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Last month, the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma became the first Indigenous nation to officially ban data center construction from its land.
When a tech startup approached Tribal leaders asking them to sign a nondisclosure agreement along with a letter of intent to construct a data center on Seminole territory, the Tribal Council unanimously shot them down, voting 24 to 0 to instead enact a permanent data center moratorium.
The Seminole Nation isn’t alone in fighting off predatory tech firms. Across the country, data center developers are using underhanded tactics to ram their server farms onto Indigenous land, whether Native communities want them there or not.
In an interview with Democracy Now‘s Amy Goodman, activist Krystal Two Bulls, executive director of Honor the Earth — an Indigenous-led environmental organization that helped the Seminole Nation assert their rights against the unscrupulous data center startup — said there are anywhere between 103 and 160 proposed hyperscale data centers looking to build on Native lands.
One of the tactics Native tribes are increasingly seeing is the bait-and-switch, in which developers come in looking to build renewable energy infrastructure, only to swap the plan to a data center at the last minute.
“What we’re hearing from different Native nations is that corporations will come, they’ll start by talking about solar panels and installing that on their lands, and then it quickly shifts to a hyperscale data center,” Two Bulls said. “But often, before they even get to that conversation, they’re asking them to sign an NDA. And so that makes our tribal leadership accountable to them and not to the people… they’re actually supposed to represent.”
For the activists at Honor the Earth, not to mention Tribal communities themselves, that means proposed data center projects are often difficult to even identify, nevermind organize against, until they’re well underway.
“Oftentimes we don’t know that these projects are coming to our lands until we hear in a press release or on the news or we hear rumors of what’s happening,” Two Bulls explained.
Data center developers are all too happy to take advantage of rural communities throughout the US. But Two Bulls says Tribal nations make particularly appealing targets for exploitation due to their ample water and baked in tax incentives, to say nothing of the kind of economic desperation created by centuries of dispossession and neglect.
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