CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Battle of Socorro, New Mexico and the Uprising Against AI Data Centers

Photo: Kent Paterson.

If there is any place on the map that captures the depth of the global revolt over AI data centers, it might well be little Socorro County, New Mexico. Located astride the Rio Grande and almost smack dab in the center of New Mexico, at first glance, rural Socorro County seems an unlikely center for the rebellion.

But at a May town hall, matters of environment and climate change, gaping economic inequality and creeping oligarchy, local land use, legacies of the nuclear weapons age and space exploration, democratic governance and transparency, and then some all boiled over in a lively, memorable meeting fit for the history books.

The occasion was Canadian company Green Data’s proposal, in possible partnership with Socorro-based New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (better known as New Mexico Tech), to build a massive data center on 10,000-plus acres of land owned by the public university. Last January, unbeknownst to locals, the New Mexico Tech administration signed a letter of intent with Green Data to explore a possible deal.

In Spanish, Socorro means “help,” and in a fitting display of wordplay, data center opponents outside New Mexico Tech’s Macey Conference Center on May 19 distributed buttons and t-shirts with the words “S.O.S. Socorro.”

Interviewed inside the Macey Center as locals waited for the town hall to commence, resident Beaumont Chrismer immediately raised the water question that is unnerving Socorro and New Mexico, as drought emergencies are declared and supply restrictions implemented. Consequently, residents of Socorro County and across the Southwest are increasingly alarmed at the prospect of a hyperscale data center moving into their neighborhood. The facilities require water-often lots of it-to cool their systems.

“Water is life in the Southwest, as you know, and stocks of water have been continuously depleting due to drought,” Chrismer said.

James Boswell, who lives south of the village of San Antonio, described the Rio Grande near his home as “bone dry, just nothing but a sand box.”

Other reasons against siting a local data center voiced by speakers at the town hall included intrusions on sacred indigenous and historic Chicano lands, noise pollution, and health hazards from stirring up depleted uranium contamination originating from previous tests conducted by

“I’m very concerned about the dust that accumulated from the testing of depleted uranium in the area,” former Socorro resident Damacio Lopez said. Data center construction activities could result in exposures to workers and others, he contended. Lopez works with Veterans for Peace and is co-chair of the Uranium Weapons Working Group.

Victor Savedra urged officials to “respect our people who live on this land grant.”

Other attendees brought up the possibility of electronic interference from a data center to the National Science Foundation and National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Very Large Array (VLA), one of the world’s leading astronomical radio observatories, which consists of 27 radio antennas set in a Y-shaped field configuration about 50 miles west of Socorro.

Grower Cari Powell, who’s now the Democratic candidate for the Socorro County District 1 Commission seat, held aloft a big poster with a painting of a mushroom cloud accompanied by the words “Don’t Sacrifice Us Again,” in allusion to the first atomic bomb test that was conducted by the U.S. government about 40 miles to the southeast of Socorro in July 1945. Decades later, New Mexico is still witness to the generations of downwinders affected by the cancer-causing radiation fallout from........

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