AI Infrastructure & Society Initiative

This project was graciously funded by American University’s Competitive Internal Grant Program (Exceptional Faculty Research Award, 2025).

The AI Infrastructure & Society Initiative examines artificial intelligence as physical infrastructure: the land, water, energy, and communities required to sustain it. It asks who bears the costs of the AI buildout, who captures its benefits, and who has the power to set its rules.

Combining large-scale quantitative analysis of data center siting in the United States with critical and qualitative infrastructure research, the initiative traces how the expansion of computing capacity is transforming agricultural and rural landscapes, concentrating environmental burdens in particular communities, and shifting consequential decisions about energy and water into zoning hearings, utility negotiations, and other forums rarely treated as part of AI policy. It extends this analysis to emerging frontiers, including nuclear-powered, undersea, and orbital data centers, where promises of limitless computing capacity often relocate resource constraints, environmental risks, and questions of jurisdiction rather than resolving them.

The initiative is designed to inform policy and public debate. Its research provides regulators, legislators, and civil society with the evidence needed to govern the material foundations of AI, including measurable patterns in facility siting and land use, rigorous assessments of environmental and distributional impacts, and governance frameworks that treat social and environmental consequences as central questions of AI policy rather than externalities to be addressed after the fact.