Last August, citizens of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation began hearing whispers of an AI data center coming to their reservation. Kenzie Roberts and Jordan Harmon, both Muscogee citizens, were immediately worried. It “didn’t seem like something that should align with our values as Indigenous people,” Roberts said. The center would be located on Looped Square Ranch, a 5,570-acre plot of land where the tribe runs its food sovereignty initiative, a program that allows the Muscogee Nation to directly serve its citizens’ food needs. At the ranch, the tribe hosts youth agricultural activities like 4H; citizens can visit for hunting, fishing, trapping, and gathering; and the nation runs a fully functioning cattle ranch and meat processing center. The proposed legislation would rezone that land for industrial purposes—potentially taking that all away. “We give so much from the heartland, and then they still try to extract more from us,” Roberts said.

As developers scope out land across rural America for the hyperscale data centers needed to power generative AI, Native lands have become the latest target for Big Tech—from the Arizona desert to the Great Plains in Montana to the hills of central Virginia. Often, when tech companies come into Indigenous communities, they promise jobs and economic benefits for the community, but community activists say those benefits rarely materialize. Instead, data centers bring a threat of land loss and displacement that feels all too familiar for Indigenous people. “It’s just layer upon layer of exploitation, of violence, of continued colonialism. All in the name of imperialism,” said Krystal Two Bulls, an Oglala Lakota and Northern Cheyenne organizer who is the executive director of Honor the Earth, a national organization promoting Indigenous sovereignty that has been leading the fight against data centers. According to Honor the Earth, there are currently at least 106 proposed data center projects near or on Native lands. In western New York, a proposed $19.46 billion data center project would sit adjacent to the Tonawanda Seneca Nation’s territory, threatening an old forest that tribal citizens use for hunting, fishing, and gathering traditional medicine. In Reno, Nevada, an industrial park with a number of data centers planned threatens the water supply of Pyramid Lake, which is home to the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe and completely surrounded by the tribe’s reservation.

Companies attempting to construct data centers on Indigenous lands likely see it as an opportunity not just to access large plots of land, but also to use tribal sovereignty to bypass cumbersome state regulations that tribes don’t have to follow. Many tribal nations don’t have the legal codes or regulatory bodies in place yet to regulate utilities, Two Bulls said, so developers are moving quickly to begin data center projects while that’s still the case. Two Bulls also said that many developers see Indigenous communities as easy targets, especially poorer tribes that don’t have the legal or financial infrastructure to pursue litigation. “They don’t think they’re going to get a lot of pushback,” said Ashley LaMont, an enrolled tribal member of the Absentee Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma and the campaign director at Honor the Earth, who’s been........

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