Title image: Deborah Lupton / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
As two teacher-scholars working in Arkansas, we have participated in many conversations about the so-called inevitability of generative AI and what higher education needs to do to meet this moment of technological change. At the same time, we are watching communities across the US and beyond fight to keep data centers that power GenAI (and other cloud-based technologies) out of their backyards. We worry, too, now that this fight is coming to Arkansas. In the Fall of 2025, Google announced its plans for its own $10 billion data center complex in West Memphis, AR, just across the Mississippi River from Elon Musk’s xAI data center that has made national headlines for its horrific environmental and health impacts on the historically Black community known as Boxtown that it is located within four miles of the Colossus. Though Google claims the project will put Arkansas at the forefront of digital innovation, Google will reap the financial benefits. As KATV reported, “The project, approved by the West Memphis City Council in May, will include a PILOT (payment-in-lieu-of-taxes) incentive based on the $10 billion Google investment, with the possibility of up to $50 billion in personal property tax abatements over the course of the agreement.” The environmental costs will be shouldered by West Memphis in Arkansas, a community that is 64% Black, and of course, South Memphians in Tennessee who are only a little under 20 miles away. This news comes after the announcement of Musk breaking ground on another data center in Southaven, Mississippi (which is also less than 20 miles from South Memphis). Though facilitated by shady state politics, air pollution has no state borders in the newly proclaimed Digital Delta.
The West Memphis Google Campus is not the only data center that could be coming to Arkansas. According to the Arkansas Advocate, city officials representing Little Rock approved a “memorandum of understanding” with Willowbend Capital, a firm representing an unnamed Fortune 100 company, land to be bought and developed for a $1 billion, 300,000 square foot data center along the Arkansas River at the Port of Little Rock. Conway city officials have approved a similar memorandum with Forgelight for a similar $1 billion, 300,000 square foot data center to be built along the Arkansas River on Lollie Road. As noted in the Arkansas Advocate, these memoranda likely refer to the same plan given that Willowbend Capital and Forgelight “were both incorporated by the same man, Michael Montfort, and share the same Little Rock address.” As has been the case in South Memphis, Chesapeake, and Tucson, the secrecy surrounding this plan and its developer has effectively cut the community out of the conversation, limiting public input and scrutiny. And these plans are always accompanied by claims about the positive economic impact for the communities they build in. And yet, those economic benefits are significantly more limited than their grandiose announcements claim: frequently, even large data center projects employ fewer than 50 people. But the environmental impacts, as Boxtown residents and Memphis community organizers remind us, are widespread and long-lasting.
Data centers frequently strain and overburden electrical grids, use scarce water resources, worsen noise, and perpetuate environmental racism on communities long harmed by industrial pollution, as we have seen in South Memphis. In the last few years, data centers have been in the news quite frequently, as demands for computing power driven by a proliferation of GenAI products and product integrations have led to a boom in data center construction. Elon Musk’s data center has garnered national attention as the historically Black community has pushed back, highlighting both the bad local politics and the detrimental impacts of data centers. Talking to Politico about Musk’s data center, KeShaun Pearson (who leads the grassroots organization Memphis Community Against Pollution) called his community a “sacrifice zone”: “It’s amazing when you grow up and realize how redlining has allowed these industries to kill your family. Elon Musk is a representation of the oligarchy we already knew was operating under Jim Crow. It’s a familiar evil.”
Communities across the United States are discovering tech companies’ intentions to build data centers in their backyards, with little regard for already-strained (and aging) power grids, drought-prone areas, and the rising utility prices frequently associated with new data centers. Yes, that’s right: an increase in data centers is directly responsible for higher electric bills for everyone. Given the impacts of data centers, communities are fighting back. In Chesapeake, VA, for example, when residents learned about a proposed data center in town, they organized quickly and successfully lobbied their city council to unanimously vote against the project. See, too, resistance to Beale Infrastructure’s planned data center just outside Tucson, Arizona, where community opposition resulted in the city’s decision to decline to provide water access to the planned data center. The pushback in Chesapeake and Tucson is not isolated; NPR noted: “As resistance has mounted and gotten organized, more data center projects are being delayed or outright rejected—16 projects nationally between May of last year and this past March.” Still, however, NPR reporter Ryan Murphy warned, “Use of AI applications is skyrocketing, and the data centers to handle all of that have to go somewhere.” These data centers, Financial Times climate reporter Kenza Bryan warns, “are massively contributing to the continued rise in power demand, which itself contributes to the continued rise in global emissions…it’s growing faster than grid capacities. And even more importantly, it’s growing faster than renewable energy.” Increasing AI use—driven largely by the continued growth of generative AI products like ChatGPT—appears to be a significant contributing factor in the ongoing data center boom.
In the face of these concrete and growing harms to historically marginalized communities, we have a responsibility as literacy teachers and practitioners to consider how our individual digital choices impact both our local communities and those beyond our backyards. The truth is that individual decisions about cloud-based technologies aren’t so individual. As the examples of South Memphis, TN, West Memphis, AR, and Southhaven, MS make abundantly clear, state lines and town borders don’t matter when air pollution and water aquifer depletion are on the line.
In Refusing Generative AI in Writing Studies, we wrote with Jennifer Sano-Franchini about how refusal is a pragmatic and principled response to the imposition of GenAI. Refusal, or the strategic decision to not use GenAI when and where it is possible, orients us as writers and individuals to be more community-minded, particularly when considering how this technology—and others like it, including Zoom and Facebook, as two examples—impacts the environment. Here are some practical strategies for educators and literacy advocates who want to resist and refuse data center development and expansion in our backyards and beyond:
- We can help students understand the often hidden implications of GenAI technologies for bias, environment, and democracy. We can help students develop critical digital cultural literacy—critical awareness of how GenAI and other digital writing technologies shape writing environments and writers themselves. Critical digital cultural literacies help us examine the values, goals, and power structures embedded in digital writing technologies while thinking critically about the impact of these technologies on learners and communities. For example, literacy educators might use the websites of community-based organizations like “Stop Sail” (which was created by residents impacted by a data center project in rural Coweta County, GA, just outside of Atlanta) to talk about how communities frame these projects and their local impacts. This approach allows us to focus with students and others on the importance of storytelling in community-responsible work.
- We can push for language diversity and justice in educational and professional contexts. As Carmen Kynard has argued, the disciplinary commitment in writing studies to hyperstandardization and white language is in no small part responsible for the success of GenAI technologies like ChatGPT. Pushing back on linguistic racism is key to refusing GenAI in literacy education and beyond because, as we’ve argued elsewhere, algorithmic and linguistic justice are inextricably linked.
- We can make intentional individual choices regarding cloud-based technologies that acknowledge our impacts on and connections to community. How can we take stock of our engagement with energy intensive tech and make sustainable, community-driven choices? By considering how much energy and how many resources are consumed by using social media like TikTok and streaming content on platforms like Netflix, we can work to make more mindful choices. Given recent reporting about how AI is worsening attacks on libraries, checking out books, movies, and other media from the library is another way to both show our support for these vital public goods while also limiting our investments in private, for-profit entities like Netflix, Audible, and Spotify. Additionally, we can recognize our place within institutions and work to hold them and ourselves accountable. How can educational institutions make choices about GenAI and cloud-based technologies that account for both digital damage and our impact on surrounding communities?
- Finally, we can work alongside our neighbors, both near and far, to support community efforts against data center construction because we know community pressure can and does work. For example, in Kalkaska County, MI, resident pushback on a proposed data center and power plant forced the company involved to withdraw the project. In an announcement in November 2025, Rocklocker LLC President Matt Rine said, “We sought public input because we want to be partners with the community we live and work in. And we heard you. That is why my company and Kalkaska Go will end its pursuit of a data center.” Across the US, community organizations are pushing back and organizing against data center projects, and there’s so much we can learn from these organizations and organizations like the Southern Environmental Law Center, which has been doing organizing and environmental justice work across the southeastern US for the last 40 years.
For educators and literacy advocates, the challenges posed by Big Tech expansion might seem insurmountable, but our work can help bring about important changes to how we think about, interact with, and challenge tech encroachment and development in community—in writing classrooms, libraries, and other spaces dedicated to public enrichment and literacy expansion.
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