Communities fighting data centers refuse to be sites for extraction that help megabillionaires purchase more mansions.
Excerpt from this story from Truthout:
The worldâs top megabillionaires â a list dominated by Big Tech and Wall Street barons â enjoy a gamut of luxuries that are unfathomable for most of us.
Jeff Bezos owns a half-billion-dollar superyacht. Mark Zuckerbergâs portfolio of lush properties that stretches from Palo Alto to Miami Beach is worth nearly as much. Elon Muskâs wealth roughly equals the gross domestic product of Ireland or Belgium. Larry Ellison owns virtually an entire Hawaiian island.
Meanwhile, communities across the U.S. facing the construction and operation of hyperscaled data centers â from Tucson, Arizona, to Memphis, Tennessee, from rural Louisiana to Western New York â are confronting rising electric bills, depletion of water resources, loud and constant noise, ecological degradation, and pollutants, with Black and Brown communities historically impacted by environmental racism disproportionately bearing the brunt.
These two realities â the enormous luxuries enjoyed by the worldâs top megabillionaires, and the hardships imposed on communities by data centers â are bound together, with the former resting on extraction from the latter.
The very same corporate moguls who rank among the worldâs wealthiest people, enjoying the heights of opulence, are also among the top owners and profiteers off the data center boom. Positioned at the apex of Wall Street and Big Tech power, these data center oligarchs are overseeing the avalanche of data centers that Americans deeply and broadly oppose. While localities across the U.S. resist the impacts of the data center boom, these oligarchs, who have enormous personal ownership stakes in their companies and firms, experience windfall profits that sustain their opulent lifestyles.
