Written by Aaron Kirshenbaum – January 29, 2026
In the early morning hours of Saturday, January 3, Venezuela was attacked on behalf of oil, mineral, technology, and weapons interests in regime change operations. Since then, the Trump administration has threatened Iran, Greenland, Cuba, Colombia, and Mexico. What unites these threats? The United States pursues endless resource extraction to strengthen its increasingly dangerous global empire. And it’s not slowing down. As AI advances, these resource wars and “strategies” are emerging. In July, Palantir and the Department of Defense signed a 10-year, $10 billion contract. In April 2025, Palantir was awarded a $30 million contract with ICE. This is a significant development in a partnership between the two companies that has spanned more than a decade, and we are now witnessing increasingly militarized, unrestrained killings and kidnappings in Minneapolis and across the country. The increasingly inseparable partnership between AI and the war economy throws us into a rapid trajectory of climate and environmental chaos that threatens us all.
In August, I learned about an AI program developed by the U.S. Israeli military called “Where’s Daddy.” The program is designed to track individuals targeted by Israel for killing in their homes with their families. In October 2023, AI warfare giant Palantir signed a contract with the Israeli military. Since 2021, Israeli occupation forces have been collaborating with tech companies such as Google on AI programs such as Project Nimbus that will be used to monitor and kill Palestinians. “Where’s Daddy” and other overlapping systems represent the latest stage of this. The program characterizes the families of alleged fighters as “collateral damage,” but it is far from accurate in many cases, killing entire families without even having “intended targets.” The technology companies developing these programs do not have anyone’s “safety” or “security” in mind. They are motivated only by profit. This atrocity is not surprising. These are the same companies that are building harmful data centers across the United States, primarily in working-class and Black and brown communities, in the latest phase of environmental injustice.
As AI enters the commercial market and becomes more and more pervasive, you’re hearing about it more and more. In particular, there has been a lot of press about the entry of AI data centers into the community and the movements against it. Many of these battles are being taken up by environmental groups. It is estimated that data centers could consume approximately 21% of the world’s energy by 2030. To maintain this energy usage, data centers require cooling. A medium-sized data center uses the same amount of water as a city with 50,000 people. Meta’s Hyperion data center in Louisiana is projected to use as much water as the entire city of New Orleans. Another metacenter in Cheyenne, Wyoming, is projected to use more electricity than Wyoming itself.
These centers not only increase electricity bills in areas that cannot afford to pay them, but they also generate significant air, water, and noise pollution. Some centers regularly use diesel “emergency” generators to meet increased demand. Each generator is the size of a railroad car, and thousands of them are scattered across data center hotspots like Northern Virginia. As a result, toxic chemicals seep into residents’ lungs, causing asthma and long-term illnesses. Data centers are known to cause noise pollution, and the constant noise pollution can cause hearing loss, anxiety, cardiovascular stress, and other long-term problems. Additionally, equipment is guaranteed to fail, leading to toxic waste and electronic pollution.
These data centers require “critical” minerals to operate. The process of obtaining these minerals, presumably also used for green technology, requires the militarization, destabilization, and outright plundering of mineral-rich regions. These minerals are considered “essential” to the energy transition, and some advocate more “sustainable” ways to maintain data centers using “green” technologies.
The uses of these minerals are obvious. The Department of Defense recently became the largest shareholder in MP Minerals, one of the largest mining companies in the Western Hemisphere. why? Aluminum for fighter jets. Titanium for missiles. Copper, lithium, and cobalt are also used in data center batteries and semiconductors. The more data centers are built, the more minerals are required. This extraction process has killed millions of people in Congo and destroyed soil, water, and forests, one of Earth’s largest “lungs.” This led to the latest phase of imperialist aggression against Venezuela, a mineral-rich country with the world’s largest oil reserves (oil is also essential for data centers, of course). Furthermore, it led to attempts to subjugate the Philippines in semiconductor production. The US is also seeking to use the archipelago as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” for an impending war with China, its biggest competitor in the AI and minerals race.
These are effects that are already known to be devastating. But it’s also a new technology, which means there’s a lot we don’t know or have been deliberately hidden. Lack of transparency is the norm in this industry. As data centers expand rapidly and buy up land across the country, the actual companies behind them hide behind non-disclosure agreements. This is similar to the deliberate concealment of the military’s role in global emissions, enacted under pressure from the United States at the Third United Nations Climate Change Conference in 1997. Decades later, the issue of militarism remains excluded from discussions about climate change.
This parallel makes sense given how the AI industry has merged with the war machine. The US military is one of the most environmentally destructive forces on earth. In terms of oil consumption alone, the US military is the world’s largest institutional polluter. More than 800 U.S. bases in 80 countries around the world are known to regularly leak jet fuel and carcinogenic PFAS chemicals, as well as a toxic cocktail of hundreds of other chemicals. Exercises like RIMPAC in the Asia-Pacific region have been credited with killing thousands of marine animals, while environmental sacrifice zones like Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, have killed infants within hours of birth due to toxic waste from military installations. Bomb testing sites like Vieques Island off mainland Puerto Rico have been shown to have 200% higher rates of lung cancer and bronchitis in men and 280% higher rates in women than on the mainland. And the oil-motivated “war on terror” emitted 1.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide between 2001 and 2017.
Palestinian genocide is caused by Zionism, not “AI”
Now we are entering a new era of resource wars that will further destroy the planet as the AI race with China accelerates. The relationship between AI and the U.S. military goes beyond the Pentagon’s contracts with Palantir, Meta, and Microsoft. Last June, executives Shyam Sankar (Palantir), Andrew Bosworth (Meta), Kevin Well (OpenAI), and Bob McGrew (Thinking Machines Lab, formerly OpenAI) joined the US Army as lieutenant colonels. Michael Obadal, an executive at the AI war manufacturing company Anduril, is currently the U.S. Under Secretary of the Army and still has hundreds of thousands of Anduril in stock. Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel is himself a major funder of Anduril. In June 2025, OpenAI, Google, xAI, and Anthropic signed a $200 million contract with the Department of the Army. The more we look at the partnerships between these companies and their executives, the Department of Defense, government departments, and other entities, the more complex this whole military-technological-industrial complex becomes.
Many organizations are rightfully building power over the data centers that fuel literally everything, pushing for greater regulation and transparency. At the same time that Palantir signs a new agreement with the Department of Defense, sacrificial zone regulations are being ignored. On December 18th, the House of Representatives passed a bill to speed up data centers with support from Microsoft, Micron, and OpenAI. This bill significantly reduces the number of environmental and financial factors that can be considered in the permitting process. It’s simple. These communities are becoming the Camp Lejeune of a new era. A new toxic waste dump in the belly of the beast that powers the war machine. They must fight at all costs.
Regulation is extremely important. It’s also far from a long-term solution. There are many things we don’t know because many things are hidden. How many of these companies are tied to arms manufacturers, the Department of Defense, and agencies like Israel? Environmental destruction caused by military use of AI. Specific uses for all these data centers. But it is clear that AI is becoming inseparable from acts of war, that more AI means more acts of war, and that more acts of war are increasing new forms of untold environmental destruction in communities around the world and here in the belly of the beast.
AI is creeping up on our necks. This horrible “Where’s Dad” show has been around long before I knew it. Before we even begin the discussion, these products seem to be popping up in every corner of the market. Their appearance is deliberately designed to hide not only their role in environmental destruction, but also their role in the militarism that destroys communities from Virginia to Gaza.
There is no sustainable part of this. Not a war economy, not endless mining, no matter how much “green technology” is produced, not an AI-driven speculative economy. There is no room for unstructured conversations. These AI and technology companies are companies that profit from war. The new Cold War against China is driving this. This is supported by the genocide in Palestine. Wars in Venezuela, Latin America, and the Caribbean are driving this. Therefore, our organization must be unified around effects, mechanisms, and causes. Against data centers and the wars that drive them. You need to stop the bleeding. But we can’t lose sight of why bullets are fired and how they are fired.
Aaron Kirshenbaum is a Code Pink “War is Not Green” campaigner and East Coast regional organizer. Based and originally from Brooklyn, New York, Aaron holds a master’s degree in community development and planning from Clark University. They also earned bachelor’s degrees in human environmental geography and urban economic geography from Clark University. While in school, Aaron worked on Palestine, tenant, and abolitionist organizing, as well as internationalist climate justice organizing and developing educational programs.
(Counter Punch)
