Indigenous nations weigh whether to invite data centers onto tribal lands

As AI data centers crop up across the country, the Indigenous-led organization Honor the Earth has been building a grassroots network to resist the construction of such projects on tribal land. 

“We typically have access to large tracts of land,” said Krystal Two Bulls, executive director of Honor the Earth. Add onto that jurisdictional issues, as each tribal nation is its own sovereign government with its own unique framework, and “it’s the perfect storm. We’re the perfect target,” Two Bulls said.

In Utah, for instance, businessman and “Shark Tank” investor Kevin O’Leary is proposing a 10,000-acre hyperscale AI data center—down from 40,000 acres proposed initially—that is estimated to raise the state’s carbon emissions by 64%. The Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation, who live in the area, is holding tribal councils for community input. The Seminole Nation, meanwhile, has become one of the first tribes to pass a moratorium on AI data center development, and the Cherokee Nation established a task force to evaluate the impact of such projects. 

For many, the debate over data centers harks back to the development of the Transcontinental Railroad in the 1860s, which connected railroads in the east of the country to the Pacific coast. 

Since 2019, the Railroads in Native America Forum has gathered scholars and leaders from various tribes to discuss how the Transcontinental Railroad, portrayed in U.S. history as a defining moment of progress, built the country and changed Indigenous ways of life forever. At the forum’s third convening this year, which took place in Sacramento, one theme was especially prominent: extraction.

Multiple panels discussed not just what the Transcontinental Railroad took, but what it transformed. “Students should learn about the railroad as both infrastructure and invasion,” Hillary Renick, a panelist and president of the California Indian Land Institute, told Prism in an email. “These railroads initially served as conquest, aiding in the extraction of minerals.”

Indigenous nations negotiated with the railroad developers. Megan Baker, assistant professor at Northwestern University who specializes in Choctaw law and southeastern Indigenous culture, said the Choctaw Nation in Oklahoma levied taxes on railroad companies, using the funds for education and government operations.

For some of the speakers and attendees at the conference, AI data centers present a similar turning point for Indigenous peoples.

Some tribes have expressed resistance to developing AI data centers, in part due to the long, unbroken history of U.S. extraction at their expense. Other tribes, however, have more complex positions.

In February, the Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. signed an executive order establishing a task force to investigate data centers’ impact on both the economic and environmental well-being of the reservation. 

“It is in the interest of the Cherokee Nation to balance its commitment to stay on the leading edge of technological advancement for the sake of operating efficient and effective government and business systems as well as serving as responsible stewards of natural resources,” the executive order states.

What these decisions come down to, Two Bulls said, is access to information. Much of Honor the Earth’s “Data Center Resistance” campaign involves going into communities to give them the knowledge to make informed decisions about data centers. “Meta, Apple, Amazon, et cetera are now approaching our communities, and so it’s really confusing for people,” Two Bulls said.

As grassroots organizers like Two Bulls demystify what allowing each data center onto the land means, some Indigenous-run entities are seeking to tap into this latest technological development. Partnering with a data center developer could potentially help the tribes control their own sources of energy and gain profit, they argue.

A separate but related issue, Two Bulls said, is data sovereignty. Data theft can be traced back to when missionaries would enter the reservation and record Indigenous people’s ways of life, she said. Before its current task force, the Cherokee Nation had previously responded to the rise of AI data use in 2024 by investigating its potential impact on data sovereignty. Since the pandemic era, when Indigenous communities experienced some of the highest rates of COVID deaths, tribal leaders and data scientists have led a movement to track and access their own data.

This new technology has just as much potential to aid the movement as it does to continue a history of data theft, some argue, but developers don’t often communicate to communities on the ground the energy and space that their AI data centers would use. “We have to distinguish between a hyperscale data center and a smaller data center that can meet tribal needs for data sovereignty,” Two Bulls said.

Robert Voss, associate professor at Northwest Missouri State University and founder of an AI consulting company, echoed Two Bulls’ sentiment that the Transcontinental Railroad, and many projects like it, interrupted migratory patterns and extracted materials in order to lay down track. A data center does not need to be built in a similar fashion, however, he said. He recalled visiting an AI data center in Shawnee, Kansas, that the operator Netrality built by retrofitting the elevator shafts of an old high rise.

“Data centers could be a win-win situation for the communities they’re going into,” Voss said. “[They could] make that community better because a data center is there. Don’t be extractive and punish the people that happen to live there.”

Still, the environmental impacts of data centers are hard to ignore.

In Utah, O’Leary’s proposed data center would require vast amounts of water to cool. The heat alone, said Utah State University associate physics professor Robert Davies, would devastate the local ecosystem, including the rapidly shrinking Great Salt Lake. 

“Even people who don’t know a lot of the science know that the lake is in crisis,” Davies said, “and they know something of this scale can’t possibly be a good thing to do.”

Even the developers, he said, don’t seem to comprehend the sheer scale of these projects. The data centers of the past—used for the internet—could fit in an office building. But O’Leary’s original proposal, which he scaled back after public pressure, would have dwarfed that. “This is 3,000 times bigger than what we called a data center 20 years ago,” Davies said.