AI & Data Centers

Bernie Sanders calls for pause in AI development: ‘What are they gonna do when people have no jobs?’

Big Tech Unchecked: A toolkit for community action - Tuesday, January 13 at 6 p.m. online. REGISTER HERE. 

Join Healthy Climate Wisconsin, the Midwest Environmental Advocates, the Sierra Club-Wisconsin Chapter, and Wisconsin's Green Fire as we walk through the new toolkit: Hyperscale Data Centers in Wisconsin: Big Tech Unchecked, A toolkit for Community Action
 

Data Drain: The Land and Water Impacts of the AI Boom
By Jon Gorey, October 17, 2025 from The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. 

"Absent an avalanche of new, clean power, most data centers are adding copious amounts of greenhouse gases to our collective emissions, at a time when science demands we cut them sharply to limit the worst impacts of climate change. Louisiana regulators in August approved plans to build three new gas power plants to offset the expected electricity demand from Meta’s Hyperion AI data center."

From Wisconsin Chapter Sierra Club: In Wisconsin, dozens of data centers have been proposed, and some have been approved with little comprehensive environmental review that looks at the cumulative impacts of these data centers and the infrastructure being built to support them.

Currently, there are no guardrails for data centers, including clean energy requirements, protections for customers of the utilities that will be powering these massive energy users, or limits on water use. 

Unchecked, data centers could wreak havoc on our water and climate, consuming staggering amounts of energy, and Wisconsinites could be on the hook to pay for them.

New legislation that has been proposed would address these concerns with data centers. Learn more here.

Astrophysicist and science journalist Adam Becker has his eye on the dreams of Silicon Valley’s billionaire elite—and he’s unimpressed. He says Silicon Valley’s “heartless, baseless, and foolish obsessions”—with escaping death, building AI tyrants, and creating limitless growth—pervert public discourse and distract us from real social problems.

He argues that tech billionaires have decided that they should determine our futures for us, and that the only good future for humanity is one powered by technology: trillions of humans living in space, functionally immortal, served by superintelligent AIs.

In More Everything Forever, Becker investigates what he calls wildly implausible and often profoundly immoral visions of tomorrow—and shows why, in reality, there is no good evidence that they will, or should, come to pass. Nevertheless, these obsessions fuel fears that overwhelm reason—for example, that a rogue AI will exterminate humanity—at the expense of essential work on solving crucial problems like climate change. What’s more, these futuristic visions cloak a hunger for power under dreams of space colonies and digital immortality. The giants of Silicon Valley claim that their ideas are based on science, but Becker says the reality is darker: they come from a jumbled mix of shallow futurism and racist pseudoscience.