09/09/2026
A data center planned on public land in Nevada just got halted. And I need you to understand why that matters beyond the headline.
A Houston-based hedge fund, Skylar Capital Management, applied to build a solar project on 80 acres of federally owned land. Then quietly switched it to a data center. No new environmental studies. No community consultation. The Bureau of Land Management approved it anyway. Boulder City officials and environmental groups had to fight just to be heard. The land sits in habitat for endangered Mojave tortoises and protected desert bighorn sheep.
This is colonial infrastructure logic operating in real time. Public land, meaning land that belongs to communities, gets handed to capital without consent, without transparency, and without accountability. The communities closest to the harm are the last ones consulted, if they're consulted at all.
The stay was granted. The judge agreed the public interest in rushing data center development does not outweigh the right to a thorough, open environmental process.
This is exactly the conversation we have to keep having about AI infrastructure. The question have always been who decides where it lives, whose land it sits on, whose water it drinks, and whose community bears the cost so someone else's tech stack can scale.
Refusal of harmful infrastructure is the demand that communities hold decision-making power over what gets built in their backyard.
That's decolonial governance.
And it just won a round in Nevada.
Read the full story here: https://knpr.org/.../in-nevada-a-data-center-planned-on...
‘Test case’ stay comes after local officials, and environmental groups accused the government of circumventing regulations and public input
