The People Say No: Resisting Data Centers in the South

The People Say No: Resisting Data Centers in the South is a regional report published by MediaJustice on 9 September 2025 and described on its own landing page as "the first comprehensive, regional analysis of data centers in the South, with original research and case studies." It covers five Southern states — Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, and South Carolina — and frames the U.S. South's hyperscale data-centre build-out as the latest chapter in a long arc of extractive corporate investment in Black, brown, and working-class communities. The report was released alongside MediaJustice's own companion People Say No: Resisting Data Centers Toolkit on 17 September 2025; both are MediaJustice-solo artefacts, distinct from the upstream 18 August 2025 organiser guide The Cost of Data Centers to Our Communities — And How to Fight Back, which MediaJustice "developed in partnership with Kairos Fellowship" as the joint national 101 organiser guide.

The report's central claim, as launched by MediaJustice executive director Steven Renderos, is 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". Senior research specialist Jai Dulani's framing supplies the analytical complement: "The South has long been a site of both corporate extraction and fierce political resistance. At a time where Big Tech is rapidly expanding data centers in Black, brown and working class communities that drain natural resources, energy and clean water, organizers across the region are actively rising up, fighting back and halting data center projects from being constructed in their communities." The launch framing — that tech corporations are "quietly draining the South — economically and environmentally" — names the four named hyperscale operators (Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta) as the principal capital sources for the build-out, and locates the regional fight inside MediaJustice's longer-running carceral-tech and surveillance frame: "opposing surveillance and opposing data centers is part of the same fight to protect our people from corporate and State harm."

The report's evidence base is the empirical companion to the wider U.S. organising network MediaJustice anchors. By late 2025 that network 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 per MediaJustice senior movement building director Myaisha Hayes's Nonprofit Quarterly account; a parallel December 2025 Nonprofit Quarterly long-read by Iris M. Crawford-Maskell — named after the report's own title — surfaces the supporting national numbers the regional analysis is calibrated against: over 5,400 U.S. data centres operating by 2025, approximately 40% of them sited in water-stressed areas, Texas alone projected to use 49 billion gallons of water for data centres in 2025, and roughly $1.2 million in identified tech-industry political-influence spending during and after the 2024 U.S. elections. Inside the five Southern states the report covers, named fights include the xAI / Elon Musk Colossus supercomputer in Memphis (sited adjacent to the historically Black Boxtown neighbourhood, with Memphis Communities Against Pollution and the University of Memphis student coalition Tigers Against Pollution as the named local fighters); Meta's $10 billion data centre in Louisiana's Cancer Alley, requiring three new methane gas plants; and the $14.5 billion data-centre rezoning fight in Bessemer, Alabama.

Within the corpus, The People Say No is the U.S. Black-led / Southern-regional / community-organising publication-side anchor of the in-corpus Kairos Fellowship / MediaJustice Fight Data Centers campaign. It is the regional / Southern empirical companion to the campaign's national organiser-guide track — the 18 August 2025 Kairos / MediaJustice Cost of Data Centers organiser guide supplies the 101 framing and the strategies-and-tactics layer; the September 2025 report and toolkit pair supplies the regional original research and the case-study base from inside the U.S. South. The report sits inside MediaJustice's longer-running Take Back Tech programme — the in-house Data Center Fellow position and the broader Take Back Tech convening series — and inside Kairos's Fight Data Centers programme, which routes community fights through the data-centre hotline and the crowdsourced Site Fight Guide that the regional report's case studies populate. Read alongside the corpus's other two anchoring data-centre and Big Tech climate-and-infrastructure publications — Kairos's July 2025 Google's Eco-Failures on the upstream operator's emissions trajectory and Global Action Plan and Kairos's April 2026 Not a drop to drink on the UK water-security side — The People Say No completes the corpus's first transatlantic publication-side triangulation on AI infrastructure: the U.S. national upstream-operator emissions critique (Kairos / Google), the U.S. Southern regional community-organising case study base (MediaJustice / People Say No), and the UK water-and-planning evidence base (Global Action Plan / Foxglove) — three different evidentiary registers on the same physical build-out, sharing senior personnel and analytical posture across the Nicole-Sugerman-and-Oliver-Hayes co-authorship axis. The named local fighters the report anchors on — Memphis Communities Against Pollution and Tigers Against Pollution on the Boxtown / xAI Colossus fight, and the Panhandle 1st Coalition on the West Texas Project Matador setback — are each queued for the corpus's local-groups slice as the first three U.S. data-centre opposition local-group anchors in the corpus.