Data centers are having a moment. From the White House to county commissioner meetings, data centers are being trumpeted for their promise to reshape economies and secure national dominance. At the same time, as tech companies race to lead the global Artificial Intelligence (AI) market, billion-dollar data center deals have been the subject of headlines, lawsuits, and public backlash.
With support from the West Virginia University Department of English and the Department of Geology and Geography, the WVU Humanities Center welcomed San Diego State University’s Dr. Dustin Edwards, Associate Professor and Director, to campus on April 9. In his presentation, Dr. Edwards tracked the policy developments, financial arrangements, and energy configurations that have paved the way for the rapid construction of hyperscale AI data centers in the U.S. Drawing on qualitative interviews with frontline communities where data centers are being proposed, Edwards insists that this future is not a foregone conclusion.
His work reveals a current-day extension of Appalachia’s long history of labor, extraction, and energy production. As technology and industry progresses, it too often depends on communities to absorb the costs while others benefit from the power generated there.
In a moment of unchecked growth and little governmental oversight, data center opposition coalitions have scaled in their own right, demanding a different and less extractive vision for a collective future.
WVU Libraries sat down with Dr. Edwards to dive even deeper.
What is your research about and what drew you to the subject?
Dr. Dustin Edwards: In our cultural imaginaries about digital technology, we might get an image of Mark Zuckerberg wearing Meta glasses peering into the future, but we often are not getting an image of a miner going deeper into the earth to extract the copper needed for GPUs. We might see an interface for a chatbot, but we are not seeing an overworked data center. And we certainly are not seeing images of data cleaners in the Global South sifting through troves of images and text in an attempt to rid models of pornographic, violent, or otherwise harmful material.
I published a book titled “Enduring Digital Damage: Rhetorical Reckonings for Planetary Survival.” This book is my attempt to grapple with the narratives we have inherited about digital technologies—the narratives that linger in our public imaginaries. These narratives, I argue in the book, are often kept abstracted. These narratives position digital life as somehow disconnected from land, water, and those emplaced material environments that make large-scale computation possible.
So, a major argument of my book and the findings from my research is that when land is absent, so too is any kind of hope for justice. In this age of generative AI, this argument means that, for those invested in projects of justice, there is a need to focus on the AI supply chain. There is a need to focus on issues such as labor exploitation in the making of large language models, environmental pollution where data centers are being powered, and extraction of all kinds.
Within the last year especially, the facade of an ungrounded cloud has begun to crumble before our eyes. You all know this well in West Virginia. A number of data center projects have been announced across the state. In Tucker County, the company Fundamental Data has announced plans to build a massive data center and gas-powered power plant. In Mason County, there has been an announcement of an 8-gigawatt data center. If brought to reality, this data center—by electricity use alone—would be the largest in the world. For some context, during a heat wave in 2024, the energy demand of all of San Diego was 5 gigawatts. And that’s to supply power to about 3.3 million people.
And so, given this mass acceleration of AI data centers, my research and book are a qualitative project that is full of people and their testimonies. It’s a project where I am interviewing and analyzing shared documents from frontline communities who are opposing AI data center development in their hometowns. These interviews show me that something quite profound is happening all across the country. From Ohio to California, residents—working moms, retired grandmothers, K-12 teachers, young activists, Republicans, and Democrats—are all coming together in their dissent of data centers. These unexpected coalitions are organizing in astounding ways to slow down harmful development and demand a different future.
You use the term “Digital Damage” in your research and book. What is digital damage?
Dr. Dustin Edwards: In September of 2016 when Meta—then called Facebook—announced that they were breaking ground on a new data center in Los Lunas, New Mexico, it received little press and community pushback despite the deal Meta made with New Mexico and Los Lunas to claim water rights. The deal guaranteed Meta fresh water—up to 1.5 million gallons of water per day. Seeing this number as someone who grew up in New Mexico, I became concerned.
I also started tracking data peripheries. In other words, all the extractive conditions along the supply chain that enable data centers to operate. Considering the data peripheries of Meta brought me to a copper mine near my hometown in Grant County, New Mexico. Copper, after all, is a key mineral that begins its extractive journey on the periphery of a data center. And there’s a deep, murderous history of extraction against Indigenous Apache people and the land that is tangled up in this data periphery.
So this forms the backdrop for the term “digital damage.” Digital technologies and infrastructures are implicated in webs of environmental, colonial, and climatic harm. It’s a term that insists that the digital is material and resists the abstracted view that there is no impact. Digital damage has environmental consequences—whether that’s water consumption in Utah, mineral extraction in New Mexico, pollution in Memphis, or coal extraction in West Virginia. It’s a term that tries to map infrastructures. And it’s a term that tries to reckon with the extractive ideologies that have rendered land as exploitable, people as disposable, and so-called progress as inevitable.
As a marketing, political, and infrastructural project, how can AI increase the digital damage we are already seeing? How does that translate to rapid hyperscaling of AI?
Dr. Dustin Edwards: From Wisconsin to Oklahoma, local communities are experiencing an erosion of democratic decision making—all in the name of AI advancement and so-called economic development. Meanwhile, residents are scrambling to make sense of data center projects that have been quietly moving through legislative bodies with strong lobbying efforts from big tech financiers. Once announced to the public, communities, often in only a matter of weeks, are left with sometimes literally pages of unanswered questions. And the end result is that these proposals often, though not always, get bulldozed into reality.
Across the country, residents are encountering what I have come to think of as the data center playbook of promises. Some common promises data center developers and governing bodies issue to communities are as follows. First, there is a promise of jobs, but the reality is that data centers bring relatively few jobs once construction is completed (and often the higher paid jobs aren’t sourced locally). Another big promise is that data centers are a local investment, but the reality is that the lion's share of wealth extraction moves elsewhere. There is often a promise that data centers will improve existing energy and water infrastructure, but the reality is that many of these projects strain grids and deplete natural resources. Some developers and government bodies promise a horizon of renewable energy and water stewardship, while the reality is that data centers are energy, carbon, water, and mineral intensive.
The final promise is the big one seen throughout the AI industry. AI is inevitable, so you might as well skill up and take a sliver of the pie. But the reality is that the market for AI is quite volatile and unstable, with many experts predicting a bubble burst at any moment.
So, why is this happening? What’s driving so much growth? Well, if we step out of the local council chambers, we are hearing fantastical claims about the imagined potential of AI from tech CEOs. The AI arms race has its motto: SCALE, SCALE, SCALE. And what this has meant is a tsunami of data center development. In 2025 alone, financial backers for AI data centers spent $61 billion, with estimates of total spending reaching $3 to 7 trillion by 2030.
As this financial projection suggests, data centers require unfathomable sums of money (and debt) to be built, but they also require finite earth materials like minerals and rare earths. They require the consumption of billions of gallons of fresh water per year and they demand energy at scales we have never seen before. And increasingly, data centers are reinvigorating the fossil fuel industry, sending a lifeline to an industry whose infrastructures carry immediate and long-term health impacts.
Seen in this light, Hyperscaling is an intensified extractive ideology and capitalist logic whereby energy, water, land, minerals, and human bodies are sacrificed for a future imagined by tech CEOs and their financial boosters. So, again, the question is: how can this be happening? How can this be happening when the scale of extraction seems so antithetical to life, especially life on an increasingly precarious planet?
One answer involves an ideological movement that has moved among tech circles. It’s called effective accelerationism. This movement, often labeled as e/acc in X bios and sub Reddits, has at its core a techno-optimist ideology. It operates at a near-religious level of faith. It has a set of beliefs: technology as savoir, technology as abundance, and, ultimately, technology as utopia. This ideological movement is very much espoused by some of the key financiers of the tech industry—people like Marc Andreessen, Peter Theil, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk are connected to this movement. This movement cares little about what they would perceive as “short-term” human suffering. The stated goals are to unleash capitalism to its violent extremes, to throttle it, to choke regulation, to minimize safety, and to maximize economic productivity and especially energy use.
These accelerationist, techno-optimist ideologies are not fringe ideas in Silicon Valley. They spread across venture capital firms, creep into the executive boards of Big Tech, and grease the wheels of capitalism and state power. And they have increasingly found no habitable future on planet earth—indeed, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor refer to this ideology as “end times fascism.” Looking to the universe as an untapped source of energy and an uncharted domain to conquer, futures sold by AI accelerationists are notably devoid of fleshy, interconnected webs of life. Instead, we get visions of a techno-capital god surfing the cosmos, where humans can be “uploaded” into “the singularity” to live on infinitely. Who cares about a little pollution on earth when utopia is beyond its atmosphere?
So while data center developers twist themselves into knots to make hollow offers to the communities where they build infrastructure, the techno-optimists inflating the AI bubble have no desire for sustainable development. Quite the opposite. As Klein and Taylor write, “the most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating.”
Is their hope for the future? Can we calm the wave of digital damage down?
Dr. Dustin Edwards: This is heavy stuff—it’s depressing in all sorts of ways. But I see an extremely hopeful point. And that point involves the profound community organizing that has occurred all over the country. Solidary has formed to refuse a future determined by tech CEOs and their financial boosters. At a time when we are hearing this future is inevitable, there is a growing groundswell of people saying no. And this is no small matter.
The New York Times recently reported, for example, that community pushback in 2025 stalled or blocked 165 billion worth of data center projects. So, this is hopeful, but I think developers and states are also getting more clever about bypassing community oversight altogether—so our time to act, I believe, is now.
All over the world, including in West Virginia, coalitions opposing data centers are inventing different narratives for addressing this techno-accelerationist moment. These coalitions are deeply committed to the project of living well on this Earth. The chokepoints some of these coalitions have been able to exploit are fragile as they do not assure a future governed by people instead of oligarchs, but they do offer a glimmer of hope in bleak times.
First, participants have told me to pay attention to the boring stuff in local meetings. Rezoning meetings, votes for financial incentives, air permits, and so on. While legislation can significantly dampen room for civic engagement, these procedural moments are often the only windows to stop data centers from being built.
Second, I have observed that communities have a deep well of expertise to draw on. Coalitions have organized in outstanding ways—creating subgroups to devote time and expertise to particular concerns—pursuing legal and policy options, documenting environmental issues, contacting local press and media, and organizing for civic participation, to name a few.
Third, I’ve also seen coalitions connect with and learn from other communities fighting data centers. What has worked to stall a project? What hasn’t? How have others organized in online and grassroots settings? There’s a wealth of knowledge out there, and, in my experience, other groups are ready and willing to share their knowledge with others.
Fourth, even though data center deals can be demoralizing, those who continue to push back, continue to organize, and continue to not accept inevitability arguments have seen data center deals get pulled.
And fifth, insist on accountability. A common refrain I’m hearing from communities all over the country is pretty simple: we’ll remember this. We’ll remember this when you’re up for reelection, we’ll remember this when new climate crises emerge, and we’ll remember this when promises are not fulfilled.
We can change the narrative that this future—filled with data centers, shadow fossil fuel grids, and extracted resources—is not a foregone conclusion. As one of my participants Andres told me, “[For those refusing data center projects in their backyards], work on the narrative. Because at the end of the day, this is a battle of narratives. And whoever controls the narrative, controls the power.”