Ana Carolina de Assis Nunes, an anthropology Ph.D. candidate with a minor in women, gender, and sexuality studies, is studying how AI data centers in Oregon interact with the environment, local communities, and the users themselves
Ana Carolina de Assis Nunes
By Halle Sheppard, CLA Student Writer - July 24, 2025
Ana Carolina de Assis Nunes is at the cutting edge of the ever-changing world of artificial intelligence (AI), and her anthropological research is helping to uncover the reality behind this new technology. It wasn’t always this way though.
Hailing from the rural state of Goiás, Brazil, Assis Nunes is a classically trained bassist, and even attended a music conservatory while a young adult. After she finished music school, she sought a career that was more than performance and decided to attend the University of Goiás to study social sciences. She became even more interested in anthropology, and decided to pursue a master’s degree focusing on artificial intelligence.
Her start to AI was actually rooted in curiosity and fear. “In 2016, I just started seeing all these reports in Brazilian media about how AI was going to take all the jobs in the future and how humanity was doomed.” Assis Nunes explained how as a first-generation college student, she felt it was “very unfair” that when she finally had the opportunity to go to college and have a profession, AI would just take her job. This fear of AI destroying her prospects and heralding the end of the world as the media presented switched her focus to a desire to understand what exactly is AI and what was really going on behind the scenes.
Her research led her to some important realizations about the nature of AI, and how there is no such thing as this dangerous entity we think of. She explains that AI instead is more statistical machine learning, and thinking about it as an entity or a non-human body/mind is a way to obscure powerful people making decisions behind harmful technologies. “It's easier to blame a machine than to acknowledge that AI, as a decision making device, is intentionally being used to cause harm to humans and nature,” she says. Her research, instead of blindly jumping on the bandwagon of fear, delves deeper and asks “who is the person, or what interests are there behind AI?”
Assis Nunes partnered with the computer science department at the University of Goiás to help develop her master’s thesis, where she conducted an analysis that compared and contrasted how AI was being portrayed in the Brazilian media versus what scientists were actually studying.
“The Brazilian media’s expectations of AI were immense,” explained Assis Nunes. “There was talk of curing cancer. When in reality, Brazilian scholars weren’t even considering those far-reaching implications.”
This research led her to the anthropology Ph.D. program at the College of Liberal Arts’ School of Language, Culture, and Society. While her Ph.D. work was advised by Dr. Emily Yates-Doerr, she was initially brought to OSU by Anthropology Associate Professor Shaozeng Zhang who was recruiting research assistants who spoke Portuguese for a project involving the development of a fair AI framework. After realizing that they were looking for someone with the qualifications that she had, Assis Nunes decided to move to Oregon.
“I had visited other parts of the U.S. before and the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. was very interesting to me,” she explained, motivated also by a new unwelcome political shift in Brazil at the time. At first, she “felt a little out of place to be honest,” but later stated how she “got used to Corvallis and I actually like it here now.” With OSU’s heavy STEM focus, it’s been wonderful for her own anthropology research. More attention from the faculty and freedom to explore her research has been integral, and allowed her to achieve her anthropological goals.
Assis Nunes’ master’s research and time at OSU led her to explore the importance of the tangible aspects of the internet like the massive data centers located in Oregon for tech companies outside of the state. “I don’t think a lot of people understand how central Oregon is to the tech industry in the U.S.,” Assis Nunes explained. Due to the cheap electricity from the abundant hydropower dams, a friendly tax system, and pre-existing infrastructure, Oregon’s data centers did not necessarily start from scratch. The “Silicon Forest” of the Pacific Northwest “is the place where a big part of the infrastructure of the internet lives.”
The Dalles, Oregon, located on the idyllic Columbia River 80 miles west of Portland, has seen industry come and go. In the early 1800s, The Dalles was an active and important port for the North American fur, salmon, and timber trade. By the early 20th Century, the construction of multiple federal hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River produced cheap electricity, which in-turn attracted energy-intensive business to the area, including smelting and nuclear facilities. Today, the banks of the Columbia River are home to much technology infrastructure, but nothing compares to the size and scale of Google’s hyperscale data center in The Dalles.
Assis Nunes’ Ph.D. research looks specifically at how the industrialization of the Columbia River yielded the creation of Google's data center in The Dalles in 2006. Assis Nunes also explores the relationship between the technology and the surrounding environment, including how the data center has impacted not only the Columbia River, but also the surrounding town of 16,000 residents.
“I’m hoping to show how tech is material; how the cloud is actually not a literal cloud in the air but physical infrastructure; and how the internet is actually cables under the sea.”
It’s not just technology though, Assis Nunes’ anthropological research agenda looks at how the development of tech is tied to other systems of power like colonialism and why some regions are more developed than others. “Old telephone lines under the sea are even an expression of old systems of power, as it mainly leads to Europe, the center of colonialism,” Assis Nunes explained. “It is very interesting to think of the centralization of power and the decentralization of the internet.”
OSU has helped her to understand that “anthropologists have a place anywhere they want to be, not only in academia.” As for Assis Nunes’ plans after graduation, she will continue researching cloud infrastructures as a postdoctoral fellow with the Trustworthy Infrastructures team at the Data & Society Research Institute.
“Anthropology is my thing. I love it; I can’t imagine myself doing anything else. I think it's so amazing too because anthropology is holistic in the sense that we are always connecting the dots. It's very hard for us to see one thing in isolation; everything is connected to something.”
“The goal for me is to always put humans first and the users of the technology first,” and her research outlined the importance of technology made for humans and what they want, and not only for corporate goals and profit. Assis Nunes hopes to influence policy around AI, and will continue to fight for humans to be put first when it comes to AI.