Going forward, one of the major challenges communities will face is the federal government. In the president’s AI Action Plan, the Trump administration said the US must “build and maintain vast AI infrastructure and the energy to power it. To do that, we will continue to reject radical climate dogma and bureaucratic red tape, as the Administration has done since Inauguration Day.”
In Memphis, that’s already playing out. “The Trump administration has stepped in and tried to intervene in the lawsuit the NAACP filed against Elon Musk’s xAI, and their intervention is on the basis of national security,” explains Aya Ibrahim, senior economic and security fellow at the AI Now Institute, which studies the social impact of AI. “I think that will be a recurring challenge organizers are going to come up against.”
All of that might make it feel like opposing AI infrastructure is impossible, but that’s not how Ibrahim sees it. “It feels impossible until it’s not, and we have no choice but to figure this out.”
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