Do you use ChatGPT? Do you talk to Siri on your phone? If so, you’ve helped fuel the rise in data centers. Now, the energy-hungry, water-thirsty centers are coming to places in the Southwest, including the lands of native peoples. That was the topic of a panel discussion Friday in Window Rock, Arizona, organized by Diné C.A.R.E., a Navajo environmental organization. Diné C.A.R.E. executive director Robyn Jackson said five data centers have been proposed in and near the Navajo Nation, three in Arizona and two in New Mexico, including one in Shiprock. Northern Arizona University Professor Karen Jarratt-Snider said artificial intelligence, which is now present in almost every aspect of our lives, requires huge amounts of energy and water. Yet centers are being built in hot, arid states such as Arizona even as it and six other Colorado River Basin states wrangle over how to allocate the river’s water. Snider said tribal nations have water rights independent of those Colorado River water rights, but she asked, “If there’s not enough water to go around now and we keep inviting data centers in, how long will it be before people come to indigenous nations and say, ‘we want to renegotiate your water rights’?”
Gail Binkly is a career journalist who has worked for the Colorado Springs Gazette and Cortez Journal, and was the editor of the Four Corners Free Press, based in Cortez.