Salmon, energy plans and cultural identity are all being impacted by the corporate drive for AI

By K.C. Mehaffey/Video by Deborah Bloom.
May 28, 2026.

Hundreds of people are gathered on a windy plateau near Goldendale, Wash. Almost 2,000 feet below, the John Day River flows into the Columbia River. With the snow-covered prominence of Mount Adams looming in the distance, wildflowers, native grasses, junipers and the blades of the Tuolumne Wind Farm dot the landscape.

Members of the Rock Creek Band, one of 14 American Indian Tribes and Bands that make up the Yakama Nation, convened here in April to hold a ceremony, dance and pray for the land.

On May 8, they invited others to the area—a site of deep ancestral significance—to bring awareness to a proposed pumped hydroelectricity storage project on this land that is in the final stages of permitting.

“Pumped hydro” refers to a system that generates and stores electricity by moving large amounts of water between reservoirs located at different elevations. If completed, the Goldendale Energy Storage Project would release 2.3 billion gallons of water from a man-made reservoir downhill almost 2,000 feet through a tunnel drilled into the mountainside, spinning power turbines near the bottom. Collected in a reservoir at the bottom of the slope, the water would then be pumped back uphill, and released again.

The Yakama call this site Pushpum. About 110 miles east of Portland, it overlooks a stretch of river where their ancestors lost fishing sites to the inundating waters of John Day Dam, which was completed in 1971.

Proposed pumped-hydro project location. Image: Wash. Dept. of Ecology

Despite the disruptions of industrial modernity, the Yakama continued to gather roots and medicines here. The site remains sacred, its importance passed through generations.

“Why would you want to desecrate this piece of property? Why?” Yakama Tribal Council member Jeremy Takala asks the crowd.

On Jan. 22, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued a 40-year license to construct the $2-3 billion Goldendale project near Pushpum. The license was issued to Rye Development, a Florida-based company with 12 employees (according to one independent profile) that describes itself as a “partnership” between French utility giant EDF Group and San Francisco private equity firm Climate Adaptive Infrastructure.

Owned by businessman and investor Scott Tillman’s NSC Smelter LLC, the land on which the lower reservoir would be built was once occupied by an aluminum smelter operated by Lockheed Martin Aluminum. In a 2022 declaration to the State of Washington and Klickitat County regarding public and tribal access to the land, Tillman listed a Goldendale business address and said that since 2007 he had been president of NSC Smelter, LLC.

According to Rye Development, its new energy project “will store electricity for up to 12 hours and generate 1,200 megawatts of on-demand electricity—enough to power about 500,000 homes.” That’s more than 10% of all of the households in Oregon and Washington combined, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. [A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that the electricity generated would be enough to power all of the households in Oregon and Washington combined. —Editor]

By way of succoring public opinion, energy companies often equate the capacity of industrial-scale projects with cozy images of kith and kin in the soothing confines of home.

But will electricity generated by the Goldendale project be used for homes or by private citizens?

According to documents from Washington’s Department of Ecology, Colorado-based data center developer STACK Infrastructure is proposing to build a 1,100-megawatt data center campus next to the new energy facility.

New gold rush

As it has across the country, the data center construction boom has come to the Pacific Northwest. Many data centers are found along the Columbia River, which can supply the comparatively cheap hydroelectricity needed to power the facilities and the massive amounts of water needed to cool many of them.

New data centers in Oregon and Washington are being planned in 12 counties along the river. In those counties, Portland-based Columbia Riverkeeper has identified more than 100 existing or planned campuses that could require 4 gigawatts of power.

Mounting public outrage over everything from rising utility rates to detrimental environment impacts has eroded the reputation of data centers and the growing AI machine they feed.

Around tribal lands, however, the effects of the proliferation of water- and energy-sucking data centers take on a unique dimension—the desecration of cultural sites, potential harm to traditional food sources and a painful continuation of government policies that ignore the needs and voices of Tribes.

Jeremy FiveCrows, communications director of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission (and a Columbia Insight board member), says the data center boom is reminiscent of the California Gold Rush.

“Any kind of moderation was out the window,” says FiveCrows, who was born and raised on the Nez Perce Indian Reservation in Idaho.

Nineteenth-century prospectors and settlers in gold-rich areas decimated rivers and streams. They fought—and often killed—Americans Indians who got in their way.

“It’s like this frenzy that is making people not see these big consequences of such fast, frenetic choices,” he says.

Regardless of what electricity from the proposed Goldendale facility will be used for, the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation and other Northwest Tribes have opposed the pumped hydro project from the start.

“I know we’re in a time when we need renewable energy, but why on our root grounds? Why on critical deer winter habitat? Or critical migratory corridors for hawks?” asked Elaine Harvey at the Pushpum event.

Harvey is a member of the Yakama Nation and manager of the Watershed Department for the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission

“Today, every one of our traditional foods is under threat. Our salmon, our suckers, our sturgeon, our lamprey, our deer and elk, all the different roots that we gather and our berries,” she said. “And I say, ‘For who?’ We’re going green now for data centers. We’re not going green for Washington and Oregon state mandates.”

This depiction of the two reservoirs associated with the proposed Goldendale Energy Storage Project shows the locations of the John Day Dam (lower left) and defunct aluminum smelter (lower center). Illustration: Rye Development

The Yakama Nation says the Goldendale project will cause irreparable damage to Pushpum, “a site of religious, ceremonial, and cultural importance to the Yakama People since time immemorial,” per a July 2024 letter from the Yakama Nation to FERC, asking the federal agency to deny the permit.

“Repeating history by approving the Goldendale permit application without free, prior, and informed consent from impacted Tribes is an environmental injustice,” said the letter.

Under the Yakama Nation’s 1855 treaty with the United States, the site is part of the Yakama Nation’s ancestral or ceded lands—part of the 12 million acres that the Tribes and Bands gave up to the U.S. government, but where tribal members reserved rights to fish at all their “usual and accustomed places” and to hunt and gather foods and medicines and pasture horses and cattle “upon open and unclaimed land.”

“The project respects the vital role of Tribal consultation in the FERC licensing process, which is among the most rigorous for all energy projects,” a Rye Development spokesperson wrote in an email to Columbia Insight. “The FERC license includes numerous environmental protections and operating conditions developed through years of independent review by federal and state agencies, Tribes, and input from the public. We remain committed to working with affected Tribes to finalize a Historic Properties Management Plan that safeguards cultural and historic resources.”

“This is a project that’s been looked at by the Goldendale community since the 1990s as part of their overall economic development plan for renewable electricity, primarily wind, then solar and pump storage, all part of the energy overlay zone,” Erik Steimle, Rye Development director of development, told Columbia Insight in January.

But as companies doing business in the Northwest race to develop data centers and the plants that provide them with power, some Columbia River Basin tribal leaders say they’re being left out of the planning that will determine the future of their ancestral lands. Again.

Tribal opinions accommodated or ignored?

In 2025, Wash. Gov. Bob Ferguson created the state’s first Data Center Workgroup to develop recommendations for handling the huge power needs of data centers.

Tribal representatives didn’t make the initial cut.

“We found out there was this working group and really felt like we should be part of that because of all the different energy projects and energy activities that are occurring within our very large ‘usual and accustomed’ area,” says Kate Valdez, environmental coordinator for Yakama Nation Fisheries.

Tribal councilman Jeremy Takala at Pushpum with Tuolumne Wind Project towers. Photo: Paloma Ayala/Columbia RiverkeeperIt took some convincing, but eventually the Yakama Nation was able to insert itself into the group. Valdez became the only tribal representative with a voice and a vote on the group’s recommendations.

Valdez says after agreeing to include the Yakama Nation, the state’s Department of Commerce decided that, as a sovereign nation with treaty rights, Yakama recommendations that did not make it into the group’s final draft report should nevertheless be heard. The Yakama Nation’s recommendations were included as a separate appendix to the draft report.

The work group’s draft report led Washington state lawmakers to craft H.B. 2515—the state’s first attempt to impose guardrails on data center development.

Jeremy Takala, the Yakama Council member who introduced speakers at Pushpum, spoke before the Washington Legislature in favor of the bill, which addressed some but not all of the Tribes’ concerns.

Among concerns the bill did not address: a requirement for data centers to “provide evidence that the facility would not affect watershed conditions, including stream flows for anadromous species, temperature, and pollution; would not affect local municipal water sources; and account for existing over-allocation, climate change projections showing reduced snowpack and earlier runoff, and the cumulative impact of all water uses on treaty-protected fisheries.”

The bill wasn’t perfect, but it was a start.

“Then Microsoft came out from the shadows and opposed the bill in the Senate Ways and Means Committee and then released their markup for their proposal,” says Ed Sheets, a former executive director of the Northwest Power and Conservation Council and a consultant for CRITFC and the Yakama Nation.

The revision had 18 amendments, most of which the Tribes opposed, he told Columbia Insight.

The bill ultimately died.

In March, the bill’s sponsor, Dem. Rep. Beth Doglio, chair of the Washington House Energy & Environment Committee, told Columbia Insight that behind-the-scenes lobbying by Microsoft and Amazon convinced a number of Senate Democrats to back away from supporting the bill.

Valdez says tribal efforts to reign in new data centers remind her of how little Columbia River Tribes were able to change the course of hydroelectric development in the twentieth century.

“We weren’t significant enough to be considered during that time, and sometimes it still feels a little bit like that,” she says. “The difference now might be that people feel like the Tribes have an opportunity to have a say. But do we really?”

As with the data center bill, the Yakama Nation has weighed in on several renewable energy projects on ceded lands, a process that includes government-to-government consultations.

“That consultation may be initiated, but at the end of the day we’re still seeing that these projects are being permitted, and they are impactful to resources that we rely on, that are the very identity of who we are as a people,” says Valdez.

Another threat to salmon

For more than a century, Indigenous peoples up and down the Columbia River and its tributaries have disproportionately suffered the environmental consequences of energy development in the Pacific Northwest.

“The devastation of once-abundant salmon, steelhead, and other species in the Columbia River Basin adversely and inequitably impacted Tribes’ spiritual, cultural, physical, and economic health,” according to a 2024 U.S. Department of the Interior report on the impact of the Basin’s federal dams on Tribes.

The hydroelectric system that gives the Pacific Northwest some of the cheapest, most reliable and cleanest energy in the country changed an entire way of life for people who had for centuries depended on the Columbia River for their livelihoods.

“First it was dams on the Columbia and the loss of our fishing and village sites,” Harvey told Columbia Insight last year. “Then it was construction of the highway, then Hanford nuclear facility. Now we’re in another energy transition, and it feels like the burden is again being put on us.”

Dams wiped out tribal villages and gathering spots (most notoriously at Celilo Falls in 1957), displaced families for years and inundated burial sites.

The monolithic concrete barriers created by dams have nearly stripped Tribes of a primary food source and cultural totem they’re committed to protecting—salmon.

In 2001, a combination of energy problems—including under-investment in new energy resources, a flawed electricity market in California and the lowest Columbia River runoff since 1929—led to what the energy industry knows as the Western Energy Crisis.

Columbia River Basin Tribes call it the salmon crisis.

Federal agencies that operate Columbia River dams declared an electric power emergency, enabling them to suspend mandated operations that protect salmon.

Elijah Cetas, CRITFC’s energy analyst, says tens of millions of juvenile salmon and steelhead migrating downstream died that year. In one example, only 6% of juvenile Snake River steelhead migrating downstream from Lower Granite Dam to Bonneville Dam survived. Most years, the survival rate is between 40% and 60%.

The emergency measures devastated adult salmon and steelhead returns in subsequent years—in some cases just 10% of previous runs came back, says Cetas.

The catastrophe led CRITFC to develop an “energy vision,” a plan for energy resilience that also protects salmon and other natural resources.

The most recent Energy Vision document updated in 2022 focuses on the need to move away from fossil fuels and prepare for a surge in renewable energy projects. Data centers aren’t even mentioned.

The rise of data centers has become a dominating concern in less time than it takes for a healthy Pacific salmon to complete its life cycle.

“It’s been difficult for us to wrap our heads around,” Cetas says of the rapid change.

CRITFC is worried about the huge amounts of uninterrupted energy data centers need, and about connecting those new resources to the hydropower system. That connection could lead to the next energy emergency; the next suspension of spilling water over dams to keep baby fish away from the turbines, and all the other measures in place to protect more than a dozen threatened or endangered runs.

“When our energy vision came out, where we were at then, it was going to work,” Christine Golightly, CRITFC policy analyst, tells Columbia Insight. “Data centers have come in and kind of thrown a monkey wrench into that.”

Utilities in the Pacific Northwest are required to provide electricity to customers who request it. But Golightly believes data centers should be treated differently than other electric consumers.

“They’re a new creature. They’re not just any customer,” she says.

The Northwest Power and Conservation Council’s most recent power supply adequacy assessment for 2029 finds that the chance of blackouts in the region increases from 2.2% per year to 13.3% per year under a scenario with high data center build-out.

As the risk of an energy emergency increases, so does the chance of suspending salmon protections, and repeating the devastating impacts from 2001.

Transparency, jobs, nukes

Unlike many environmental groups that favor accelerating the siting and permitting of clean energy generation and transmission, the Yakama Nation wants a slower approach.

“Any time you get into any sort of streamlining, what that really means at the end of the day is that you’re not going to have meaningful consultation with the Tribes,” says Valdez of Yakama Nation Fisheries.

Valdez says renewable energy projects have spread “like wildfire across Yakama Nation’s usual and accustomed” hunting, fishing and gathering sites.

“All we’re saying is, ‘Let’s not put it on our backs again, just like the hydro dams,” she says.

The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (CTUIR) also has sighting concerns, especially with respect to hyper-scale data centers. Amazon has built several data centers on CTUIR ceded lands.

These data centers are not on the Umatilla Indian Reservation, but on the Tribes’ aboriginal title lands, where tribal members retain treaty rights to hunt, fish and gather foods and medicine.

Amazon Web Services data center in Umatilla County by Susan Woodward / American Rivers scaled

According to various reports, Amazon operates at least 13 data center campuses across Umatilla and Morrow counties with a combined 1,770 megawatts of capacity. The CTUIR’s ceded lands include all of Umatilla County and most of Morrow County.

“Amazon does not release the energy use of any of its facilities, however Umatilla Electric Cooperative delivered 8.4 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) in 2024, of which only 3.7% was delivered to residential customers,” according to a report by Columbia Riverkeeper.

In an email to Columbia Insight, a CTUIR spokesperson said the Tribes would like to see cooperative agreements for siting hyper-scale data centers on its ceded lands along the Columbia River, or co-management agreements when there might be impacts on water, salmon, big game and gathering resources.

The Tribes also want waste heat to be reused by other industries; assurances that the data center workforce comes from nearby communities; and government-to-government consultation if data centers are being powered by small modular nuclear reactors.

Along with concerns about water use and the potential for heating and contaminating water sources, the Umatilla are worried about noise pollution from continuous fans, and how fenced areas prevent wildlife from grazing where they normally would feed.

For what?

Tribal leaders question the benefits of AI.

“I say it’s the companies that will profit off this. It’s their race for their gold,” says Golightly. “If it takes your question two more minutes to generate an answer (to an internet search), I don’t know what the benefit really is.”

“People are creating weird, exotic animals (online). That’s what we’re having to give up our resources for? For people to be able to do those types of things?” asks Valdez.

Compared with their elders, young people from the Yakama Nation who attended the May 8 Pushpum event have a more nuanced relationship with AI and the data centers needed to support them.

“It helps me when I’m struggling in school,” said Chance Wesley, a 15-year-old Goldendale High School student. “AI explains it to me in simple steps.”

Wesley thinks AI will lead to breakthroughs in science and other disciplines, but he doesn’t like that some students use it to “cheat” or the vast amounts of water and energy data centers require.

“If (the Goldendale project) goes through, we’ll lose most of our natural foods that we eat and gather. It will affect a lot of people,” he said. “I see the use for AI, but I also see the damage it would cause to our community.”

“It’s your main source of information,” said Tyler Takala, 14, noting that a simple Google search now involves AI.

Students repeatedly voiced particular concerns about how data centers use water from the Columbia River.

“I’ve noticed the water changing color,” said Annie Payer, 16. “And it’s not just our part of the river. It’s affecting all the other people along the river.”

Takala says the toxic algae that’s becoming more common in the Columbia River—blooms are caused by warm, calm waters and excessive nutrients, and exacerbated by climate change—is hurting tribal drift net, scaffold and pole fishing.

“If AI takes over the world, we’ll have to rely on our native foods. But the way it’s going, we won’t have any left,” said Payer.

Still, she said, events like Protect Pushpum give her hope. It’s not just her Tribe standing up to save this place. Other Tribes, nonprofit organizations and non-tribal individuals came to give support.

“People all across the country are standing up and opposing data centers being built in their communities,” said FiveCrows. “It’s strengthening communities to exercise their collective voice, and that’s regardless of whether it’s tribal communities or non-tribal communities.”

Columbia Insight: SPECIAL REPORT: How data centers pose a unique threat to Pac NW Tribes