Kaitiakitanga: A Māori guardianship Indigenous data sovereignty framework that includes both environmental and digital domains, centered on collective benefit and responsibility in managing resources and knowledge.

Constitutional AI: Technical frameworks attempting to encode behavioral constraints into AI systems, despite lacking clear definitions of the behaviors being constrained.

Country: In Australian Aboriginal knowledge systems, Country represents an interconnected living system requiring reciprocal care and responsibility. The concept emphasizes that “Indigenous knowledge lives in country, and in doing things together in country—not in computers.”

Digital Terra Nullius: An expansion of the New Zealand Māori Te Mana Raraunga’s Data Sovereignty principles, describing the treatment of digital and computational spaces as unclaimed territory, disregarding existing Indigenous frameworks of rangatiratanga (authority) and kaitiakitanga (guardianship) over data.

Standing on the shores of Country, watching waves inch closer to ancestral lands, I witness a stark reality: Across the Pacific region, 16 nations face an existential collision between rising seas and Silicon Valley’s computational colonialism. From Tuvalu’s 11,400 people to Papua New Guinea’s 10.4 million, our communities confront unequal access to digital resources, with internet penetration ranging from 26.97% to 85.22%. While Tuvalu implements its “Future Now Project” to preserve culture and governance against territorial loss, the computational infrastructure of major tech companies consumes ever-increasing resources without accountability or recognition of Indigenous knowledge systems.

This technological colonialism has quantifiable costs. According to Australia’s Department of Industry, Science and Resources, “data centres currently represent 1-1.5% of electricity use globally,” with individual facilities consuming energy “equivalent to heating 50,000 homes for a year.” In Australia alone, data center energy consumption is projected to grow from 5% to potentially 15% of national energy use by 2030.

The water demands of this computational infrastructure are equally concerning. In locations where artificial intelligence (AI) facilities operate, they can consume up to 6% of district water supplies during peak periods. Colonial resource extraction patterns have implications. Pacific Island nations face critical water security issues due to climate change while AI companies construct facilities requiring millions of lites of water for cooling their systems.

Read the full article about Indigenous data sovereignty by Ben Kereopa-Yorke at Brookings.