Alaska: A Case Study for the Environmental Impacts of AI

Trump's call to "win the AI arms race" has come at a steep environmental price. On October 6, 2025, the administration approved the Ambler Road Project, a 211-mile industrial corridor that will traverse national parks and one of the most important ecosystems on the planet. This decision reverses a previous 2024 rejection that cited potential harm to wildlife and Indigenous communities that would be irreversible. Using "critical minerals" as a justification, communities are being destroyed.

During an Oval Office meeting, Trump said that the decision was necessary to "unleash billions and billions of dollars in wealth." And he is correct, from a financial side, there is a motivation. The Ambler district holds more than $7 billion on copper reserves, the same metals that are crucial to energy-hungry data centers that drive AI systems, crucial to AI. In an area where the growth of these data centers is crucial, resource nationalism is necessary. Trump's recent calls for resource nationalism, despite coming at the cost of much of the stock market, have only increased.

Looking at the project specifically, just last year, the Bureau of Land Management, citing the EPA and tribal councils, went into detail describing how devastating the project would be: destroying fish habitats, contaminating waterways, and destroying migration routes for organisms that are already endangered. The scale of the project is staggering, cutting across 3,000 different streams, necessitating the construction of 50 bridges, and slicing through habitats that have sustained native communities for thousands of years. For tribal leaders, both ecological collapse and cultural erasure are at stake, with the project a part of the continued genocide of Native culture. The approval of this project is just an example of the pattern of deregulation. The administration also plans to roll back the "Roadless Area Conservation Rule," now allowing over 45 million acres of protected forests to construction of roads and access to logging, shifting conservation to a backseat while corporate profits are coming first.

Unsurprisingly, AI commentators have celebrated this move. Trump's $500 billion "Stargate Project," which was launched earlier this year with OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank, aims to build a nationwide chain of these exact energy-intensive data centers. Executives like Sam Altman, Tim Cook, and Mark Zuckerberg contributed millions to Trump's fund after attending a White House roundtable. These AI datacenters consume enormous amounts of power, billions of gallons of water for cooling, and generate insane amounts of carbon emissions. These facilities are often clustered near vulnerable ecosystems, because that is where cheap water and land intersect. The Ambler Road project is simply an example of this trend.

As climate disasters are only accelerating and Arctic ice is melting at a record pace, Trump's push for resource extraction could shape America's ecological legacy for decades. The decision of policymakers and corporations will have deep implications on our world, and the pursuit of AI dominance may sacrifice millions worldwide.

— Omar Dahabra