  Research and activism have increasingly denounced the problematic
environmental record of the infrastructure and value chain underpinning
Artificial Intelligence (AI). Water-intensive data centres, polluting mineral
extraction and e-waste dumping are incontrovertibly part of AI's footprint. In
this article, I turn to areas affected by AI-fuelled environmental harm and
identify an ethics of resistance emerging from local activists, which I term
'elemental ethics'. Elemental ethics interrogates the AI value chain's
problematic relationship with the elements that make up the world, critiques
the undermining of local and ancestral approaches to nature and reveals the
vital and quotidian harms engendered by so-called intelligent systems. While
this ethics is emerging from grassroots and Indigenous groups, it echoes recent
calls from environmental philosophy to reconnect with the environment via the
elements. In empirical terms, this article looks at groups in Chile resisting a
Google data centre project in Santiago and lithium extraction (used for
rechargeable batteries) in Lickan Antay Indigenous territory, Atacama Desert.
As I show, elemental ethics can complement top-down, utilitarian and
quantitative approaches to AI ethics and sustainable AI as well as interrogate
whose lived experience and well-being counts in debates on AI extinction.
