Climate activists take on a new foe: Data centers

In the aftermath of the political upheaval of 2025, which saw mass federal layoffs, agency closures, and reductions in clean energy spending, an event of significant political importance slipped by largely unnoticed. On December 31, 2025, the Green New Deal Network, an alliance of climate, labor, and social justice organizations, officially disbanded.

Though the coalition was never meant to be permanent, its end was hastened by the political climate that led to Donald Trump’s re-election in 2024. The momentum the movement had gained during Joe Biden’s presidency seemed to dissipate overnight. As Trump aggressively rolled back environmental regulations and climate policies, the climate movement found itself at a loss, struggling to advocate for change while the public’s attention shifted to other issues, such as living costs, and a government resistant to its cause.

“The conditions under which the Green New Deal Network was founded have fundamentally changed,” the coalition’s site stated, justifying its closure. “The mission of climate, jobs, and justice is far from over — but the structure built to win a specific moment is no longer the right vehicle for what comes next.”

Saul Levin, the network’s campaigns and politics director, knew his next steps personally: combating AI data centers. The boom in artificial intelligence has led to a rapid rise in constructing massive facilities for processing digital information. Communities nationwide are resisting their development, worried about water consumption, rising energy costs, and Big Tech dominance. Over a year ago, Levin initiated a Signal chat to organize opponents of data centers. His chat now includes roughly 350 members across 40 states, and he is engaged with his podcast, “The Hum,” which shares their stories and highlights victories.

Many climate activists are taking a similar route. Concerns about greenhouse gas emissions, pollution, and social justice naturally align with the anti-data center movement, which has garnered a more extensive, bipartisan coalition than the Green New Deal ever achieved. “The climate movement is increasingly realizing that this is a fight that’s both an important fight and a strategic fight,” noted Evan Sutton, an anti-AI advocate connecting data center opponents.

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Consider the Sunrise Movement, whose members famously occupied Representative Nancy Pelosi’s office in 2018 to demand a Green New Deal, propelling the idea into the national spotlight. “We’ve definitely seen a surge of interest in data center fights around the country,” said Aru Shiney-Ajay, the group’s executive director. Local Sunrise hubs have been active in opposing data centers in Dallas, Denver, Pittsburgh, and Lansing, Michigan.

The climate movement has a compelling reason to engage: these large-scale data centers are set to significantly increase carbon emissions. A recent report from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory indicates that data centers could be responsible for around one-third of the growth in U.S. electricity demand between 2024 and 2030. This increased demand is boosting infrastructure for natural gas, a fossil fuel. A standard AI data center uses as much electricity as 100,000 homes, with the largest potentially using up to 20 times that, according to the International Energy Agency. The rapid growth of data centers threatens to “undo a huge amount of the progress that we made in terms of moving toward clean energy,” Shiney-Ajay warned. “If we don’t really seriously start to pass policy that mitigates that, then they could be a disaster for our climate.”

Some established environmental organizations have joined the call to halt hyperscale data center construction. A letter to Congress this month, advocating for a nationwide moratorium, was endorsed by over 500 groups, primarily those focused on the environment, climate change, or environmental justice, including Greenpeace USA, Third Act, GreenLatinos, and Food and Water Watch. However, notable groups like the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Nature Conservancy were not among the signatories.

That doesn’t mean they support data centers, though. “The speculative rush to build data centers is harming ratepayers, our climate, and community health, which is why we urgently need protections from states and the federal government,” stated Jeremy Fisher, the Sierra Club’s principal advisor, via email. The organization pushes for Big Tech to adhere to higher environmental and health standards and advocates for using clean energy instead of fossil fuels to power these facilities. “Data centers can and should be powered with renewable energy that does not threaten our environment and our health, our wallets, or our environment,” Fisher noted.

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Thomas Meyer, the organizing projects director at Food and Water Watch, which spearheaded the letter to Congress, argued that using renewable energy for data centers doesn’t solve the issue. In Washington state, for example, Amazon outbid the utility Puget Sound Energy for a massive Oregon solar farm, sparking concerns about competition for renewable resources as Amazon seeks to power its energy-intensive data centers. “What about the things that that solar power would have gone to power instead?” Meyer asked. “You haven’t grown the pie. You’ve just shifted it from one place to another.”

Some major environmental groups may be influenced by Democratic politicians, many of whom, like Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, support data center development. “The unfortunate reality is that some organizations tend to follow rather than lead, especially when it comes to mainstream positions of Democratic Party leaders or elected officials,” Meyer observed.

Meyer saw a similar trend a decade ago while working as a field organizer on campaigns to ban fracking: a disconnect between grassroots energy and mainstream institutions. Established environmental groups tend to move more slowly than grassroots movements, noted Valerie Costa, co-executive director of the Oil and Gas Action Network, a nonprofit supporting grassroots efforts to move the U.S. beyond fossil fuels. “One of the things that grassroots movements do really well is shifting when there are more immediate threats, and being able to respond quickly,” Costa explained.

This was recently evident in Seattle, where the climate activist group 350 Seattle joined the push for a moratorium on new large data centers after news emerged this spring of five major facilities potentially coming to town. If all were built, they would require about one-third of the power that Seattle uses daily. The Seattle City Council passed the moratorium unanimously earlier this month, making it the largest city in the U.S. to pause approvals. For local activists tackling a daunting issue like climate change, it was invigorating to engage in a mission with tangible local results.

“For us, it was a very good on-ramp for people who just want to do something and want to turn that powerlessness into something meaningful,” said Nivi Achanta, the founder and CEO of Soapbox Project, a local climate action group that advocated for the moratorium. The group’s Signal chat buzzed as the city council weighed the policy: “People were, like, pulling out drinks and grabbing their popcorn and actually watching these city council politics unfold in a way that’s so much more fun than anything I’ve experienced outside of this, in the general climate movement,” Achanta said.

In Washington state, known for its progressive climate policies, new natural gas infrastructure driven by power-hungry AI data centers threatens to produce an additional 13.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, about 14 percent of the state’s current annual emissions. That could derail its attempt to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 95 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, as required by the state’s Climate Commitment Act. Even in a blue state, there’s an understanding that opposition to data centers has to be bipartisan if it’s going to be successful, especially since most data centers are being proposed in rural areas. “We can’t just rely on the West Coast, or on the blue corridor from Bellingham down to Vancouver, Washington, to get something done,” said Lauren Redfield, a voluntary organizer with the Washington AI Resistance.

As climate activists join local fights, they may find themselves teaming up with people they don’t agree with on everything, or on much at all. Data centers are a rare issue that unites Americans across the political spectrum, with 75 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of Republicans opposed to building data centers in their area, according to polling from Gallup. All kinds of people — punk musicians in Utah, farmers in Oregon, beauty salon workers in Maryland — are coming out for all kinds of reasons, according to Levin, the host of “The Hum.” But their differences aren’t stopping them from working together.

“Again and again, we hear from organizers who are like, ‘I don’t care if you’re here for climate change, and I’m here because I think it’s going to be ugly, and that person’s here because they hate AI’ — all of us think this is a bad project,” Levin said.

In the first three months of this year, data center opponents blocked or delayed at least 75 facilities worth nearly $130 billion. One reason this resistance has been effective is because of its people power — the hundreds of thousands of people who are turning out to town halls, meeting up on porches, and otherwise showing up to fight. In an age of loneliness and political disillusionment, it’s a sign that something is changing.

“I’m really hopeful that this is the thing that gets communities re-engaged in local politics,” Redfield said. “We’ve seen a lot of apathy over the last several years, and I’m really hoping that this civic engagement can help us build that community that can help us stitch our society back together.”