Big Tech Is Coming for Tribal Land. Some Tribes Are Saying Yes.
The AI energy rush is sparking a fight in Indian Country over water, sovereignty, and who controls the future.
In December 2025, the Department of Energy announced plans to build nuclear-powered AI data centers on federal land. One of the first sites selected was Idaho National Laboratory, an 890-square-mile facility on the ancestral homeland of the Shoshone and Bannock peoples. The Shoshone-Bannock Tribes were not mentioned in the DOE’s press materials. This week, two Muscogee women appeared on the cover of TIME magazine for their leadership in fighting AI data center development on tribal lands. Indian Country is paying attention, and it is not speaking with one voice.
A Massive Build-Out Is Underway
The biggest technology companies in the world are racing to power artificial intelligence, and they need more electricity than the current grid can provide. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta have all signed multi-billion-dollar agreements to use nuclear energy. Meta alone has secured contracts for up to 6.6 gigawatts of nuclear power by 2035, making it one of the largest corporate nuclear buyers in American history. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has called the entire effort “the Second Manhattan Project.”
Nuclear power requires uranium, and American Indian lands hold as much as 50 percent of U.S. uranium reserves, according to the Wilson Center. Any significant expansion of nuclear energy in this country runs through tribal territory, whether for the fuel it needs or the federal land where it wants to build. Communities near existing data centers are already seeing electricity bills rise 267 percent over five years, according to a January 2026 Bloomberg report. More than 70 percent of American Indians live in urban areas, where those rate increases hit the hardest.
This Has Happened Before
Between 1951 and 1992, the U.S. conducted nearly a thousand nuclear weapons tests on Western Shoshone land in Nevada. During those same decades, 96 percent of U.S. defense-related uranium mines were on the Navajo Nation. Cancer rates among Navajo people doubled. In 1979, a dam collapsed at a uranium mill on Navajo land, sending 360 million liters of radioactive wastewater into the Puerco River, still the largest single radioactive release in American history.
More than 500 abandoned uranium mines remain on the Navajo Nation today. The cleanup has never been finished. As of 2019, more than 30 percent of Navajo Nation residents lacked running water, while a single large AI data center can consume nearly a billion gallons of water per year.
That context shapes how Indian Country hears the current round of partnership offers, and it is why the same proposal can produce completely different reactions depending on who is sitting across the table.
A Community Divided
On the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana, a utility company announced plans last year to build a Small Modular Reactor just outside reservation boundaries, a technology that has never been built or tested anywhere in North America. More than a dozen community members, most of them Northern Cheyenne, showed up to oppose it. The utility told them the project was moving forward regardless.
Organizations like Honor the Earth and Stop Data Colonialism are building resistance campaigns across multiple reservations. Dr. Nichole Keway Biber, a citizen of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, wrote in Native News Online this month that data center development is the newest form of the land grab, and that developers frequently arrive with non-disclosure agreements that prevent communities from getting basic answers about water use and environmental risk before any decisions are made. Cheyenne Morgan of Stop Data Colonialism, a member of the United Keetoowah Band and Oglala Lakota, found similar warning signs in zoning documents for a proposed data center near the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, where public-facing materials told a different story than the industry documents. “Talk to your neighbors,” Morgan said. “Find out what they know. File open records requests.”
Other tribal leaders read the same situation differently. Paul Bemore of the Osage Nation utility authority told the Mountain West News Bureau that tribes dependent on casino revenue need to diversify, and that data center partnerships offer one path forward. He pointed to data sovereignty as an underappreciated benefit: a tribe that builds its own data infrastructure controls its enrollment records and cultural archives, rather than storing them on servers accessible to corporations or federal agencies. Matthew Rantanen, Director of Technology for the Southern California Tribal Chairman’s Association, noted that data centers built with underground cooling systems can avoid significant water consumption entirely, and that smaller, tribally controlled facilities represent something meaningfully different from a hyperscale corporate campus. “Making big blanket statements about data centers can harm some of those smaller, very effective uses,” he said.
What Comes Next
The DOE hosted a webinar in February 2026 offering tribes financial and technical assistance to pursue data center partnerships. The Trump administration has made clear it views AI infrastructure as a national priority, and federal land is part of the plan.
New uranium extraction will follow new nuclear construction. Water demand will grow alongside data center capacity. The abandoned mines, the broken cleanup promises, and the utility in Montana that moved forward over community objections are the baseline for every negotiation happening right now in Indian Country. Whether genuine consent becomes part of this build-out or is treated as a box to check remains to be seen.
If you work in tribal energy policy or live near one of the sites mentioned here, I want to hear from you. What is your community being told, and who is at the table when these decisions are made?