Someone lives next to the data centre.
Literal meaning: Geographic areas — typically low-income, politically marginalised, or sparsely regulated — that bear concentrated and disproportionate environmental burdens from industrial or infrastructural activity. In the AI context: communities near data centres, power plants, or resource extraction sites whose local environment is degraded to sustain digital services used elsewhere.
Origin: The term originates in environmental justice scholarship, associated with researchers Robert Bullard and Steve Lerner, who documented patterns in which environmental harm from industrial facilities was systematically concentrated in communities of colour and working-class communities in the United States. Lerner’s book Sacrifice Zones (MIT Press, 2010) codified the concept. From the 2010s onward it was extended to digital infrastructure by scholars at the intersection of environmental justice and platform studies.
Geographic areas that bear concentrated environmental costs from AI infrastructure serving populations who live elsewhere.
The Appeal: The term is not primarily descriptive of a corporate choice — it names a structural outcome that emerges from market forces, regulatory gaps, and political asymmetries that no single actor fully controls. Acknowledging sacrifice zones does not require attributing conscious malice.
The Friction: Patterns are reproduced by choices. Externalized Costs make it rational for companies to locate infrastructure where resistance is lowest and land is cheapest. Digital Colonialism describes the international dimension of the same logic. What is called economic development from one angle is sacrifice from another — and the people doing the sacrificing rarely get to choose the name.
Why This Matters: Sacrifice zone is a term that refuses geographical abstraction. It insists that digital infrastructure has a physical address — and that address is in someone’s neighbourhood. Once you know the term, “the cloud” becomes a location, not a metaphor.
Related terms: AI Energy Consumption · Externalized Costs · Digital Colonialism · Data Center Water Consumption · Greenwashing · Nuclear Renaissance
Read more:
- Sacrifice Zones — Lerner (2010), MIT Press
- The Costs of Connection — Couldry, N. & Mejias, U. (2019). Stanford University Press