The War Intervention: AI, Data Centers, and the Environment

the issue of militarism is still left out of climate conversations.

SCHEERPOST, January 28, 2026 By: Aaron Kirshenbaum for Codepink

Early on Saturday, January 3rd, Venezuela was attacked on behalf of oil, mineral, tech, and
weapons profiteers in a regime change operation. Since then, the Trump administration has
threatened Iran, Greenland, Cuba, Colombia, and Mexico. What unites these threats? The
U.S.’s quest for endless resource extraction to power its increasingly deadly global empire. And
it’s not slowing down. These resource wars and “operations” are emerging as the AI drive also
ramps up. In July, Palantir and the Pentagon signed a 10-year, $10 billion agreement. In
April 2025, Palantir won a $30 million contract with ICE — a significant development in their
decade-plus-long partnership that we are now seeing play out in their increasingly militarized,
unrestrained murders and abductions in Minneapolis and around the country. This increasingly
inextricable partnership between AI and the war economy is throwing us into a fast track
of climate and environmental chaos that threatens us all.

In August, I learned about an AI program created by the U.S.-armed Israeli military called
“Where’s Daddy.” The program is designed to track individuals Israel is targeting in order to kill
them at home with their families. In October 2023, the AI war giant Palantir entered into a
contract with the Israeli military. Since 2021, the Israeli Occupation Forces have been working
with tech companies like Google on AI programs such as Project Nimbus, used to surveil and
murder Palestinians. “Where’s Daddy” and other overlapping systems represent the newest
phase of this. The program characterizes the families of these alleged combatants as “collateral
damage” and is often far from accurate, killing entire families without the “intended targets” even
being there. The tech companies developing these programs do not have anyone’s “safety” or
“security” in mind; they are solely motivated by profit. This cruelty is no surprise— these
companies are the same ones building toxic data centers across the U.S., largely in working-
class and Black and Brown communities, in the newest phase of environmental injustice.
We’ve been hearing about AI more and more as it enters the commercial market in increasingly
pervasive ways. In particular, much has been reported about AI data centers entering
communities and the opposition to them. Many of these fights have been taken up by
environmental organizations; it’s estimated that data centers could consume approximately 21%
of global energy by 2030. In order to sustain this energy use, data centers need cooling. Mid-
sized data centers use as much water as a city of 50,000 people. Meta’s Hyperion data center
in Louisiana is projected to use as much water as the entire city of New Orleans. Another
Meta center in Cheyenne, Wyoming, is projected to use more power than the state of
Wyoming itself.

These centers not only increase electricity bills for communities that can’t afford them, but they
also generate significant air, water, and noise pollution. Some centers regularly use diesel
“emergency” generators to meet increased demand. Each generator is the size of a railcar, and
thousands are littered across data center hotspots like Northern Virginia. As a result, toxic
chemicals are seeping into the lungs of residents, causing asthma and long-term illness. Data centers are known to create noise pollution, with constant hums that can lead to hearing loss,
anxiety, cardiovascular stress, and a host of other long-term issues. Furthermore, equipment is
certain to break down and lead to toxic waste and electronic pollution.
“Critical” minerals are required for the operation of these data centers. The process of obtaining
these minerals, supposedly also used for green technology, requires the militarization,
destabilization, and total plunder of mineral-rich regions. These minerals are supposedly
“critical” for energy transitions, and some have advocated more “sustainable” methods for
maintaining data centers through “green” technologies.

The use of these minerals is clear: The Pentagon recently became the largest shareholder in
MP Minerals, one of the largest mining companies in the Western Hemisphere. Why?
Aluminum for fighter jets. Titanium for missiles. And copper, lithium, cobalt, and many others for
data center batteries and semiconductors. The more data centers are built, the more minerals
are needed. This process of extraction has murdered millions in the Congo, destroying the soil,
water, and forest: one of the largest “lungs” of the planet. It has led to the newest phase of
imperialist aggression on Venezuela, a mineral-rich country with the largest oil reserves in the
world (oil, of course, is also essential for data centers). Additionally, it has led to the attempted
subordination of the Philippines to semiconductor production. The U.S. also seeks to use the
archipelago as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” for the U.S.’s looming war with China, its largest
competitor in the AI and mineral race.

These are the impacts we already know to be devastating. But this is also new technology,
which means there’s a lot we don’t know and a lot that’s being intentionally hidden. Lack of
transparency is the norm in this industry. As data centers rapidly expand and buy up land
around the country, the actual companies behind them hide behind non-disclosure
agreements. This is not dissimilar to the intentional concealment of the military’s role in global
emissions, enacted through U.S. pressure at the third U.N. Climate Change Conference in 1997.

Decades later, the issue of militarism is still left out of climate conversations.
The parallel makes sense, considering how the AI industry has fused with the war machine. The
U.S. military is one of the most environmentally destructive forces on the planet. In its oil
consumption alone, the U.S. military is the world’s largest institutional polluter. The U.S.’s 800+
bases in 80 countries globally are known to regularly leak jet fuel and cancer-causing PFAS
chemicals, along with a toxic cocktail of hundreds of other chemicals. While training exercises
like RIMPAC in the Asia-Pacific region authorize the deaths of thousands of sea creatures, in
environmental sacrifice zones like Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, toxic waste from military
facilities has killed infants hours after birth. In bomb testing sites like Vieques, off the coast of
mainland Puerto Rico, lung cancer and bronchitis rates have been shown to be 200% higher
than on the mainland for men, and 280% for women. And the oil-motivated “war on terror”
emitted 1.2 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from 2001-2017.
Now we are entering a new era of resource wars that will further destroy the planet as the AI
race with China accelerates. The relationship between AI and the U.S. military goes beyond the Pentagon’s contracts with Palantir, Meta, and Microsoft………………………………………………………………………..

No part of this is sustainable — not the war economy, not unending extraction, regardless of
how much “green tech” it produces, and not an AI-driven speculative economy. We cannot
afford to have splintered conversations either; these AI and tech companies are war profiteers.
The new Cold War on China drives this. The genocide in Palestine drives this. The war on
Venezuela, Latin America, and the Caribbean drives this. And so our organizing must be unified
against the impacts, mechanisms, and causes. Against data centers and the wars that drive
them.We need to stop the blood. But we can’t lose sight of why and how the bullets are
fired. https://scheerpost.com/2026/01/28/the-war-intervention-ai-data-centers-and-the-environment/