Kairos Fellowship / MediaJustice Fight Data Centers (2024–ongoing)

From late 2024 onward Kairos Fellowship and MediaJustice — two long-running U.S. Black-led / Brown-led tech-justice organisations — built out a jointly anchored community-organising programme aimed at slowing or stopping the rapid build-out of hyperscale data centres on which generative AI and the wider Big Tech cloud depend. The Kairos programme is published as Fight Data Centers; the MediaJustice programme runs through the organisation's Take Back Tech convening series, the in-house Data Center Fellow position, and the regional research base in the South. The two programmes are sustained, distinct organisationally, and tightly coupled at the public-output and organising-infrastructure layer — co-publishing the canonical national organiser guide, sharing field-organising contact points, and feeding into a wider U.S. organising network that by late 2025 covered 142 activist groups across 24 states and was credited with delaying or stopping roughly $64 billion in data-centre projects between May 2024 and March 2025.

Origins and theory of change

The campaign sits at the intersection of two longer-running lines of work. On the Kairos side, the Fight Data Centers programme is the data-centre extension of the organisation's earlier Big Tech accountability work — the Tech Is Not Neutral and Facebook Logout campaigns through the 2020s — and of the climate-and-Big-Tech research line that produced the July 2025 Google's eco-failures report co-authored by lead researcher Franz Ressel and senior campaign manager Nicole Sugerman. On the MediaJustice side, the data-centre work is the AI-infrastructure extension of the organisation's longer-running carceral-tech and surveillance-organising frame, articulated as "opposing surveillance and opposing data centers is part of the same fight to protect our people from corporate and State harm." Both organisations frame the data-centre build-out as "Big Tech's latest extraction scheme", continuous in form with the long arc of Big Tech extraction the two organisations have campaigned against in the platform and surveillance layers.

The theory of change is organising-infrastructure first and concentrated at the local-permitting and corporate-tenant-investment layers rather than at the federal-legislative layer. Where the corpus's Foxglove / Global Action Plan UK data-centre challenge is a public-law judicial-review programme aimed at a UK ministerial planning decision, and where the Foxglove South Africa data-centre programme works the Constitutional Court track, the Kairos / MediaJustice U.S. programme works the community-organising track on the working theory that hyperscale facilities can be slowed or stopped at the city-council, state-utility-commission, and rezoning layer — and that the corporate tenants whose capital commitments anchor the financing of a proposed site can be peeled off through sustained public campaigning. The December 2025 West Texas Project Matador / Fermi America setback is the campaign's clearest single demonstration of that theory: the first prospective tenant's $150 million funding withdrawal triggered a roughly 50% drop in Fermi's share price and stalled the proposed 11-gigawatt AI infrastructure campus, with MediaJustice campaign specialist Danny Cendejas's "this moment shows that data centers are not inevitable" framing supplying the campaign's headline message.

Organising infrastructure

The campaign's load-bearing organising infrastructure runs through five connected pieces.

The August 2025 organiser guide

On 18 August 2025 Kairos and MediaJustice co-published The Cost of Data Centers to Our Communities — And How to Fight Back, the campaign's anchor public-output document. The full PDF covers data-centre basics; strategies and organising tips for starting a data-centre fight; data-centre impacts and myth busting; research, policy guidance, messaging, and coalitions; and real-life campaign examples — and is positioned explicitly as "a 101 resource for community members and organizers" facing a proposed local site. Print and Spanish versions are available via campaigns@kairosfellows.org.

The September 2025 Southern report and toolkit

On 9 September 2025 MediaJustice released The People Say No: Resisting Data Centers in the South, described as "the first comprehensive, regional analysis of data centers in the South" and covering Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, and South Carolina. Executive director Steven Renderos's launch framing — that "while Big Tech wants the public to believe that the AI boom and rapid data center growth marks progress, our communities are being sold out in the process" — and senior research specialist Jai Dulani's complementary line that "the South has long been a site of both corporate extraction and fierce political resistance" supplied the report's twin framings. A live report launch webinar was held on 17 September 2025. The 48-page People Say No: Resisting Data Centers companion toolkit was released alongside, with case studies, a data fact sheet, an interactive gallery walk of advocacy across the country, and a stated audience of communities "currently battling a data center project or looking to create protective measures."

Regional training

The October 2025 regional organising training in Memphis drew 90+ organisers from across the South, serving as the campaign's first major in-person Southern convening and the organising-side counterpart to MediaJustice's larger biennial Take Back Tech gathering. Kairos's Fight Data Centers programme runs interactive trainings on fighting tech harms in cohort form and through custom facilitation for partner organisations, with organizing@kairosfellows.org as the named training-request address.

The data-centre hotline and Site Fight Guide

Kairos's Fight Data Centers page announces a "data center hotline" — framed as a reboot of the organisation's earlier "popular tech crisis hotline" focused now on data-centre organising — paired with a crowdsourced living Site Fight Guide — Stop Data Centers, Free the Robots public Google document that community groups facing a proposed local facility can consult and contribute to.

Narrative and political-education work

In December 2025 MediaJustice launched its Digital Colonialism series framing data-centre and AI infrastructure as an extension of long-standing extractive technology systems. Executive director Steven Renderos's December 2025 appearance on the WaterHub podcast on western data centres, Jai Dulani's April 2026 Peace & Riot podcast appearance "Dissecting the AI Hype with Amirio Freeman," and the regular press appearances by senior movement building director Myaisha Hayes function as the campaign's narrative-strategy side, locating the data-centre work inside MediaJustice's broader analytical position critical of generative-AI hype and aligned with the surveillance / state-violence frame the organisation has carried for over a decade.

Active fights

The campaign's named active U.S. fights as of late 2025 cover most of the South, Texas, and other affected regions. The xAI / Elon Musk Colossus supercomputer in Memphis — sited next to the historically Black Boxtown neighbourhood — is the campaign's most prominent local fight, with Memphis Communities Against Pollution (MCAP) and the university student coalition Tigers Against Pollution as the named local fighters. Meta's $10 billion data centre in Louisiana's Cancer Alley — a project requiring three new methane gas plants — anchors the campaign's Louisiana track inside the report's regional frame on the South. The $14.5 billion data-centre project in Bessemer, Alabama — facing community concerns about rezoning — is the campaign's Alabama anchor. The Project Matador / Fermi America 11-gigawatt AI infrastructure campus near Amarillo, West Texas — the campaign's clearest named win after the December 2025 prospective-tenant withdrawal — sits alongside Panhandle 1st Coalition's organising work, with potential tenants Oracle, AWS, and Palantir as the named investor pool the campaigning targets and the Purge Palantir campaign as a named adjacent coalition. Beyond the named local fights, the campaign's organising base extends to Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Phoenix, and the wider water-stressed Texas grid where around 40% of U.S. data centres sit in water-stressed areas and Texas alone is projected to use 49 billion gallons of water for data centres in 2025.

Place in the make-AI-good movement

The campaign matters to the wider make-AI-good corpus on four connected counts. First, it is the corpus's only U.S. community-organising and Black-led data-centre opposition campaign, structurally distinct from the corpus's two other data-centre campaigns — the Foxglove / Global Action Plan UK challenge, which works the public-law judicial-review track on a single ministerial planning approval, and the Foxglove South Africa data-centre programme, which works the Constitutional Court track. The U.S. campaign works the community-organising and corporate-tenant-divestment track instead, on the theory that hyperscale facilities can be slowed or stopped at the local-permitting and tenant-investment layers without federal legislation. Second, the August 2025 Kairos / MediaJustice organiser guide is the U.S. movement's anchor public-output document on the data-centre fight — the U.S. analogue of the action-days infrastructure Global Action Plan supplies in the UK alongside Foxglove, and the document through which most subsequent U.S. local data-centre fights pick up the framing. Third, the campaign's transatlantic connective tissue runs through Nicole Sugerman's named co-authorship with Global Action Plan's Oliver Hayes of the April 2026 Not a drop to drink report on the water demand of data centres in water-stressed regions, the same report that supplied the water-side evidence base for the UK data-centre challenge — making the U.S. and UK programmes structurally connected at the research-and-evidence-base layer even as they work distinct legal and organising tracks. Fourth, the campaign's coalition shape — two long-running U.S. national tech-justice organisations co-anchoring a public-output and organiser-training programme, supplying narrative and infrastructure for a wider organising network of 142 activist groups across 24 states, and concentrating tactical work at the local-permitting and corporate-tenant-investment layers — is the corpus's clearest U.S. template for grassroots organising against the physical-infrastructure layer of AI, structurally distinct from the federation-of-chapters template the PauseAI protest cycle records, the strategic-litigation template the Foxglove dockets record, the cross-party joint-statement coalition template the Big Brother Watch LFR coalition records, and the Brussels-secretariat / pan-European-NGO-network template the EDRi EU AI Act campaign records.