Fighting Data Centers from California to DC

Here at Third Act, we’re now fighting a two-headed hydra: Big Oil and Big Tech have launched a full-on assault on our planet, with both of them polluting our water, air, and soil with fossil fuels and AI-driven data centers. The fight for moratoria on data centers is also a fight to protect our democracy—unchecked AI is being used to spread misinformation and being pitched as a tool to wrongfully purge people from voter rolls. There’s a reason why Trump has been buddying up with all those corrupt tech billionaires.

Third Actors are uniquely positioned to organize against these techno-fascist billionaires. With your decades of activism, you not only bring your wisdom to this new fight but passion—for inspiring younger organizers and fighting for their future on this planet as well as yours. Third Act Actions Lab recently did a tour of Big Tech’s offices in DC, sharing how the data center frenzy is harming our planet and calling for a national moratoria (read their blog here); meanwhile, Third Act Nevada is working hard to stop the proposed Boulder City data center—recently, the Planning Commission there voted 6-1 to not move forward with the data center. There’s more of the fight to come, but you can read about that big win here.

On a personal note, I’ve seen the impact of organizing on the ground in my own hometown. You might have heard that the city of Monterey Park, a municipality in Los Angeles County, recently became the first city in California to ban data centers. This is meaningful to me on multiple levels: it is a huge win for climate justice, but Monterey Park is also the place where my mother and her siblings grew up. As a Chicana-Chinese woman, Monterey Park feels inextricable from my identity—the city is over 60% Asian and over 20% Latino. I have many memories of spending time there, walking its hills, sitting in its parks, enjoying dim sum on the weekends.

Despite its small population of 61,000, the residents of Monterey Park were able to take down a tech behemoth (HMC StratCap) that wanted to build a 250,000-square foot data center which would have strained the electrical grid, emitted harmful air pollution in a city that already sits far too close to a freeway interchange, and released a constant hum that would have been dangerous not only to humans but to local birds and other wildlife.

Residents showed up to city council meetings and shared comments late into the night. They spoke about rising energy costs, about AI taking jobs, and about the desire for parks, bike lanes, libraries—places and infrastructure that make our lives and communities more beautiful and vibrant; in short, the opposite of a sterile facility for computer servers.

I wanted to share this story with you as inspiration as this campaign gains momentum nationwide.

If you haven’t already, please sign up for our next data center webinar on June 9 and learn how to build large, powerful coalitions to fight back against any centers being built near you. Some of these are being proposed under-the-radar, so we will all need to stay plugged-in on the local level and work within our communities. Luckily, we’ve got powerful volunteers and Working Groups all over the nation that know how to do just that.

Christine Larusso

Christine Larusso (she/her) is Third Act’s Senior Communications Manager. She lives on unceded Tongva land—aka Los Angeles.