At a recent televised dinner at the White House, Big Tech executives profusely thanked Donald Trump for unleashing “American innovation,” while the president, in turn, praised Big Tech for “investing billions in the country.” This orchestration of Big Tech executives kissing the ring was more than a display of how tech oligarchy has become the new normal. It was a dramatized, Gilded Age-type demonstration of Trump’s AI Action Plan, which grants Big Tech the unfettered ability to expand AI infrastructure.

Announced in July 2025, Trump’s AI plan aims to accelerate the construction of data centers by bypassing public protections, environmental laws, and critical oversight. This push for federal deregulation is a direct response to more and more local communities fighting back to unveil who actually benefits from these massive investments — and who is being sold out in the process. Data centers powering AI require an enormous amount of water and energy. A single data center can consume up to 5 million gallons of drinking water per day. A data center campus using one gigawatt of electric power annually would use more power in a year than consumers use in Alaska, Rhode Island, or Vermont. As tech companies scramble to build data centers in the relentless “AI race,” they are creating infrastructure that will lock us into burning fossil fuels for decades. They are seeking a future where we have to compete with corporations for drinking water and subsidize Big Tech’s energy costs with our own wallets due to increased utility bills.

In their search for cheap land, cheap energy, and cities and towns that have been structurally disempowered, Big Tech has descended upon the South. Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon have committed over $200 billion to build medium and large data centers in North Carolina, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Virginia, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, and Tennessee. As the South becomes the new epicenter of data center growth, it is becoming increasingly clear that Big Tech is following Big Oil’s footsteps, compounding the harms of decades of environmental racism in the South.

Elon Musk’s $12 billion artificial intelligence company, xAI, is poisoning Black communities in Memphis, Tennessee. Musk’s supercomputer, Colossus, sits a few miles from Boxtown, where nearly half of the residents have an annual household income below $25,000 and the cancer rates are four times the national average. According to the Southern Environmental Law Center, the data center has been fueled by 35 unpermitted gas turbines that produce smog-forming pollution and harmful chemicals like formaldehyde. Peak nitrogen dioxide concentration levels have increased by 79 percent from pre-xAI levels in the areas immediately surrounding the data center. Nitrogen dioxide is linked to respiratory diseases. Memphis already leads Tennessee in emergency department visits for asthma and received an “F” from the American Lung Association for ozone pollution in 2025. Memphis resident KeShaun Pearson states, “We are breathing dirtier air, experiencing higher rates of asthma, and our children are spending more time in emergency rooms due to the misguided ambitions of billionaires who don’t see us as human.”

Similarly, Meta’s largest data center to date is being built in Richland Parish, Louisiana, where over a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line. Meta’s $10 billion complex will consume an unprecedented amount of energy from the state — approximately three times as much electricity as the entire city of New Orleans annually. According to the permit for the data center, it will directly emit 5,862 tons of CO2 annually, equal to the annual emissions of 1,108 homes in the U.S. Three new methane gas plants are being built just to power this one data center. Two of the power plants will be built in Richland Parish, while the third power plant will be built at an existing nuclear power plant site in the region known as “Cancer Alley.” Cancer Alley is an 85-mile stretch of land along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, where Black and low-income communities have been getting sick and dying for decades due to emissions from over 200 petrochemical and fossil fuel plants in the area.

In South Carolina, power plants are being built in predominantly Black communities to keep up with data centers’ energy needs. In Mississippi, the state’s Public Service Commission unanimously approved a special contract to extend the life of a Mississippi Power coal unit, Plant Victor J. Daniel, to meet energy needs for a new data center project. This comes after the state government had ordered the utility company to phase out coal in 2020 due to its detrimental impacts on health and the environment. In 2022, Plant Victor J. Daniel reported more than 6 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions, higher than any other facility in Mississippi, according to Grist. The plant has also been reported to be one of the nation’s top groundwater polluters, with excessive amounts of lithium, which is associated with neurological damage.

Big Tech has pushed rapid data center development forward through opaque and corrupt processes to avoid public scrutiny. Wanda Mosley, a resident of South Fulton, Georgia, told Truthout that the public processes related to data center development have been biased, saying, “They’re holding these town halls but they’re only having people who benefit from the data centers speaking at the town halls.”

In Georgia, county commissioners have been easing requirements for Project Sail, a data center which would use up to 6 million gallons of water per day — over a fifth of the entire county’s daily water allotment. Officials adopted new planning laws which were watered down by industry lobbyists and removed provisions that aimed to limit harmful environmental impacts and that would require special public hearings for proposed data centers. This was only revealed through a public records request that matched anonymous comments with emails.

Major project developers in the South have concealed key information from the public, including water and energy consumption, deals with local officials regarding tax breaks and other incentives, and even company names. Local politicians make backdoor deals with tech companies before the public has a chance to be fully informed of the harms and have a say in data centers entering their communities. Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and South Carolina all provide major tax exemptions for data center companies. Louisiana’s GOP-controlled legislature fast-tracked Act 730 in 2024, granting data center companies 20-year tax exemptions, extendable to 30 years, for projects creating just 50 jobs and investing at least $200 million. The bill was championed by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry and corporate lobbyists, under the guise of economic development.

Big Tech promises thousands of jobs when data center projects are announced. However, in reality, data centers create very few permanent jobs. Even Microsoft admits that a data center can run with less than 50 technicians. According to a Business Insider analysis, “tax breaks given to developers can amount over time to more than $2 million for every permanent, full-time job at an operational data center.” Despite the widespread talking point that data centers bring jobs to local areas, half the states that provide tax subsidies for data centers do not actually require job creation. States that do only require a small number of jobs to be created. In Tennessee, only 15 jobs are required for data centers to qualify for tax breaks.

CNBC reports that states are forfeiting hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue to tech companies. Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, called this “a giant transfer of wealth from taxpayers to shareholders.” These tax breaks divert funds away from direct government expenditures in support of schools, tackling income inequality, investing in public transit, environmental remediation and other community needs. This affects marginalized communities the most, especially communities of color in the South. Georgia is projected to waive roughly $296 million in sales tax revenue this year for large data centers. This economic extraction through subsidies parallels the fossil fuel industry.

These subsidies extend beyond state tax breaks. In South Carolina, Dominion Energy will provide electricity to Google for multiple data centers at a discounted rate that amounts to less than half of what residential customers have to pay. Dominion has not disclosed how much electricity it is going to provide to Google data centers, saying the information is a protected trade secret. However, data centers in South Carolina will drive a whopping 65 to 70 percent of the state’s increased energy use, forcing consumers to pay more in utility bills. Jennifer Whitfield, senior attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, has stated, “The highest low-income energy burden is seen in the South, specifically in Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas.” Energy burden refers to the percentage of personal income needed to pay energy bills. Data centers will exacerbate this systemic inequity.

The South has long been a site of both corporate extraction and fierce political resistance. Continuing this legacy of resistance, data center opposition is increasingly strong across the South. A proposed $14.5 billion hyperscale data center in Bessemer, Alabama, has been paused after facing a united front of residents concerned with the data center’s local impact. The center would require 2 million gallons of water per day, or roughly the same amount of water as two thirds of the city’s population. In Warrenton, Virginia, residents voted out all town council members in the November 2024 election who supported Amazon’s proposed data center. In July 2025, the newly elected council voted to ban data centers from Warrenton. In Georgia, the Monroe County Board of Commissioners voted unanimously to deny a data center proposal that would rezone 900 acres of land after residents pushed back and said it posed environmental threats.

Mosley, the South Fulton resident, told Truthout:

They don’t understand what they have started. They don’t understand the coalition that we’re about to build, because all of us have high electricity bills. All of us have high water bills. And so, people who don’t normally rock together, oh, we about to rock together, and we are about to make some changes in Georgia.

It is critical that we pay attention to fights like these and stand in solidarity with the Black, Brown and working-class communities being harmed by Big Tech and federal and state governments. The people are saying no.

Truthout