The AI Bubble and the Sacrifice Zone
November 24, 2025
by Dwaign Tyndal
Earlier this year, Elon Musk built a gas-burning power plant large enough to power a small city, claimed it was exempt from air pollution laws, and placed it next to Boxtown, a Black neighborhood in Memphis where he had built a new data center. People in Boxtown started breathing polluted air – and dying faster.
This is what the AI bubble looks like today: pursuing “progress” at all costs, and putting Black and Brown people in the sacrifice zone. But what will happen once this bubble pops?
You don’t have to be an expert to see the red flags: circular investments, billions in valuation without any path to profits, and widespread articles calling it a “Ponzi scheme” and “the ultimate bubble.” Even without popping, the AI bubble is extracting wealth and health from Black and Brown frontline communities to fund vast, profitless tech projects powered by zombie fossil fuel plants.
When it bursts, the AI bubble will wreak havoc on our economy, and it could hurt communities like ours in Roxbury the most: on the frontlines of data-center pollution and power-price spikes, on the margins of politics, and one lost paycheck away from the edge.
When it bursts, the AI bubble will wreak havoc on our economy, and it could hurt communities like ours in Roxbury the most
The Hidden Costs of Data Centers
Big Tech is racing to build data centers – warehouses filled with computers and advanced GPUs. But there’s one thing they’re less eager to brag about: the electricity it takes to power them. Despite their futuristic claims, data centers are largely fueled by last-century technology: coal, gas, and nuclear power plants.
The impacts are devastating. Musk’s Memphis data center is the most visible case, but there are dozens like it. Tech giants are funding new gas pipelines and power plants, purchasing old coal-burning generators, and even buying all the power from the 51-year-old nuclear plant at Three Mile Island, now back online to serve Microsoft.
Increased air pollution means more people suffer and die from asthma, heart disease, and lung disease. Public health experts tell us there’s nothing speculative about this – we can measure the impacts in asthma attacks and dead bodies.
We demand a moratorium on data center construction in environmental-justice communities.
Our Demands
The AI bubble treats our neighborhoods as sacrifice zones, where air-pollution and water-use regulations can be ignored, where speculative technology can be built overnight without regard for the law, where local health impacts aren’t important.
We won’t accept it. Our communities matter.
Let’s take the lessons from the mortgage crisis: unregulated capital markets create risk and enact real harms – especially on marginalized and vulnerable populations. We should act now to limit those harms.
We demand a moratorium on data center construction in environmental-justice communities. We demand criminal investigations into companies knowingly polluting our people. We demand these companies post bonds large enough to pay for their health impacts – not later, but now.
When new data facilities are proposed, we must be honest about their huge, negative impacts on local communities. They should source only new, renewable energy, rather than propping up outdated power plants. Instead of giving them deep discounts and tax exemptions, they should pay the real cost of these impacts.
Our communities must be included in the planning and decision-making process. Community representatives need to be at the table, and our voices must count.
the most-vulnerable communities: the Black, Brown, and low-income folks on the front lines.
