Data Centers Are the Enemy We’ve All Been Waiting For
The Trump White House wants tech companies to publicly commit to ensuring that their data centers won’t raise electricity prices, stress local water supplies, or complicate grid reliability, Politico reported last week. This kind of voluntary compact is mostly useless, of course. It’s exactly the sort of thing you’d expect from the crowd whose official environmental policy is that it doesn’t matter if pollution kills us—a logic that recently led them to officially stop regulating greenhouse gases.
And yet: This administration felt a need to interrupt its virtually nonstop death drive to draft this compact, and then to make statements that make it sound more aggressive than it is: “I just want to assure people that we’re on it,” Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro told Fox viewers on Sunday, floating the surprising news that his administration would “force” companies to absorb the cost of data centers. That means the mass revolt against AI data centers is working.
All over the country, communities have been fighting data center proposals for a variety of reasons. Some want to protect their grids and water supplies. Others fear data centers will push up energy bills, stress the electrical grid, and use up land that would be better preserved for nature conservation or farming. Then there’s more general rage at the tech oligarchs, as well as terror of the impending dystopia of AI—from job loss to Hollywood visions of malevolent machines that prioritize their own survival over ours.
“The infrastructure that they need for this corporate domination isn’t built in the cloud,” says Mahroh Jahangiri, senior policy counsel at Local Progress, which has been supporting local officials with technical and policy expertise on this issue. To get that “physical infrastructure” built, tech companies are “relying on the structural power that they’ve exerted over democratic institutions for a while to be able to do whatever they want to.” But what we’re seeing right now, she says, is that “local communities and their elected leaders really are finding themselves on the front lines of this fight,” and are finding that they do, in fact have some power to say no to Big Tech.
In Wisconsin, for example, at least four communities—DeForest, Caledonia, Yorkville, and Greenleaf—have recently defeated data center proposals, either by getting local authorities to reject them or by causing so much trouble that the companies withdrew their plans. Counties and cities in Georgia have passed moratoriums on data centers.
Communities have even, using public relations and protest, resisted data centers in places where the town has no authority to regulate, as is the case with a proposed data center opposed by Ypsilanti residents that would be sited on University of Michigan land.
In fact, at least 19 Michigan communities—including Bay City and Grand Rapids—are considering banning data centers or have already done so (the latter include Howell, Saginaw, and Pontiac). The Michigan rebellion is particularly significant given that in 2024, the state promised massive tax holidays—no taxes till 2050, if they meet some extremely mild conditions—to companies willing to build data centers. That’s a big incentive for companies to site their data centers in Michigan. But local communities are not welcoming them. As town after town takes up the issue, local officials described packed community meetings and data center backlash unlike anything they’ve ever seen before.
“So many people come to this issue because all of a sudden, overnight, there is a data center proposal or a facility going up in their community often with very little notice, without their knowledge, without any meaningful transparency or public decision-making,” Alli Finn, partnership and strategy lead at the AI Now Institute, said. “And the impacts are material and, in many cases, immediate: pollution and traffic from construction, air pollution from operation of diesel generators.” Finn pointed to water use, as well as the “most immediate” effect for many: “raising their electricity bill.”
But these are also fights about class power, as is abundantly clear in a beautifully granular Politico article about a data center fight in Northern Virginia, which shows the lengths that those who profit from data centers must go to circumvent local democratic governance. Says Finn, “There’s a bigger context of how decisions are made and by whom, to serve whom. Who this buildout is serving, who’s getting these tax breaks, where these public dollars are being spent. And many people correctly see that it’s not for them, that it doesn’t serve them, that they are being shut out of critical conversations about how the resources in their community are used.” Asking even bigger and even more disturbing questions, Finn says, many are wondering, about the tech oligarchs and corporations, “what this future is that they have chosen for us?”
The political class has been slow to address this anger. But there are signs that some are finally catching up. Some gubernatorial candidates are now placing opposition to data centers at the center of their campaigns. In Georgia, Michigan, New York, and Wisconsin, and elsewhere, legislators are proposing statewide moratoriums on their construction.
Conventional wisdom seems to hold that the climate movement is in retreat. It can certainly feel that way, with fewer headline-grabbing disruptions or protests in the news these days. It can be hard to focus on long-term issues like climate change when the national political situation is so dire that the president is threatening public officials with hanging and his masked goons are shooting protesters in the street. But the data center rebellion offers an interesting asterisk in that narrative: When it comes to energy and climate issues, people will act when there are immediate local effects. And these hyper-local fights can, in turn, start to shape national narratives.
It also shows that many of us rise to the occasion when we are given something to do. One ubiquitous complaint about climate change is that it can be hard to know, as an individual, what to do about such a global, diffuse problem. And similarly, it’s hard to know what an individual can do about the other abstract and distant problems that a data center represents: a destructive tech mogul class unaccountable to the masses, the surveillance state, a possible tech bubble, the affordability crisis, a far-right leadership class that doesn’t get off its phone long enough to even notice the great outdoors it is destroying. Most of us can’t give up our work and family responsibilities to protest every day in Washington, D.C., or Silicon Valley. But an individual data center brings the entire constellation of problems to your town—and many Americans are showing that they know what to do when it shows up.
As one of the few national leaders to understand mass public anger, Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed a national moratorium on data centers. That the reactionaries at The Washington Post think this is “Bernie Sanders’ Worst Idea Yet” shows that it’s hit a nerve, and reflects a grassroots momentum that the Bezos class fears. Congressional Democrats, with their usual genius for the zeitgeist, are not getting on board with his measure, probably because far too many are beholden to tech industry donors. Fortunately, not everyone in this party is a fully owned subsidiary of Anthropic or Google; Democratic politicians in New Jersey and Virginia ran against data centers last November and won their elections, as did data center skeptics on the Georgia Public Service Commission.
Of course, in many cases, local officials are getting steamrolled by Big Tech operators. Far too many of these data centers are under construction as I write this. But the resistance is growing, and is plainly shaping local and state policy. It’s possible that soon, the big civilizational battle will be less between Democrats and Republicans, and more between Big Tech—and similar industries like Big Oil and Big Pesticide—and its opponents. The future of humanity, the natural environment—and local democracy itself—may depend on the grassroots fights that are underway now.