Image @ reiner-sct.com
AI’s rapid expansion and the construction of energy-intensive data centers are raising urgent environmental justice concerns in Black communities, concerns that Joshua Ogundu, a tech writer, says often go unexamined.
“The current and future benefits of AI have been mostly what is centered in conversations about the emerging technology, but recently, people have been bringing attention to what this may be costing people, especially Black and brown ones. We are all aware of how racism exists as it relates to systems, but you can also see signs of racism in the way environments are formed and how they are, or are not, tended to over time,” Ogundu observes
One recent flashpoint occurred in Memphis, Tennessee, where the NAACP recently notified Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, with its intent to sue over pollution concerns in the historically Black neighborhood of Boxtown.
The group asserts that the data center’s operations have degraded local air quality, highlighting the broader tension between technological advancement and environmental health.
Ogundu traces this moment back to a much longer history of environmental injustice.
He cites Warren County, North Carolina, citing it as “the birthplace of the environmental justice movement,” where, in the early 1980s, Black residents protested the siting of a hazardous PCB landfill in their community.
“Black residents of Warren County protested against allowing contaminated soil to come into their community to create a landfill,” Ogundu writes, noting that the chemicals involved “can suppress the immune system, contribute to cancer, and cause other harm… and tend to stay in the land, air, and water for years if not decades.”
Though the landfill was eventually built, ensuing studies, including a 1987 report by the United Church of Christ’s Commission on Racial Justice, helped establish vital precedent linking race and hazardous waste site placement.
Ogundu further cites the 1979 case Bean vs. Southwestern Waste Management Corp., recognized as the first environmental justice lawsuit.
“Black residents in Houston sued to block the construction of a landfill, arguing that it would be a form of racial discrimination,” Ogundu records, noting that although their injunction was denied, it demonstrated that legal action and community organizing can yield important leverage.
For a more recent reference, Ogundu points to the Flint Water Crisis. He recounts how, after Flint, MI, switched its water source to the Flint River in April 2014, a cost-cutting move, the corrosive river water caused lead contamination in pipes, causing widespread poisoning in a predominantly Black community.
He underscores how government response was sluggish, noting that “only this year… the city put in the required 11,000 replacement pipes that a 2017 court decision required them to do.”
Ogundu adds that the activism of then-8-year-old Amariyanna “Little Miss Flint” Copeny helped spur national attention and federal action, as her letter to President Barack Obama prompted his visit in 2016 and a subsequent $100 million allocation.
These examples, Ogundu warns, may soon repeat in new forms as AI infrastructure grows.
He urges communities to mobilize now, warning that under deregulation-heavy political climates, data center siting decisions could happen with little oversight. “Organizing does work,” Ogundu writes, referencing ongoing efforts in Memphis and elsewhere to stop or mitigate AI infrastructure impacts.
By: Joshua Narh