The AI chatbot making communities of color sick

A new report out of MediaJustice illuminates how Southern states are being impacted by the ruthless expansion of artificial intelligence data centers.

Twenty years after the preventable horrors of Hurricane Katrina, the advocacy organization MediaJustice—which challenges how corporations and governments use media and technology to shape our collective future—embarked on a research project to report on how communities of color in the South are continuing to be neglected and harmed by our elected leadership and by corporate power.

We’ve spoken at length at Hard Reset about AI data centers and the literal human and environmental costs of their proliferation. MediaJustice’s new research goes deep into all of the issues these communities in the South face: sickness, the muzzling of local leaders, incessant lobbying, disinformation, and pollution.

We spoke with Jai Dulani, one of the researchers and authors of the report, about what he found.

Ariella Steinhorn: Tell us a little bit about the work of your organization MediaJustice?

Jai Dulani: I'm a senior research specialist at MediaJustice. And MediaJustice, over the last 15 years, has been organizing people of color around media and technology issues—whether that's fighting racist media bias, securing affordable broadband, pressuring platforms to combat hate speech, or blocking dangerous surveillance technologies.

And so we know that when we fight big tech—which are also, as you know—media conglomerates, that harming working class communities of color isn't a bug in their system. It's a feature of their business model. And so I'm excited to talk about this report with you today because we're really trying to shine light on how data center expansion in the South is really harmful and that the South is going to pay for the price of this expansion that is happening to fuel AI, both on an economic level, on an environmental level, on a health level. And so it's really important that we support the local fights happening right now to stop this expansion.

AS: Yeah, absolutely. So tell me what was the impetus to create this report and do a deep dive into what's been happening in these states?

JD: MediaJustice is a movement-building organization. For many years, we hosted a national network with many community members in the South. And so our commitment and accountability has always been to communities of color, working class communities of color. And so when we were sort of, you know, witnessing this rapid data center expansion,

We were really interested in the material impacts on communities. And so when you look at the South, that's where the energy demand is gonna come from for electricity for these data centers. They're building two large scale pipelines across the South over 300 miles long. It's going to emit methane gas, which is a super pollutant.

So it's the South that's going to bear the brunt of this quote unquote investment, right? It's the South whose air is dirtier, who has has more water shortages, who has more water contamination, and who is already paying some of the highest rates for electricity in the country. They're the ones who are going to have to pay more.

We're deeply invested in supporting the local organizing in the South, because the South has a long history of fighting corporate extraction and fighting environmental racism. And so they can give us a really long history of why we need to pay attention to the consequences of what Big Tech is doing right now.

AS: What are some examples of how—and they're mentioned in the report, for example, in Bessemer, Alabama—of what have been most effective in fighting this data center expansion?

JD: In Bessemer, Alabama, you see some of the same tactics of the playbook that are being used across the country. There was an NDA used so that folks weren't aware of farmland being rezoned.

But what we can learn from Bessemer is that, you know, organizing works. People have been showing up to these city council meetings, and have successfully paused the development of this $14.5 billion data center. They haven't revealed who's going to be the end user of this data center yet, but clearly the scale of it is really large, likely meaning Big Tech is behind it.

Folks have really been showing up, and have successfully paused that development.

AS: Right. I wanted to ask you about NDAs and the widespread usage of non-disclosure agreements in silencing the elected officials who were brought into the planning.

Have you seen instances where elected officials have actually broken the NDAs? I just find it fascinating that they're signing them to begin with when they're meant to be representing and communicating with their people.

JD: There was an example in Pima County in Tucson where a county administrator had revealed that it was Amazon behind the data center. And there was a victory in that community.

Folks have really been organizing in Tucson, and they successfully defeated that push for that data center development to happen there. They're in the desert, and they recognized the lies around, don't worry, we're not gonna use that much water.

The organizing cries have been really inspiring. They're saying not one drop—as in,“not one drop for Amazon.” Why should we be competing with corporations for water? That is insane.

I'm sure there's more examples of policymakers getting out of NDAs or even refusing to sign NDAs. But I think the bigger point is actually about how these companies are obscuring the reality of what they're doing—whether it's NDAs or different intermediaries they're using to not reveal what’s behind all this construction and energy consumption.

People are already aware of the amount of money, the political power, and the litigious nature of Big Tech. And so the power dynamic is already set up. We should all be concerned about this coercion and intimidation, because anything that is a risk to our future and the planet's future should have a public process.

AS: Yes. And I also think it's hard for people to successfully organize if the people who have access to the plans are being muzzled and unable to talk about it. I'm also wondering, with the revolving door situation of policymakers lobbying for corporations in the future—is that an issue here? That these elected officials potentially want a good relationship with these companies? And if so, how do we combat that kind of corruption?

JD: We just saw last week all the tech oligarchs sitting around the table kissing Donald Trump's ass. So we can definitely talk about lobbying, but there's sort of a bigger scale of corruption up top that we're seeing. Like that is the national environment where Big Tech has the full support of the Trump administration right now.

There definitely are examples then of how that green light from up top is trickling down to efforts to corrupt local governments. There's an example in Georgia where county commissioners green lighted a project that would use 9 million gallons of water a day, which is one-third of the entire county's daily water allotment.

New planning laws were essentially written by industry lobbyists, and provisions were removed because of industry lobbyists corrupting the public comment process. These provisions would require a special public hearing for proposed data centers, and were aimed to limit harmful environmental impacts. So all of that was removed.

This was only revealed through a public records request that matched anonymous comments with emails. So investigative reporting is really important. Calling out and shining light on this corruption is really important right now.

AS: I'm also wondering, have the governments done anything to alleviate the rising costs of these data centers for citizens? There's a lot in the report about how people are seeing rising electric bills and in addition to the water issue and either having poor water coming out of their taps or no water.

And I'm wondering if the elected officials are doing anything to help people or the companies. I'm sure that they pay a lot of lip service with their community relations teams. But yeah, are they doing anything?

JD: You know, they're not doing enough and they're often very complicit in the backdoor deals that are happening. In Louisiana, Meta's $10 billion project saw a legal intervention by the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Alliance for Affordable Energy. They tried to get the Public Service Commission in Louisiana to evaluate so much expert testimony about how this was going to really cause major risk for power outages, and how this was going to essentially put the burden of the electricity costs on taxpayers for hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars.

Despite that, the commission voted two months early to green light the project. They ignored all of this expert testimony and they didn't even wait for a ruling from a judge who was reviewing hundreds of pages of documents that were supposed to aid the commission in doing their job, which is to protect the public.

We have to push local governments to not bend to big tech and utility companies, and showing up at different points of intervention. Big Tech would like us to believe that data centers are inevitable, but local organizing really works. Showing up and calling out the lies is critical, because being in the room with the local government who has to answer to the people makes a difference. As a result, $64 billion of data center projects have been blocked or delayed.

AS: I wanted to talk about the misinformation and disinformation peddled by these companies. I saw in the report that in one of the states they were sending around flyers to say that there was government oversight and that was just patently false.

JD: Yeah, it was absolutely false. That was the Memphis Chamber of Commerce. They set up a 24-hour service committee for this deal and sent out flyers. People were like, wow, we've never gotten a flyer from the government before, it’s been years. And all of a sudden they put the logos of like nine agencies on the flyer and said, don’t worry, we’re keeping an eye on this. There is regulation and protection.

But it wasn’t true. ProPublica reached out to all these agencies, and two of them were like—we have no authority over this deal. Others said that their part of the process was very small. Nothing was addressing what people in the community were saying, which is that data centers are polluting the community.

There's 79 % more nitrogen oxide in the Memphis community after Elon Musk’s xAI data center went up. And this is a community that's historically had higher respiratory illnesses and higher rates of cancer. We're seeing literal data of more asthma concerns, more people going to the emergency room. So this is real, and xAI is creating chatbots like Grok to sacrifice. This is what community of colors are being poisoned for? This pro-Hitler chatbot? It’s really ridiculous and insane.

AS: It is insane. Yeah, and tell us a little bit more about that, the long-term health and environmental implications of all of this being released into the environment and people's proximity to the center. I I know the water issue is massive and it's becoming more mainstream and common knowledge that the water requirements for these products, but what other ways would you contextualize it?

JD: The first thing that comes to mind is Cancer Alley, which has over 200 petrochemical facilities in a 85-mile stretch of land. In the Western Hemisphere, it’s the most concentrated area of those facilities. And while Meta is gloating about this huge data center in Louisiana, they're talking about a data center that is requiring three new gas plants. One of them is going to be built in Cancer Alley, right? Harming a community which already has up to 50 times the cancer rate than the national average.

Human Rights Watch did a report on this, The Guardian did as well. It’s gotten so much global attention and so there's no way that anyone can feign ignorance to what the consequences are.

I know you mentioned Bessemer. That data center was going to use around two-thirds of the entire city's water supply. Folks are saying that when they get these requests for water, they say we literally can't handle this. We're going to have to build some new way of finding the amount of water and energy that these data centers require. Why should we bend to the demands of big tech at the expense of everyday people?

It also kind of speaks to the philosophy that a lot of Big Tech folks have. These tech CEOs, their vision for technology is really anti-Earth, it's anti-humanity. They don't care about our survival—let alone that of low-income black communities in the South. And it's just something to really think about. They talk about investment and innovation, but at what cost and what is their end goal?

AS: And something I found incredibly interesting in the report is that these data centers aren't even creating that many jobs. That's usually the argument for corporate interests. They'll say, well, there may be some environmental impacts or changes, but we're creating jobs for people. And here, that doesn't even apply.

JD: Yeah, it doesn't apply at all. They talk about creating thousands of jobs, and then in reality, in the actual deals that happen, the centers usually only have to create 50 job at most. Data centers don't require a lot of people to run them.

When you get into the details about the metadata center in Louisiana, for example, you ask point blank, you know: are these jobs going to be filled by local people? And they won't confirm that, because they won't. They're building in towns that have huge poverty rates, and saying this is a huge economic investment. But it's really an investment in Big Tech’s own profits and monopoly power.

It is disinformation and propaganda that they're spewing to push these data center deals through—whether that's jobs, or whether that's greenwashing and lying about how much water and energy they're going to consume. There are countless tactics they're using to push everything through.

AS: Right. I even read this was not related to a data center hearing, but one of the corporations in the South paid actors to come to a hearing a few years ago—it just sounds like they'll go to just tremendous lengths to do whatever needs to be done to, to fabricate the reality, to push something through.

JD: Yeah, yeah, yeah, they did.

AS: So for people who are interested in organizing, what would you say that they need to do? How do they become aware of this issue to begin with? How do they apply pressure in strategic ways?

JD: You know, I think what we're trying to do through this report is to build a larger community of folks pushing back and defending themselves. This report is like our bat signal for other people who are organizing and want to fight back.

And we are actually releasing a toolkit alongside the report that goes through everything, from how do you identify fact versus fiction to how do you practice speaking up to the propaganda that you're going to be faced with in the process. How do you conduct your own research around zoning laws, and who are the city council decision-makers in your area?

They're essentially bulldozing so many democratic processes, and things are moving really fast and in the dark. So the more that people can start asking the questions, start doing the research, start showing up to these hearings, start getting more support from legal organizations, and start sharing stories across cities, states, and counties—the more we can successfully block things and learn from each other, get inspired by each other. That's what we're hoping for through this report.

AS: Absolutely. And it sounds like for a lot of these situations, people don't have as much recourse once the development begins. In that, the government's muzzled and they’re not going to do much to deal with the after-effects of what it might mean for their utility bills or access to water. So it sounds like getting at the problem while it's still in the discussion phase is really critical.

JD: Intervening in the expansion is really critical. And I think we're also going to be facilitating trainings with various folks in the South and beyond. We're trying to develop organizing capacity across the board, to let folks know that we shouldn't accept this future.

They're currently locking the South into decades of fossil fuel usage. They're reversing all of the victories and progress we've made to fight environmental racism and to try to have a healthy, cleaner future. Now it's just a critical point for us to intervene and push back.

AS: I think it's particularly poignant that this is coming out 20 years after Hurricane Katrina and I watched the Netflix documentary about it and just the lack of care and compassion and just the pure neglect of a lot of these communities of color at a systemic level is really heartbreaking. And one would think that things might change, but history, of course, has a pattern of repeating itself.

JD: It's the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. I think we know that from a structural standpoint that the South has faced so much state abandonment, so much divestment, and that the South prioritizes an economic model that prioritizes business interests over…

AS: Tax breaks.

JD: Right. Tax breaks. Low wages, few regulations on businesses, few labor protections, a weak safety net, and a really kind of vicious, intense opposition to unions. And so it's for a long time been a testing ground for corporate extraction. And it's really good that you're bringing up the tax breaks because, as Zuckerberg said at the White House last week, they’re investing $600 billion into the U.S.

But we have to look at what is actually happening. Are these investments for the people or for the companies? Georgia is waiving nearly $300 million just this year to give tax breaks for data centers. Louisiana has a policy of 20 to 30 years of tax breaks for data centers. So where's this investment?

It actually means that either folks are going to have to end up paying more taxes, or there's not going to be enough money to go into social services. So it's a wealth transfer from taxpayers to shareholders.

AS: Well, and the health care system then becomes more burdened as people get sick and people are less able to be productive and contribute to the economy because they don't have water.

JD: Absolutely.

AS: Is there anything else we didn't cover that you might want to add?

JD: I think we’re in a really hard time where the collusion between Big Tech and the state is just humongous. There are billions of dollars of government contracts that tech companies now have. And we're just being lied to about how important AI is and what it's going to do for us—like, AI is going to help us solve all our problems and even solve climate change. It’s just a glorified Google search regurgitating information. The cost is immense. And it's not worth it.

AS: Thank you for all the critical work that you do.