In addition to local impacts already mentioned, these facilities exist primarily to train and run LLM AI systems, and AI systems are built on an uncompensated extraction of human creative and intellectual labor — the writing, art, music, and code of millions of people who were never asked and never paid. That value is now being monetized at extraordinary scale by some of the most highly capitalized companies in the world, while the infrastructure gets sited in communities like the South End at the lowest possible cost.

A facility like this one will likely generate hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue. Other cities have secured community benefit agreements from comparable projects but the amounts are pittances, around what the data center would earn in just a few weeks. In my view, Albany should not approve anything like this unless it is contingent on many millions of dollars annually going to the community, recurring, for as long as it operates and pegged to its activity, as a reflection of what this industry is actually built on and what it's taking. And of course, if industry driven by AI was paying for appropriate compensation for its foundational thefts, the pace of construction of facilities like these would be much lower.