What this film is about: 

Every time someone runs an AI search, streams a video, or stores a file in the digital cloud, their action affects the physical realm. Freshwater cools the data servers within massive warehouses paved atop ecosystems, powered by oil and gas infrastructure. Most people rarely consider the location of these facilities, the communities living nearby, or the associated costs to the environment and consumers.

With the rapid arrival of data centers, communities struggle to respond. Although policy makers rush to write regulations and accountability measures, they often cannot pass bills quickly enough. Overloaded power grids force electricity bills to steeply rise while neighborhoods pay the price. Water sources replenish at a slower rate than we consume them, as the UN has famously declared “global water bankruptcy.” Despite the climate crisis, fossil fuels power 56% of all data centers in the United States. Data centers harm those who live nearby with noise pollution, low water pressure, and high energy bills.

Across the Great Lakes Basin, the largest freshwater system on earth, different communities  bear the cost of an infrastructure they have no control over. In Joliet, Illinois, city officials approved Illinois’s largest data center complex on March 19, a 795-acre, $20 billion campus, despite hours of public comment filled with pushback from community members. Ten miles away in Minooka, Illinois, Equinix and village officials held private negotiations under non-disclouse agreements to approve a 340-acre campus on farmers’ lands on the edge of town.  

Near Lake Ontario in New York, the Tonawanda Seneca Nation is fighting a proposed data center at a site directly adjacent to their reservation territory in the Big Woods where Seneca people have hunted, fished, and gathered medicinal plants since time immemorial. In Wisconsin, the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians has spent years fighting Enbridge's Line 5 pipeline, which moves in the long chain of pollution that powers data centers.

However, organized movements are working effortlessly to fend off harm associated with data centers. In Illinois, coalitions champion the POWER Act. In New York, the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) supports lawmakers who want to advance a global trend of legislating the Rights of Nature. In Wisconsin and Michigan, the #StopLine5 movement of tribal nations and allies are powered by grassroots movements who provide legal, technical, and direct action assistance to frontlines. 

This is a pivotal moment in human history where we must decide if we will continue to blaze a path towards our collective destruction or begin to construct a new one. In a time when so many people feel both overwhelmed that AI and data centers are “inevitable” despite the climate crisis, we want to tell a story that uncovers how data centers directly harm a wide range of people and planet, while spotlighting the emerging leaders who are fighting to build a safer planet with determined optimism. We hope this story will rally everyday people to join local movements seeking to safeguard the planet.