North Nashville's Reckoning: The Fight for Sovereignty in the Shadow of a Data Center

Wolfgang Bronner

19 Aug 2026

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Fiske University data center project rendering

Fisk University, an HBCU, is presenting a $400 million A.I. data center is presented as progress for the North Nashville community. In truth, it means more pollution, more surveillance, and another chapter in a century of land dispossession dressed up as economic development.

Within Nashville, Tennessee, there has been a rapid implementation of numerous technological tools and digital infrastructure. This transformation has turned the city into a hub for the growing tech economy. This new technology ranges from license plate readers to SkyWatch towers to facial recognition and to phone-hacking. The list keeps expanding. In North Nashville, a prominent Black/African community, a new battle has emerged: a proposed data center to be located at Fisk University.

Considering the situation in Memphis, Tennessee, regarding the xAI data center; this announcement has ignited a storm of resistance. North Nashvillians, who live three hours away from Memphis, have seen how the xAI data center has inflicted devastating environmental and health costs, utilized massive amounts of water, and increased electric bills on Memphians. This has been the case in other locales where data centers have been constructed. While this seems like an isolated issue, it is a continuation in the domestic warfare committed against North Nashville through the systemic denial of their sovereignty and self-determination. This escalation, in particular, could lead to a reckoning pitting corporate interests against North Nashville, which has been exploited for generations. Fisk University, a historically Black/African institution that should be serving as a beacon of North Nashville’s self-determination, finds itself at a crossroads that exposes the connection between its institutional ambitions and the very corporate forces that have historically oppressed the surrounding community.

The rapid construction of data centers across the country is a part of a larger scheme: the merger of artificial intelligence with American militarism. The entanglement of Big Tech companies with the government has been plain for all to see. In a lot of instances, these private tech companies have been leased land on military bases to construct large-scale data centers (Arnold AFB, an Air Force base in Tennessee, was considered, but didn’t receive any proposals). Tennessee has 60 data centers, but fears over the impact of artificial intelligence have made them a hot-button issue in rural and urban communities across Tennessee. Concerns over pollution are the most prominent, but is also connected to militarization as it’s the leading cause.

This connection between artificial intelligence and militarization expands across national borders. The computational power generated by these data centers fuels United States imperialism. While the infrastructure for artificial intelligence expands domestically, it is used in military aggression abroad, such as in the ongoing war with Iran. As Malcolm X once taught us, “Chickens come home to roost,” which, among other things, describes the United States’ imperial ambitions that will always return home; which we have seen this with the recent deployment of drones by the Metro Nashville Police Department as supposed “first responders”.

The fight over the data center in North Nashville is fundamentally about land and sovereignty. The construction of Interstate I-40 serves as a living example of how this community has been decimated for decades. Promised as an “economic engine,” the interstate was built directly through North Nashville, splitting the thriving community in half. It destroyed 620 homes, six churches, 130 Black-owned businesses, and displaced 1,500 residents. The “economic engine” helped the growing white suburbs, while it committed economic warfare on the Black community. The sequence of events that led to the construction of the interstate was insidious: initially proposed in white commercial districts but was rejected so North Nashville was offered up as the sacrifice. Information about the construction was withheld from residents, and by the time the community formally organized, city planners had already invested enough to counter these efforts. The struggle over the interstate reached the Supreme Court, and the roadmap to how this land dispossession was committed displays patterns to how the struggle over the data center is currently unfolding.

The “Quantum Leap” master plan proposed by Fisk University is a complete campus transformation anchored by a $500 million campus renovation and a $400 million Innovation and Technology Center. The technology center will house a 70,000 sq ft., 30-megawatt data center on undeveloped land adjacent to Andrew Jackson Commons, a designated affordable housing community. The master plan is hailed for its potential benefits: revenue for an institution that deals with repeated financial crises, jobs training, and student success and academic achievement. However, this clashes with well-documented patterns of environmental and economic exploitation that we have seen around the country. “Higher ed is in a different place right now, and the challenges that we’re up against are some we’ve never experienced before. We’ve got to be innovative, visionary, and figure out what it looks like to go forward,” claims Fisk University president, Dr. Agenia Walker Clark.

The foundation for this comment should be acknowledged due to the financial pressures that Fisk University has faced. As recently as 2024, the university has skated by, and this is the driving force behind this master plan. The nickname of Nashville, “Music City, USA”, does not come from the right-wing country music stars that populate the area, it comes from the Fisk Jubilee Singers and their quest to keep the school doors open. In 1871; Fisk was broke, so the Fisk Jubilee Singers toured across the country and internationally to raise money to keep the doors open. They raised $20,000, which kept the school open, allowed them to buy the land, and gave them the ability to build their first permanent building, Jubilee Hall. While these financial burdens create the allure of understanding, broadly, it creates a form of economic dependency and economic dependency is economic warfare. Communities are placed in positions where they must trade their people(s)-centered human rights for the promise of “economic development”; they must “compete” in order to escape economic stagnation. The university could have fostered community trust, instead the plans have been shrouded in secrecy. This secrecy has only amplified negative feelings as most information has been obtained through the media and not community engagement. This failure has left a community already burdened by a legacy of harmful infrastructure to rightfully conclude the worst, making the apparent "benefits" of the plan ring hollow against the possibility of more land dispossession.

In a lot of ways, the data center struggle in Memphis and North Nashville carry the same characteristics. Memphis is a Black/African city with a majority Black/African political establishment. This political establishment has positioned itself as a corporate partner rather than defenders of its own community. They have decided to tie their fortunes to Elon Musk and turn their backs on the working-class citizens of Memphis. Fisk University, which sits in the heart of North Nashville, has decided to tie its fortunes to corporate partnerships rather than defend the surrounding community, and leading the charge is the majority-Black educational leadership. Black Misleadership Class is a term we should all become intimately familiar with as it describes the decades-long dynamic of a compromised class.

This term describes Black politicians, professionals, leaders of civil rights organizations, and others who advance policies for their personal gain and social status while harming Black/African working-class communities. There is a class reckoning that is unfolding in Memphis; one that has been escalated since the changing of the voting map. North Nashville, which doesn’t have a say in the university’s decisions, bears the cost of its decision-making. In practice, any “partnership” is an extraction deal; they are proposing that investors will co-locate their data servers at Fisk and by charging them this will serve as a means to accumulate revenue. This potential deal opens the campus to militarization that will escalate the criminalization and surveillance of North Nashville.

Additionally, this move has historical precedent when a previous Fisk president attempted to sell the art depicting the Fisk Jubilee Singers to keep the school afloat. It was another instance of Black leadership prioritizing capital over the preservation of Black/African history. This is the legacy of the Black Misleadership Class: inviting militarization, economic warfare, and surveillance at the expense of the African/Black community in North Nashville. Any opposition to this proposed data center has been met with the typical charges of “misinformation” and assurances that the data center will be eco-friendly and therefore won’t deliver the same negative consequences to North Nashvillians, but those same assurances were made to Memphians; those same assurances were made to North Nashville during the construction of I-40. Why should a community believe these claims?

The struggle over data centers and the effort to stop them in Nashville has mostly existed within legislative processes, such as zoning, eminent domain, moratoriums, etc. While these efforts are worthy and significant, they unfortunately may not be sufficient to stop the construction. Developers look for technical loopholes and/or different locations that have less political resistance. This dynamic has already been displayed by Nashville’s political establishment. Consider this: the same political establishment that led an aggressive response to a proposed data center to be located on land adjacent to the Nashville Zoo now celebrates and supports a Fisk data center. But even the concerns about the zoo are misplaced. There are certain truths that need to be reckoned with, starting with the zoo sitting on the site of a former plantation. It should also be called into question their corporate partnerships and how they serve as an easy justification for developers. The zoo is also located adjacent to the Nolensville Pike Corridor, home to Black/African, Hispanic, Kurdish, and Middle Eastern communities and local businesses. The outrage over the treatment of animals while the human communities along Nolensville Pike and in North Nashville face the consequences of land dispossession and displacement reveals the racialized logic of who, and what, is deemed worthy and expendable. These new zoning laws have not deterred Fisk, as its leadership seeks new means to accomplish their goals, and so the struggle regarding the area of undeveloped land identified as the data center location and whether or not it will serve the broader tech economy or the residents of North Nashville continues.

The Fisk data center represents another attempt to destabilize North Nashville, which continues a process that has defined this community for generations. The construction of I-40 split this community in half. The private-prison corporation, CoreCivic, has turned Nashville into a site of carceral extraction, and currently the Multi-Agency Law Enforcement Training Academy (Tennessee’s Cop City) is being constructed in North Nashville. This constellation of infrastructure: the interstate that fractured it, the prison complex that criminalizes it, and the police training academy that surveils it represents the assault on North Nashville’s sovereignty and self-determination. Even though the data center is framed as an academic initiative, its connections to artificial intelligence and the border militarization of data infrastructure raise questions about the ultimate use of this facility. Data centers are not neutral; they power surveillance, they provide computational power for drone warfare, and the A.I. systems that are the linchpin to U.S. imperial strategy at home and abroad. These different battles represent different fronts in the same war waged against North Nashville, and the fight isn’t simply over stopping one development, but reclaiming self-determination and sovereignty for a community that has been sacrificed for far too long. Yet to understand this fight is to also understand a deeper contradiction. Consider that just two miles away, Vanderbilt University doesn’t have to consider clinging to a data center on its property. Why is that? It possesses a $10 billion endowment, while Fisk has had to consider selling its art collection and its land just to survive. Fisk represents a contradiction, but they are not the ultimate villains of this story. A Black/African-serving institution in the heart of a Black/African community has to consider poisoning that community in order to survive. This is what it looks like to be Black/African in Capitalist Racist America.

However, an organized North Nashville has the chance to change these dynamics, to refuse the false choice presented to them, and redefine what sovereignty and self-determination truly look like.

Citations

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https://abcnews.com/US/fisk-university-president-defends-plan-build-data-center/story?id=135328495#1

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https://hoodcommunist.org/2022/05/05/the-usefulness-of-the-term-black-misleadership-class/

https://www.npr.org/2017/01/03/508075243/fisk-university-works-to-move-past-cash-strapped-history

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Wolfgang Bronner is a Nashville, TN native, but raised in Chattanooga, TN. He is a member of the Black Alliance for Peace, Nashville City-Wide Alliance where he is an organizer. By day a librarian and in his free time a gun-safety trainer and a dedicated student of boxing, Muay Thai, grappling, and MMA. He also runs Be A Radical, his own educational book and database project dedicated to connecting people with transformative resources for liberation.

data centers

environmental damage

higher education

imperialism

sovereignty

land

Black Misleadership Class

black community

A.I.

Fisk University

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