. According to Global Energy Monitor, the “U.S.” now accounts for almost one-quarter of the world’s total gas powered energy in development with more than one-third of the energy reserved for data centers.

There has also been a push for nuclear energy proliferation to power data centers. Meta, a social media and technology multinational company, is now one of the largest corporate purchasers of nuclear energy in “U.S.” history. They’ve recently announced several agreements with three major energy providers to secure up to 6.6 gigawatts of nuclear power by 2035.

There are talks of reopening Three Mile Island (TMI), a defunct nuclear power plant that sits atop a strip of land in the Susquehanna River in “Pennsylvania,”to power Microsoft’s data centers. On March 28, 1979, TMI experienced a partial meltdown when a cooling system malfunctioned. Today, there’s roughly a tennis court-sized amount of High-Level Radioactive Waste from the incident stored on site. In a sick twist of irony, TMI will be renamed the Crane Clean Energy Complex if successful in reopening in 2027, one year earlier than originally estimated.

The energy plant, data centers, and TMI are in an area of the “U.S.” that has suffered from a gas fracking boom of the Marcellus and Utica Shales that has already led to increases in cancer and other health issues, environmental harm to local water supplies, and the devaluation of people’s homes. Communities have fought numerous pipelines, cracker plants, export, and other related facilities since the boom took off in late 2009/early 2010. The shales cover a large section of Central Appalachia, extending into “New York” state near several Native reservations such as the Onondaga.

The Office of Nuclear Energy under the US Department of Energy claims that the radiation exposure from the TMI catastrophe was limited with no resulting fatalities, adverse health impacts, or environmental repercussions. However, health impacts from Three Mile Island have indeed been documented. Penn State College of Medicine researchers found “tumor samples from people verified to have lived in the areas around TMI at the time of the accident, remained in the area, and subsequently developed thyroid cancer, researchers observed a shift in cases to cancer mutations consistent with radiation exposure from those consistent with random causes.” This gives credence to the opposition who claim the government and nuclear and tech industries are downplaying the consequences of nuclear energy, including environmental ramifications.

More nuclear power plants equals more uranium mining. The largest deposits of uranium in the “U.S.” sit on Native lands, like the Navajo Nation. The largest uranium deposits in the world are on Indigenous lands in “Australia.” Communities in these areas suffer from significantly higher rates of cancer with fewer healthcare resources than other areas of the colonial countries.

AI data centers are also furthering the “U.S.” military industrial complex. In December 2024, the University of Michigan announced an $850 million investment in partnership with Los Alamos National Laboratory, the institution responsible for developing, testing, and deploying the nuclear bomb through the Manhattan Project. University officials state they’re building the “biggest, baddest, fastest computer in the world,” with over 90% of the facility’s computational power slated for LANL’s classified warfare project. U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright has proudly proclaimed that the “U.S.” government’s buildup of AI infrastructure is “the Second Manhattan Project,” moving the world toward nuclear war on the backs of the local community and “Michigan” taxpayers. Beginning in 1951, the “U.S.” government performed 928 nuclear tests on Western Shoshone lands; the most nuclear-bombed nation in the world.

Cheyenne Morgan (United Keetoowah Band and Oglala Lakota), Coalitional Coordinator of Stop Data Colonialism, told The Magazine that Project Clydesdale, a proposed data center project south of “Owasso, Oklahoma” on the Cherokee Nation reservation, has been a source of concern for some in the community. Morgan noticed while reading documents related to a zoning proposal that the message conveyed to the public differed to that in industry and government documents. “Talk to your neighbors about data centers, find out what they know, file open records requests with your local, county, and state governments,” Morgan warned.

AI & Water Usage

A July 2025 University of Michigan study states that for higher-density data centers cooling via water is required for the centers’ performance. As of this publication, 22% of data center facilities use water-based cooling systems. Most data centers use over 10 million gallons of water annually; some exceed that with usage in the hundreds of millions of gallons per year. Google’s Council Bluffs data center in Iowa uses approximately 980 million gallons of water per year, equivalent to the annual water usage of over 4 million homes.

In sharp contrast is the lack of clean water access on reservations. According to the Navajo Water Project, in 2019 30% of those residing on the Navajo Nation, the largest reservation in the “U.S.,” were without running water. In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the “U.S.” owes no “affirmative duty” to the Navajo Nation to secure water, reversing a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. The justices ruled that the 1868 Treaty of Bosque Redondo established no federal obligation to do so.

There may be water-saving alternatives. According to Matthew Rantanen (Cree descendant), the Director of Technology for the Southern California Tribal Chairman’s Association, co-chair for the Tech and Telecommunications Committee at the National Congress of American Indians, and cofounder of the tribal broadband boot camps, data centers can have more sustainable construction. Rantanen told The Magazine that data centers can be built underground, using the Earth’s natural cooling to reduce the heat created by the equipment, as well as different air flow systems that can avoid the usage of water altogether. “I think in most of the Indian country, at least the opposition I hear, is all about the water, and I think secondarily it’s about the power grid that’s local to the region. The generative AI versions of data centers, such as those by Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon, these types of data centers use the most resources, but they don’t all have to be built this way.”

Internet Access & Data Sovereignty

As so often the norm, Tribes and Native people suffer the consequences of technological advances without reaping the benefits. In 2020, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported conservative estimates that nationwide, 18% of people living on tribal lands couldn’t access broadband service, compared to 4% of people in non-tribal areas. Broadband availability includes speeds of 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload or greater, excluding satellite service.

The GAO has stated that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has overreported broadband access on tribal lands, as the numbers the FCC shared are self-reported data by broadband carriers. According to Rantanen, carriers will count an entire census block as having coverage if they can hook up one person to broadband. “That is not coverage, affordability, or reality,” Rantanen told The Magazine.

In 2021, the Executive Office of the President in the “U.S.” began coordinating federal tribal broadband efforts, but according to GAO, these efforts “are not guided by a national strategy with clear roles, goals, and performance measures,” and that the American Broadband Initiative (ABI), an intergovernmental agency effort to expand broadband access across the “U.S.,” “lacks a framework for addressing tribal barriers that could also support implementing a national strategy.”

Many Indigenous communities are concerned with cultural appropriation and data theft as a result of AI, as well as outside government intrusion. Tribes are combating some of these issues by producing their own data centers. Rantanen told The Magazine that these centers use low amounts of power and are a way for tribes to control their data. They’ll no longer have to put sensitive information, such as enrollment records, on outside cloud servers that then open their data up for theft, use in training AI, and even subpoenas or snooping by federal agencies like ICE or FBI.

Tribal control over smaller, local data centers could not only potentially improve safety and security for tribal members, but also for the environment. “I think making big blanket statements about data centers can harm some of those smaller, very effective uses of the term,” Rantanen said. But he also warned that tribes need to create policies related to data sovereignty and AI, data storage, and transmission in order to ensure the best practices for their tribe.

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About the Authors

Jen Deerinwater is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, journalist, and the founding executive director of Crushing Colonialism. Jen is currently a member of the Disability Community Advisory Group for the first of its kind American LGBTQ Museum and serves as a member of the Rooted Together: Building Power through Diasporic Dialogue cohort. Jen is also a member of the board of directors for the Disabled Journalist Association and a Senior Advisor for the Disability Culture Lab.

Jesse Deer In Water is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and visitor on Traditional Homelands of The Anishinabek 3 Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Bodewadomi and Odawa peoples in the area known as Wawiyamtanong (“North Redford, MI”). Jesse is a community organizer, a father of three, and friend and family to many, including plants, beings, and elements within this existence.