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The Data-Center Backlash Looms Large Ahead of the Midterm Elections

By , a tech columnist at Intelligencer 
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Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images via Amazon Web Services

In the past year, data-center construction has become an unavoidable, extraordinarily toxic issue in local politics. This was an organic process: Unprecedented capital is being deployed in a rapid AI build-out, manifesting in communities around the country as massive, urgent physical projects; residents, reacting to rushed plans from presumptuous builders and skeptical of the benefits of having giant power-hungry, mostly automated warehouses in their communities, are mobilizing against them. The backlash is unusually bipartisan and, despite the abstract, universal character of the broader discussion of AI, is most concerned with community matters like local costs, material externalities, political autonomy, taxes, and jobs. It’s a genuine grassroots issue sprouting from a seed bomb of trillions of dollars of out-of-town money.

As a result, many local, state, and now national politicians have been taken by surprise, forced to catch up with the issue and understand their constituents who have raised the salience of data centers in ways that have confused both Democrats and Republicans. Many are finding themselves — like Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania — under pressure from the left and the right.

This week, though, Donald Trump suggested he doesn’t find the issue confusing in the slightest. In an interview with fixer turned enemy turned pal Michael Cohen, the president staked a maximalist position against the populist tide. “Communities that don’t take a data center, they’re making a mistake,” he said, because data centers create “tremendous amounts of jobs and money.” Concerns about energy prices were irrelevant, Trump suggested, because the firms building data centers are also “building the most beautiful — you’ve never seen power plants like this.” Meanwhile, the EPA is taking steps to limit public input on new data-center projects in an apparent attempt to clear the way for new construction.

Trump’s position is interesting in a number of ways. For one, it’s utterly disconnected from the national mood, including the Republican base; while self-identified MAGA voters used to be slightly more supportive of data-center construction than their peers, those numbers are collapsing. Trump is also making a combination of arguments you won’t hear almost anywhere else: His suggestion that “beautiful” power plants may address energy concerns is at least connected to reality, though the most visible example of actually existing “behind the meter” (that is, on-site at a data center) power generation is Elon Musk’s locally disruptive gas-turbine complex in Tennessee, which was built with flagrant disregard for local and federal regulations. But Trump’s claim that data centers create “tremendous amounts of jobs” overshoots even the rhetoric from the companies trying to build them. It’s a message former data-center booster Texas governor Greg Abbott, for example, no longer thinks will suffice in his state, leading him to temporarily halt new approvals for data centers. Texas attorney general and Senate candidate Ken Paxton has come out against them in his own idiosyncratic way:

If Republicans think you can’t sell data centers in Texas, a deregulatory paradise with, for example, more visible oil infrastructure than anywhere else in the country, it’s reasonable to wonder how they might be sold elsewhere. And it’s easy to imagine how Trump circa 2016 would have weaponized an issue like this: with low conviction about the underlying issue but a strong instinct for which way the wind was blowing. They are building data centers and taking jobs from you; “big tech” is steamrolling real America to build its censorship/disemployment/cultural-influence machine.

Instead, today everyone but the president is finding their place in the backlash. There is a huge and rare political opportunity here. As Jasmine Sun reports, the backlash against data centers can be meaningfully separated from the national discourse about AI. While people at AI firms are prone to theorize data-center backlash in terms of broad AI fear and risk, local opposition to data-center construction is more obviously motivated by a sense of plunder, powerlessness, and pointlessness. “AI data centers are big, ugly, noisy, and very energy-hungry,” Sun writes. Their arrival has been accompanied by a process that looks like big tech companies “cheating the system, engaging in cronyism and bribery, throwing money bags at politicians.”

Amazon has long been able to extract concessions from local governments to build its own megaprojects, in part because it was able to promise that new fulfillment centers would produce jobs to the end of serving local Amazon customers. In contrast, the theoretical benefits of data centers — which are uncertain and hard to articulate clearly — are understood to accrue almost exclusively elsewhere and to other people.

While data-center construction promises a temporary surge in employment, the idea that these warehouses full of chips will be much more than an ongoing resource drain to their surrounding communities doesn’t sound credible. To the extent that the subject of AI enters into the conversation at all, it’s negative: The public may not be obsessed with catastrophic AI risk or persuaded by the need to beat China in a race, but polling suggests people generally don’t imagine the industry is building something that will help them, instead assuming it will have a broadly negative effect on their jobs and on society in general. Some in the AI industry think people just need to be shown that AI can cure diseases, or help them personally, to come around; there are surely people who would see things this way. Many more, though, see the prospect of a local data-center project as akin to building a giant dump.

It’s true that the data-center debate incorporates a lot of misapprehensions and misinformation, including around water use, which has driven some in the AI world to dismiss a widespread national upswell as incoherent and fundamentally invalid. But even fairly widespread data-center moratoriums and local opposition to specific projects are unlikely to meaningfully slow the work of the biggest AI firms. Data centers are extremely fungible, and there’s enough money in play that companies driven out of one community, or many, can probably find other places to build. (There is a real risk, however, that intense opposition to data-center projects could bleed over into policies affecting, for example, solar-energy projects.)

In contrast with the nebulous AI debate, people have both pretty straightforward feelings about the giant, empty, energy-hungry complexes planned for their communities by people who don’t live there and clear solutions in mind: to either get even bigger concessions from the firms or tell them to leave.

As a result, Democrats have a fairly easy job here: Position themselves against an industry that has been telling apocalyptic stories about AI at the same time it was going out of its way to align itself with the current administration and with Trump himself, and make it clear to voters around the country that their local concerns about data-center construction are worthy of national attention and that they deserve more of a say in how such projects get done or don’t get done. They basically just need to listen to their constituents and they’ll be rewarded.

Meanwhile, the risks of getting the AI issue wrong in some fundamental way, by, as the industry may worry, hindering the growth of something world-historically significant, for example, are relatively contained. Democrats can meaningfully align themselves with the data-center backlash and with surging populist, anti-elite sentiment — particularly in deindustrialized areas where data-center construction is targeted — in ways that will be satisfying to people in communities where the issue matters, while having neither the need nor the ability, at least until November, to enact more comprehensive policies and regulations around AI in general. Republicans, by contrast, are stuck in the shadow of second-term Trumpism, which appears increasingly aloof, unpredictable, and unpopular. Featureless, jobless data centers feel like parodically on-the-nose representations of pro-corporate politics. The same president who ten years ago opened the door for politicians to talk about a “rigged” economy from the right is now doing everything he can to slam it shut.

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