Americans hate data centers. They really, really hate them.
A Gallup poll from May found that 71 percent of Americans would oppose a data center being built in their area. In rural communities in Utah and North Carolina, regular people are organizing to stop data center construction, speaking out at public hearings and pressuring politicians for bans. They are passionate enough to attend political education sessions about water rights, land use and thermodynamics. Cities like Tulsa, Okla.; Birmingham, Ala.; and New Orleans have recently passed temporary moratoriums on data center construction. Last week, lawmakers in New York passed a statewide pause on large-scale data centers; other states, including Maryland and Michigan, could be next.
According to polling by Heatmap News, more than half of all Americans support a national ban on data centers. The public seems to agree that data centers are giant, ugly, noisy, smelly altars to industrial-scale hostile architecture. In our virulently partisan country, this constitutes a rare show of consensus.
I have been watching this new groundswell of dissent firsthand in community meetings, organizing sessions and civic trainings here in North Carolina. The resistance has lifelong joiners, alumni from environmental and housing movements and young organizers. There are also a lot of people who have never dreamed of being disagreeable in public, much less considered joining a raucous social movement. The imminent risk of living next to a data center may be why they show up for a meeting, but they’re committing to the issue for bigger, deeper reasons. Political corruption and corporate malfeasance make them feel politically impotent. Voicing their objections, sharing their anxieties with others, recalling politicians who override them and in some cases beating the opposition is giving them something few politicians are offering — a taste of political power.
Their energy has the potential to distill the diffuse political dissatisfaction and ambient anti-establishment sentiment of the moment into a political movement that wins elections. That’s a mix so potent that it makes strange bedfellows of me and Steve Bannon. I loathe his politics, but he also sees what I see in the populist impulse of resisting artificial intelligence. MAGA hates data centers, too. But really, it is a political opportunity that could go to any party that seizes it.
Democrats need organized voters. The political mobilization that the civil rights movement built and that has propelled Democrats to victories across the country is aging. The G.O.P. is racing to disorganize and dilute Black electoral power across the South and the Voting Rights Act is all but dead. Your guess about the Democratic Party’s plan to fill the gaps is as good as mine. The party seems to want some kind of economic populist message without embracing the demographic reality that a member of the working class is just as likely to be Black or a woman as a white dude in a Carhartt. Whether the data center resistance is a blip or a beginning of a new political imagination, it refutes the idea that you cannot have it all: populist energy, an economic message and a multiracial coalition that crosses class divides, in the South and beyond. Why aren’t Democrats jumping at the chance to get into the fight?
Money is the most obvious explanation. Data center infrastructure is a marriage of the technology and energy sectors. Separately, the two industries are economic powerhouses; united, they are a behemoth. A.I. interests are well on their way to spending hundreds of millions of dollars on state and federal elections in this midterm cycle, when there are far too few competitive races to influence. The A.I. industry’s deep pockets are making candidates on the left and the right cagey.
Important, too, is the seductive cultural narrative that flows from the pro-data center camp. A powerful bench of celebrity C.E.O.s, exuberant financiers, developers and futurists consistently present artificial intelligence as an inevitable technology Americans must adopt, lest they be left behind. If you accept the inevitability thesis, you are likely to believe that data centers are necessary and public dissent is naïve or, worse, un-American.
It’s not just contempt for dissent; it’s contempt for the people who dare to do it. Scott Furgeson, the mayor of Shelbyville, Ind., was caught on tape describing local data center opposition as poor people who live in “shitty houses.” The phrasing is crude, but his comments make the class politics — shared by plenty of wealthy Democrats — clear: Winners get rich, losers don’t and questioning how winners win is why losers are poor.
Centrist Democrats’ penchant for technocratic tweaks over big ideas is another factor. Abigail Spanberger, Virginia’s governor, is taking the third-way approach to data center resistance in her state. She campaigned on the idea that data centers should pay their fair share of the electricity costs they generate. But the governor recently refused to end the tax incentives for their construction, even though two-thirds of Virginia voters would support such a move. Savvy voters surely view Spanberger’s approach as a political concession to corporate interests. I find centrism to be uninspired political messaging under the best of circumstances, but when the powerful are radically restructuring our politics, economy, relationships and environment, technocratic tinkering is political malpractice.
Even a brave candidate willing to propose big ideas will have to solve data centers’ geography problem. For the last decade, U.S. electoral politics has been preoccupied with national political posturing, so much so that even state or local races can hinge on a candidate’s opinion on the president or a war halfway around the world. This shows no signs of waning, while the populist energy of the data center resistance is hyperlocal. People experience data centers locally, in dirty water and overtaxed electrical grids. Organizing and political education are also local affairs. Running on data center resistance may at first appear too local to attract national interest and the funding that comes with it.
Despite the challenges localism presents, it is also what makes this issue Democrats’ greatest untapped opportunity. Data centers evoke strong emotions because they are tangible. Voters can hear them, smell them and see them. Because of this, they are a balm to typical, national political partisanship that keeps communities divided. The more people think of politics through a national framework, the more they obsess over political rhetoric that plays on tribal concerns. But when political problems become local, people can be persuaded to look beyond their party affiliation or even their own social class to help one another. That is to say, it may be harder to find a national message that converts the local rage against data centers, but that is also why such a message could be a powerful antidote to partisan nihilism.
A few of the usual suspects are trying to craft that message.
Senator Elizabeth Warren has made a proposal that focuses on taxation of A.I. firms and mandating transparency about how the A.I. boom is shaping companies’ financial risks. All of these are good-faith attempts to respond to voters’ anger, but Warren’s message is too wonky to match the moment.
Senator Bernie Sanders has gone further, floating a big idea that’s consistent with his brand of democratic socialism. He called for a national data center moratorium and labor protections for workers displaced by A.I., and he is proposing the “American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund Act” to give the American public shared ownership, and therefore control, over A.I.’s expansion and its profits. But, Alex Hanna, director of the Distributed A.I. Research Institute, told me that a wealth fund act would enshrine the tech sector’s as-yet-unproven claims of its importance. This is the risk of treating A.I. as something that is as important as humans discovering fire and inventing the wheel. That’s zealotry. It has no place at a tent revival.
Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ro Khanna of California are going after data centers with an organizer’s flair for spectacle and an anti-oligarchy message. Khanna has called data centers extractive and uses them as justification for his proposed wealth tax. Ocasio-Cortez visited Georgia and spoke to families who claim to be adversely affected by the presence of data centers, including a Meta-owned hyperscale campus a one-and-a-half-hour drive east of Atlanta. She returned to Capitol Hill with two Mason jars of dirty water that she blamed on the data center. (A Meta spokesperson told CBS News that its operations were unlikely to have polluted the area’s water.) State and local politicians, many of them younger and more to the left than the party’s leaders, are taking a similar tack.
More Democrats need to get on board. Democratic voters are heading into midterms unhappy with their party’s lack of leadership. There is an enthusiasm gap, not just between Republicans and Democrats, but between Democratic voters and their political hopefuls. That’s produced some odd obsessions among the cottage industry of consultancies that are trying to save Democrats from themselves. They’re busy searching for a “Joe Rogan of the left” and rehashing a two-year-old campaign with little political insight, while voters continue to feel abandoned.
To win the future, Democrats have to survive the midterms. We have lived in Trump’s America for a decade now. Almost none of us are better off for it. The voters showing up to fight data centers demonstrate that a lot of us want something different. If the Democrats want to convince us that they are the party to get us there, they need a plan to rebuild institutions, rebalance the branches of power and restore faith in the system. They also need a national message equal to the righteous rage driving millions of Americans to look up from their enemy and finally see, instead, a neighbor and future worth fighting for. In the end, it’s simple.
We can win. That’s it. That’s the message.
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