The US South’s “Data Boom” is outlined in Southern Environmental Law Center, “Data Centers Across the South,” Southern Environmental Law Center, 2025, ➝.
See, for example Willy Blackmore, “This Is What They’re Polluting a Black Neighborhood in Memphis For,” Word In Black, July 14, 2025, ➝; Andrew R. Chow, “Inside the Memphis Community Battling Elon Musk’s xAI,” TIME, August 13, 2025, ➝; Dustin Edwards et al., “The Making of Critical Data Center Studies,” Convergence 31, no. 2 (2025): 429–46.
B. Jack Copeland, “Colossus: Its Origins and Originators,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 26, no. 4 (October–December 2004) 38–45.
Rev. Dr. Heber Brown, “Artificial Intelligence Furthers Environmental Racism in Black America,” Word In Black, July 28, 2025, ➝.
Emily R. Schwimmer, “A Tale of Two Plantations: The Comparative Development of the ENsley and Davis Plantations in Shelby County, Tennessee and the Museums That Interpret Them” (masters thesis, University of Memphis, 2011), ➝.
“T.O. Fuller State Park,” Tennessee State Parks, n.d., ➝.
“T.O. Fuller State Park.” See also: Chunrong Jia and Jeffery Foran, “Air Toxics Concentrations, Source Identification, and Health Risks: An Air Pollution Hot Spot in Southwest Memphis, TN,” Atmospheric Environment 81 (December 2013): 112–16.
Breaking from previous scholarship, historians trace continuities between enslaver and industrialist economies in the pre– and post–Civil War US American South. Musk’s facility illustrates how these might extend into the digital age. See: James Cobb, “Beyond Planters and Industrialists: A New Perspective on the New South,” The Journal of Southern History 54, no. 1 (1988): 12. See also: Forensic Architecture, “Environmental Racism In Death Alley, Louisiana,” Forensic Architecture, June 28, 2021, ➝.
Sophie Arnius, “Electrolux Group to Divest Memphis Factory,” Electrolux Group, September 21, 2023, ➝.
Analyzing AI through the lens of class, cognitive scientist Hagen Blix proposes we see AI as a “wage depression tool rather than a productivity tool” Hagen Blix, “‘AI Is an Attack from above on Wages’: An Interview with Cognitive Scientist Hagen Blix,” interview by Brian Merchant, October 1, 2025, Substack, ➝.
See, for example, Chow, “Inside the Memphis Community Battling Elon Musk’s xAI.” On community responses, see for example Matthew Gooding, “Fury from Campaigners as Elon Musk’s xAI Gets 150MW for Colossus Supercomputer in Memphis,” Data Center Dynamics, November 8, 2024, ➝; Bracey Harris et al., “Up against Musk’s Colossus Supercomputer, a Memphis Neighborhood Fights for Clean Air,” NBC News, May 16, 2025, ➝. For an outline of Boxtown’s citizens’ historical struggles see: University of Memphis Graduates, “Boxtown: The Land of Broken Promises,” StoryBoard Memphis, September 16, 2019, ➝.
Cathy Kunkel, Data Centers Drive Build Out of Gas Power Plants and Pipelines in the Southeast (Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, 2025). See also Emma Foehringer Merchant / Floodlight, “Coal Was on Its Way out. But Surging Electricity Demand Is Keeping It Alive — Costing Customers and the Planet,” Floodlight, January 8, 2025, ➝.
Adam Zewe, “Explained: Generative AI’s Environmental Impact,” MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology, January 17, 2025, ➝.
International Energy Agency, Electricity 2024: Analysis and Forecast to 2026 (International Energy Agency, 2024), 170, ➝.
Mark Kidd, “Energy and E-Waste: The AI Tsunamis,” Data Centrre Dynamics, October 24, 2023, ➝.
David Gelles, “Climate: A.I.’s Insatiable Appetite for Energy,” The New York Times, July 11, 2024, ➝.
The White House 2025 Action Plan for AI exempts AI infrastructure from environmental regulations under the framework of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, “and other relevant related laws.” See Donald J. Trump, “Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan,” The White House, July 2025, ➝.
For example, see: Nick Lichtenberg, “Without Data Centers, GDP Growth Was 0.1% in the First Half of 2025, Harvard Economist Says,” Fortune, October 7, 2025, ➝.
Emily Forgash, “Nvidia’s Massive OpenAI Deal Fuels ‘Circular’ Financing Concerns,” Technology AI, Bloomberg, September 23, 2025, ➝.
An August 2025 Bloomberg report uses census data to observe that data center construction is on track to outpace the construction of office spaces in the United States. See: Ben Holland, “AI Takeoff Turns Data Centers Into America’s New Building Boom,” Bloomberg, November 8, 2024, ➝. This dynamic seems to be offering, for the moment, a lifeline to many architectural firms. See, for example, Kriston Capps, “Can Data Centers Help Keep Architecture Firms Afloat?,” Bloomberg, August 3, 2025, ➝.
See Frick, “AI Is Everywhere But the Jobs Data.” However, as of October 2025, China’s stock market growth shows signs to be also sustained by AI. See Meaghan Tobin, “A.I. Is Driving a Stock Market Rally in China, Too,” Business, The New York Times, October 3, 2025, ➝.
Adam Mahoney, “America’s Digital Demand Threatens Black Communities with More Pollution,” Capital B News, February 25, 2025, ➝. Ben Green, “Growth of Data Centers Requires New Policies to Mitigate Local Community Impacts,” Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, Ford School, University of Michigan, July 17, 2025, ➝.
Kunkel, Data Centers Drive Build Out of Gas Power Plants and Pipelines in the Southeast.
Kriston Capps, “Why Meta’s Hyperion Data Center Looks Like It’s Crushing New York City,” Bloomberg, August 24, 2025, ➝.
Roland Meyer (@bildoperationen.bsky.social), “Megalomaniacal Plans,” Bluesky, July 16, 2025, ➝.
The perception of AI as automated helps to obscure the labor that sustains it, often under precarious conditions. See, for example, Billy Perrigo, “Exclusive: OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic,” TIME, January 18, 2023, ➝.
See Andrew Ross Hirsch et al., “The Billionaires’ Row at the Inauguration,” Business, The New York Times, January 21, 2025, ➝; Stephanie Kelly, “Trump’s Inauguration Billionaires, CEOs: Ambani, Zuckerberg, Bezos Attend Church, Ceremony,” Reuters, January 21, 2025, ➝; “Trump’s Inaugural Brings the World’s Billionaire Elites En Masse to DC,” Reuters, January 21, 2025, ➝.
In line with this effort is a new line of “Grok For Government” tools purported to “accelerate America—from making everyday government services faster and more efficient to using AI to address unsolved problems in fundamental science and technology.” See: “Announcing xAI for Government | xAI,” News Release, xAI News, July 14, 2025, ➝.
Their aims are “to accelerate DoD adoption of data, analytics, and AI from the boardroom to the battlefield. CDAO exercised its organic acquisition authority to issue the awards announced today, demonstrating that DoD acquisition can move at the speed of emerging technology and operational necessity.” “CDAO Announces Partnerships with Frontier AI Companies to Address National Security Missio,” Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, July 14, 2025, ➝.
“EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin Cancels 400+ Grants in 4th Round of Cuts with DOGE, Saving Americans More than $1.7B,” News Release, United States Environmental Protection Agency EPA, March 10, 2025, ➝.
“Data Centers Database,” Data Center Map, 2025, ➝.
See, for example, Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997); David F. Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (Oxford University Press, 1986).
For a discussion of the roots of design technologies in cold war era politics, see: Daniel Cardoso Llach, “Computer-Aided Design in the United States, 1949–1984: Designing in a Closed World,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 46, no. 04 (2024): 10–26. For an in-depth study of innovation in the US, see Matthew Wisnioski, Every American an Innovator: How Innovation Became a Way of Life (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2025).
For a political history of this period see, for example, Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2017).
“xAI Campaign,” Memphis Community Against Pollution (MCAP), 2025, ➝.
Austin Johnson, Trinity Williams, the Community Engagement Organizer with the Equity..., October 4, 2025, Photography, ➝.
Tamara Kneese and Maia Woluchem, Data Centers Aren’t the Future of American Prosperity (Data & Society, 2025), ➝.
Introducing Data Centers, Climate, & Labor [Webinar
Terry Nguyen and Ben Green, What Happens When Data Comes to Town, Science Technology and Public Policy (University of Michigan, 2025), ➝.
The energy costs of training AI models are sometimes considered. See, for example, Yolanda Gil and Raymond Perrault, Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2025 (Stanford University Human-Centerd Artificial Intelligence, 2025), 73, ➝.
Emily M. Bender, “Talking about a ‘Schism’ Is Ahistorical,” Medium (blog), August 25, 2025, ➝, offers a useful overview of recent critical work on AI. See also Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna, The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want (New York: Harper, 2025).
Edwards et al., “The Making of Critical Data Center Studies.”
Ingrid Burrington, Networks of New York: An Illustrated Field Guide to Urban Internet Infrastructure (New York: Melville House, 2016). Daniel Greene, “Landlords of the Internet: Big Data and Big Real Estate,” Social Studies of Science 52, no. 6 (2022): 904–27. Steven Gonzalez, “Cloud Ecologies: An Environmental Ethnography of Data Centers” (PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2023), ➝. For important, critical perspectives on the materiality of data and the informational dimension of urban infrastructure see: Shannon Mattern, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota press, 2017); Paul Dourish, The Stuff of Bits: An Essay on the Materialities of Information (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017); Jean-François Blanchette, “A Material History of Bits,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 62, no. 6 (2011): 1042–57.
Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?,” in The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (University Of Chicago Press, 1986).
