AI data centers have a human rights problem

Every time you ask ChatGPT to draft an email, or prompt an AI assistant to help you decide which refrigerator to buy—somewhere, a data center hums to life to make it happen. These facilities, which can span the size of a small city, are the unglamorous physical infrastructure behind the AI revolution. They’re cavernous buildings packed with servers, cooled by industrial systems, drawing power at a scale that strains local electrical grids. What almost no one talks about is the human beings building them.

To construct a single data center, developers source millions of tons of concrete, steel, copper, lithium, and critical metals from supply chains that stretch across dozens of countries. At the far end of those chains—in mines, smelters, and materials processing facilities—labor conditions are often opaque, and in some cases, deeply troubling. The industry has made notable progress on tracking its carbon footprint. It has made almost none on tracking whether the workers who made its buildings possible were free or enslaved.

That gap was at the center of a pointed panel conversation last week at Grace Farms, the award-winning cultural and humanitarian center in New Canaan, Connecticut, where executives from Google and Bloomberg joined the leader of a prominent data center trade association to reckon with a simple, uncomfortable question: At a moment when the tech industry is building faster than it ever has, who is paying the human cost?

Design for Freedom

Grace Farms’ Design for Freedom initiative, launched in 2020 by CEO and founder Sharon Prince, is a global movement to eliminate forced and child labor from the building materials supply chain. Its annual summit convenes leaders from architecture, engineering, construction, tech, government, and real estate to advance what the organization describes as a movement toward a more humane built environment. This year, the data center industry was one of its most urgent focal points—and the people in the room to address it had real power to do something about it.

The numbers are staggering. There are currently around 5,000 data centers in the United States, with Germany, the U.K., and China following behind. Global data center capacity is projected to grow 14% annually, with approximately 100 gigawatts of new capacity coming online by 2030, effectively doubling the sector in just five years. The U.S. data center construction market alone is projected to reach $112 billion in that same timeframe, which equates to $1.2 trillion in real estate value creation.

“The growth of data centers over the last three years is more than we’ve seen in the last 30,” said Miranda Gardiner, executive director of the I-Masons Climate Accord, a trade association focused on emissions reductions and sustainability in the data center sector. “To say that this is a problem and opportunity for all of us is maybe an understatement.”

The Power of the Purse

The biggest technology companies are currently the largest and most active construction clients in the world. As a result, they have unusual—and largely untapped—power to mandate better practices across their supply chains.

“When we come out collectively to say things as an industry, people tend to listen and they do change their behaviors,” said Noah Goldstein, Google’s sustainability lead for data center construction. He described using Google’s supplier code of conduct as a practical tool in meetings with contractors and senior construction leaders. He pulled up the environmental responsibility section on screen and pointed out that vendors have, by signing their contracts, already committed to reporting their emissions, training their own supply chains, and working to reduce their environmental footprint. “A lot of the CEOs that we’re meeting with have never seen this before,” he said.

Goldstein called this a “soft stick.” And alongside sticks, there are carrots: Google has created a recognition program for its supply chain, awarding physical plaques— “$7 frames from Amazon,” Goldstein said—to construction teams for best deployment of low-carbon solutions or best reporting. The competitive effect has been significant. “The CEOs of those companies are incredibly competitive people. They want to win next year. They want to compete on sustainability, and they want to get that seven-dollar plaque on their wall.”

The stakes of getting those contracts right are not abstract. The building materials that flow into a single data center—the steel, the copper wiring, the concrete, the lithium—pass through supply chains that span dozens of countries and touch millions of workers, many of them in places with weak labor protections and little recourse when conditions turn exploitative.

Forced labor has been documented in the mining of cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in brick kilns across South Asia, and in the production of construction materials across Southeast Asia. A contract clause requiring human rights reporting may seem far removed from a mine in Central Africa or a smelter in Malaysia—but when that clause is signed by a company spending billions of dollars on construction, it sends a signal down the entire chain about what will and won’t be tolerated.

It’s an imperfect mechanism: It relies on supply chains being regularly audited and violators held to account. But it is one of the few tools we have to move towards more ethical labor.

Dave Wildman, Bloomberg’s global head of data center workplace infrastructure and sustainability, offered a parallel perspective from Bloomberg, which he said was much smaller in scale than the tech giants, but nonetheless carries a recognizable name and the ability to amplify these conversations. He drew a direct comparison to where sustainability was two or three decades ago—when introducing environmental policy into a conversation with vendors yielded a few paragraphs on a page, if anything at all. “The same conversation is happening now, and it should be happening now,” he said.

An Industry at an Inflection Point

There was a sense throughout the panel that the data center industry is at a moment that resembles other industries’ past reckonings with sustainability. We’re in a window in which norms can be set before practices calcify, when competitive pressure can still be redirected toward better outcomes rather than a race to the bottom on cost.

But unlike most industries facing this kind of reckoning, the data center sector has something unusual working in its favor: the sheer concentration of purchasing power among a handful of companies. When Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon all move in the same direction on a supply chain requirement, they don’t just change their own practices, they effectively reset the floor for the entire industry. Suppliers who want access to those contracts have to meet the bar. And because data center construction is currently the most active and well-funded construction market in the world, that bar has the potential to ripple outward into broader construction supply chains that touch far more than just tech infrastructure.

The human stakes of getting that right are considerable. For workers at the far end of data center supply chains—in quarries, mines, and materials processing facilities across the Global South—the difference between a contract that requires supply chain transparency and one that doesn’t can be the difference between a job with basic protections and one without them. 

The panelists were clear-eyed that the work is still early. The forced labor and human rights piece of the data center supply chain remains largely uncharted territory, even for companies that have made significant strides on carbon.  Industry-wide adoption of human rights due diligence, if it were to follow the same trajectory as carbon disclosure, could over time create accountability mechanisms that reach workers. 

It would not happen overnight, and contractual language alone is not sufficient—enforcement, verification, and worker-accessible grievance mechanisms would all need to follow. But the argument the panelists are making was that the scale of investment flowing into data center construction right now creates a rare opportunity: with enough contracts, enough collective voice, and enough willingness to use both, the industry might be able to write better rules before bad ones become the default.

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