The AI Boom Needs Their Land

How rural and Indigenous youth are defining their own technological future

Life With Machines and Baratunde Thurston

May 05, 2026

Hi you,

The expansion of AI is driving a historic surge in data center spending, creating a massive demand for land, water, and power. Big Tech is pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into securing those resources, with talk of reopening nuclear plants and expanding uranium mining on Native lands just to feed the machine. For rural America and Indigenous communities, this presents a massive tradeoff:

Option 1: take a rigid “not in my backyard” approach, and potentially miss out on generational economic opportunity—the kind of growth that can fund schools and governments for decades.
Option 2: accept these projects without restrictions or oversight, and risk draining local resources, driving up energy costs, and losing small town character.

This episode, made in partnership with Young Futures, looks at how rural and Indigenous young people are leveraging AI for local empowerment, protecting their resources from extraction, and building digital sovereignty.

Charlotte Dungan runs AI boot camps for rural high school students and their teachers through the Mark Cuban Foundation. Rather than teaching AI literacy, she’s focused on AI agency, which she defines as putting people in the driver’s seat.

“And I’m not sure Silicon Valley always wants us to be in the driver’s seat.”

Her students are using AI to model drug treatments for Parkinson’s, map search and rescue operations, and optimize local small businesses. One student made “Shazam” for boats because, well…she really loves boats. These are kids in towns that were supposed to lose their best minds to the coasts.

Tesia Zientek is founder the AUNTIE Tech Collective at AISES, a multigenerational initiative for Indigenous girls, women, non-binary, and two-spirit people to lead in tech. Her work is grounded in the principle that Indigenous ancestors were scientists and technologists, and that today’s Indigenous youth can integrate AI without losing who they are.

Her program deliberately uses words like “waterways” instead of “pipelines” because as she puts it, “We want to be really rooted in our language” instead of ceding ground to tech jargon. She also holds the full range of how tribal nations are responding to the data center moment: one tribe in Oklahoma has passed a law banning them from their land, a sister tribe in Wisconsin owns their own.

“You see the entire spectrum, even in just those tribes.”

This conversation brought me back to one of the most important ones we had in our first year of LWM with Northern Cheyenne and Lakota technologist Michael Running Wolf: “Data is land. It’s something you own. Data has value.”

I filmed this one outside because it’s the best place to talk about AI (even when your hands are freezing). Watch the full episode below →