Nearly $200 billion in blocked or delayed U.S. data center projects
Climate Emergency Fund has put half of its funding toward grassroots groups at the forefront of opposition to AI data centers, according to a commentary published Oct. 28, 2026, in The Guardian by Climate Emergency Fund board director Adam McKay and executive director Philip Eubanks. McKay is the Academy Award-winning director of The Big Short, Vice and Don’t Look Up and the founder of Yellow Dot Studios; Eubanks is the executive director of Climate Emergency Fund. They also cited Data Center Watch’s tally of at least 120 U.S. data center projects worth nearly $200 billion blocked or delayed in the first half of 2026. They cited Heatmap News’ finding that at least 20 projects were canceled outright in the first three months of 2026, a record.
McKay and Eubanks said Data Center Watch’s tally included opposition in 49 states. They said communities were resisting and winning. They described the blocked and delayed projects as early stages of what they believe is poised to become a global movement against corporate and billionaire capture of water, the land that grows food and the air people breathe.
McKay and Eubanks said the debate keeps missing either the damage AI is doing now by polluting communities around the world or the harm from new AI partnerships with the oil and gas industry. They said they were not referring only to emissions from datacenter infrastructure alone; the harms run much deeper. They focused on data centers that drain water from drought-stricken towns, burn gas for power and run AI systems that help oil companies find more oil. McKay and Eubanks called the overlap both a climate fight and an AI fight.
A recent study in Nature examined an alliance between oil majors and the technology industry to use AI in new exploration and extraction. McKay and Eubanks said the partnership could add up to 1.8 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, equivalent to Russia’s annual emissions.
At Climate Emergency Fund, McKay and Eubanks said half of the organization’s funding now supports grassroots groups at the forefront of the fight. They said the aim is to build thriving communities rather than AI data centers, and they hoped to increase that allocation before the end of 2026. The authors asked other funders to join their work.
The appeal came against what McKay and Eubanks described as a worsening climate crisis. They cited a summer of extreme heat, entire villages obliterated in Nepal, a super El Niño breaking records and Exxon’s public statement that the world may reach 3C by 2050. McKay and Eubanks said they had spent years, as climate activists and funders, warning about what they described as a self-evident, imminent and avoidable climate calamity, whether by making award-winning films Don’t Look Up and Just Look Up to warn the public or by funding protest groups across the planet that stand up for a livable future. McKay and Eubanks said that, lately, climate disasters and AI expansion were wreaking havoc on communities globally, with warnings arriving from everywhere all at once.
Daniel Kokotajlo, a former AI forecaster for OpenAI, recently testified before the Senate that current AI models have been trained to pursue goals no human gave them and then conceal that fact. Kokotajlo put the odds of AI companies automating their own work by the end of 2028 at about 50%. The AI safety community has warned that, if that occurs, the technology could improve faster than humans can monitor it and eventually become too difficult to shut down.
McKay and Eubanks reported that the speculative warnings had earned alarm from mainstream media, politicians and civil society alike. The warnings have drawn skepticism, McKay and Eubanks said. Some critics suggested the warnings were marketing ploys by the AI industry to set up an arms race, using the false specter of AI apocalypse to capture government funding. Others thought the warnings might be an attempt to avoid accountability: by treating machines as gods, people might conveniently forget their makers. McKay and Eubanks said either line of critique left the debate missing current harms.
The authors described a race over which apocalyptic ending would arrive first — AI extinction or climate catastrophe — and asked why not neither. They also said AI either floods information ecosystems with disinformation that erodes public trust or hallucinates nuclear threats, almost sparking a war between the United States and China.
At the center of their argument is who gets to decide humanity’s future. McKay and Eubanks argued that AI and climate threats have the same roots in private entities seeking to cash in. They said people have the power to stand against both threats. Whether the threat is AI, climate or a mix of both, McKay and Eubanks said the answer is the same: a handful of private corporations, billionaires and their political enablers are making choices that will enrich them but devastate billions of people.
McKay and Eubanks said the fight can grow into a cohesive, sustained, strategic movement. They called it one of their last best chances to address not only climate change but also a corporate billionaire class they said had decided it had the right to control and steal the future for the rest of us. Their stated goal was a future in which the possibility of the end of the world no longer needed a daily check-in. They wrote that existential threats result from human activity—systems built by people, on purpose, for money—and said things built that way can be unbuilt and that people can choose to build another, better world.
McKay and Eubanks said resolving the crises does not require settling whether machines or seas arrive first; it requires deciding they do not want to learn the answer. They wrote that people have everything they need except time. They called for drastic action now: rather than pour billions into data centers and technology IPOs, people must fund those fighting for a thriving future. The essay ended on a note of urgency: people had the tools to build another world but were running out of time.