The real cost of AI is being paid in deserts far from Silicon Valley Highlight

Now the same narratives are being recycled with generative AI. The accelerated copper and lithium extraction to build megacampuses—and to build the power plants and thousands more miles of power lines to support them— is, in Silicon Valley’s account, also ushering in a better and brighter future. To block that extraction is thus to block fundamental progress for humanity. But it is not the mining that Indigenous communities resist. “Our ancestors were miners,” says Ramos. They were the ones who discovered the copper in the first place. The problem, she says, is the scale.