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.
“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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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