2026 Theses Master's

Environment for Profit and People for Disposal: The AI Industry’s Role in Environmental Injustice in the Era of Digital Industrialization

Meltzer, Isabel

This project draws on the concept of environmental justice and intends to build upon growing research regarding the environmental, social, economic, and public health impacts resulting from the current planning and political processes involving data centers and the Artificial Intelligence (AI) industry, particularly on historically working class, black and brown, and/or otherwise systemically marginalized communities in the United States.

This research will also discuss the theoretical and ideological drive behind this industry, analyzed through concepts of environmental extraction and exploitation, primitive accumulation, the Jevons Paradox, reactionary populism, as well as a concept that will be referred to as the “efficiency epidemic,” largely produced and perpetuated by the neoliberal ideology specifically epitomized by the insatiable capitalistic American Dream.

Since everything is measured in dollars in this system, efficiency thus becomes solely about economy. This drive consistently pushes for eternal progress, limitless production, to make everything bigger, better, faster–more, more, more–but almost always at the expense and exploitation of systemically disenfranchised populations. AI is the perfect invention for such a system. The study incorporates existing and collected environmental, health, economic, and social data in two selected case study locations with the objective of providing a clearer picture of data centers’ and the AI industry’s role in perpetuating environmental injustice in the United States, sustained through historical trends of neoliberal industrial capitalism.