Local opinion: AI data centers strain Southwest resources

In the AI race, the desert Southwest holds an exceptional position. It has the United States' highest heat, least water, and darkest night skies, along with the most species, sunshine, and mineral mining.

AI data centers require nonstop electrical power, releasing heat pollution into the region's already dangerously hot air, and siphoning untold amounts of water from severely depleted aquifers and the rapidly shrinking Colorado River. The energy needed to train AI models is constantly growing, and the United States' power grid does not support AI investors' goals. They aim to use publicly available electricity for data centers, while developing private power plants that favor industrial solar and nuclear.

Copper is critical in all AI infrastructure, hardware, and weapons. Two-thirds of U.S.-produced copper is mined in the desert Southwest. The region is also the domestic hub for processing other byproducts and elements such as alloying agents, lithium, and rare earth minerals needed for AI-invested energy production and next-generation warfare. Crucial for emerging nuclear weapons and small reactors, the desert Southwest is home to the country's only operational plutonium plant, as well as its only yellowcake uranium mill, which is fed by regional mines.

Mineral mining and processing, including radioactive exploits, have caused catastrophic harm to regional Native Nations’ communities. For generations at the junction of extraction, expansion, military, and surveillance operations throughout the desert Southwest, private corporations and the federal government have accumulated immense military-industrial wealth. At the frontlines of this venture, Native Nations’ communities hold the deepest and longest-standing knowledge of ecological stewardship and the defense of human rights. These communities have also borne the brunt of the abuse.

More than half of all domestic land controlled by the U.S. Department of War is located in the desert Southwest region. The U.S.-Mexico borderlands have become the continent’s most exploited interstate military proving grounds. Rugged terrain, arid climate, and dark skies make an ideal environment for AI-directed surveillance hardware, checkpoints, barriers, aircraft, satellite targeting, electromagnetic weapons, hypersonic missiles, and emerging nuclear systems. This next-generation warfare is entirely dependent on AI compute. Unless AI is incentivized differently, military strategists say that data centers will become the highest-value targets in modern warfare and terrorism. Such risks are rapidly increasing in the desert Southwest, as Phoenix becomes the first U.S. material-to-manufacturing base for AI chips, semiconductors, and robotics in a commercial ecosystem.

Choices about AI infrastructure, training, and deployment are dictating the future for everyone. Without consent and without quantitatively supported goals, the data of all humankind is being extracted for uncontrolled AI, in the hyper-consolidation of power by a few competing billionaires. Detached from social reality at the apex of power, these few men are collaborating with and benefiting from the largest operational network in human history: the U.S. military-industrial complex. This combination of circumstances is expanding a feedback loop of inhumane incentives for AI. Humane judgment is only ever possible through shared human reality.

Throughout history, some of the most powerful few have inclined always toward extraction and expansion at any cost, sacrificing the countless many. There is no human future in the scaling of technology at the cost of human rights. AI investment that puts ideology before people, and its primacy before human well-being, is a universal crisis.