As the construction of data centers expands— with more being built in Black, brown and low-income communities and harming the environments where they’re located— the NAACP hosted a summit from Dec. 12 to 13, with the goal of addressing growing environmental justice concerns and calling for greater transparency from policymakers and technology companies.
Under the theme “Stop Dirty Data,” the two-day conference featured conversations from NAACP leaders, partners and advocates exploring the effects data centers have on surrounding communities and what needs to be done to mitigate any further harm to people and access to resources.
“We recognize… these AI data centers, that are hyper-scaled and are showing up in our communities, are nothing new when it comes to where they’re placing them and citing pollution,” said Abre’ Conner, director of the NAACP’s Center for Environmental and Climate Justice (ECJ). “There are still some people who are not connecting their ChatGPT requests or the AI mode that shows up with Google to actually being an infrastructure that lives in a community.”…