Are data centers the climate movement's next big battleground?

We've just published the third in our series of discussion papers exploring where the climate movement might focus its energy and resources next.

This one, co-authored with Philip Eubanks of the Climate Emergency Fund and Saul Levin of the Center for Nonviolent Conflict Research, looks at the rapid global expansion of data centers - driven largely by the AI boom - and argues that the resistance movement forming around them may be one of the most significant organising opportunities the climate movement has seen in years.

The paper documents a movement already well underway: between May 2024 and March 2025, an estimated $64 billion in US data center projects were blocked or delayed. Communities in at least 14 states have enacted moratoriums on new construction. The resistance is frequently bipartisan - heritage preservationists and property-rights conservatives finding common cause with environmentalists and digital rights campaigners - united around shared concerns about water, energy, land, and democratic process. Our own recent RCT research found that the environmental costs of data centers - water, energy, land - were the issue most likely to move the public to take action on AI.

The paper also grapples with the harder questions honestly: whether data centers could drive clean energy investment, what role AI plays in accelerating fossil fuel extraction, and how to build a broad coalition without demanding that everyone agrees on AI itself.

We'd love to know what you think.

👉 Read the full paper here

Image in header: Aerial view of the Google Data Center in Council Bluffs, IA. chaddavis.photography. licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.