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The Seminole Nation of Oklahoma just became the first Indigenous nation to officially ban data center construction from lands under its jurisdiction.
After a tech startup approached Seminole leaders asking to allow a data center on their lands, the Tribal Council voted 24 to 0 to enact a “moratorium on the advancement of generative artificial intelligence technology and hyperscale data center development within the Seminole Nation and within tribal lands and territories,” Native News Online reported.
According to the news agency, the startup had asked the Nation to sign both a non-disclosure agreement and a letter of intent to construct a data center on its sovereign reservation. Mekusukey Band Representative Glen Chebon Kernell, a member of the Tribal Council who introduced the resolution banning data center development, first made the public aware of the startup’s plans at an assembly on March 3rd.
At the meeting, dozens of Tribal members and their non-Indigenous neighbors expressed their concerns with data centers and their staggering environmental footprint. That’s a widely popular sentiment throughout the US, including among non-Indigenous rural Oklahomans. According to a recent poll, 39 percent of Americans said data centers were “mostly bad” for the environment, compared to just 4 percent who believe the opposite.
“When the public found out, there was really not a lot of argument,” Kernell told NNO. “We’re just one voice of a growing tidal wave of concerns. Our fight is just one small piece of a collective puzzle.”
Honor the Earth, an Indigenous-led climate organization that runs a data center tracker, joined forces with the Tribal Council to inform the public.
“We applaud the Seminole Nation for their leadership on this issue, and we look forward to other tribal leaders following suit,” Krystal Two Bulls, executive director of Honor the Earth, told NNO. “As Sovereign Nations, we need not participate in the extractive colonial systems of generative AI and hyperscale data centers or their false, predatory economic promises at the expense of our lands and waters, communities and economies, security and sovereignty.”
More on data centers: Small Towns Are Rising Up Against AI Data Centers
