One of the many blinking red lights for the AI industry came in the form of a Gallup survey in May. It found that a whopping 71 percent of Americans oppose the construction of new data centers in their communities to support the AI industry, with 48 percent of those polled saying they were strongly opposed. For comparison, Gallup noted that the peak opposition to nuclear power plants in one of its long-running surveys was only 63 percent.
This opposition has translated into electoral blowback for AI companies and data center proponents. In Utah, longtime state senate president J. Stuart Adams lost his seat in a Republican primary in June over local opposition to a planned sprawling complex that would’ve transformed 40,000 acres in a rural county into the nation’s largest data center. Residents in Virginia, the world’s largest hub of data center infrastructure, and nearby Maryland have also ousted local officials over their support for the proposals.
AI’s problem is threefold. First, it is a fundamentally harmful product for American society. Second, it has been relentlessly marketed over the last few years as a fundamentally harmful product for society. Third, the AI industry’s grip on the economy and our nation’s politics is fairly brittle—at least for now.
I point out the obvious here because, according to the AI barons, their product threatens to wipe out a huge portion of those jobs, and with it, a large portion of the real economy. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told Axios last year that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next five years and spike unemployment levels to as high as 20 percent. That rate would rival the worst of the Great Depression. “Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen,” he told the news outlet. “It sounds crazy, and people just don’t believe it.”
Some AI proponents, like xAI’s Elon Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, have suggested from time to time that universal basic income could offset these problems. Even if that were true, they have also taken practically zero steps to make it happen. (Musk, for his part, has argued vociferously against a social-safety net since his far-right turn over the last decade.) Instead these tech barons have put tremendous resources into building their own personal compounds designed to keep out angry mobs and ride out a potential societal collapse.
All of this is before I get to what AI is actually used for. What it really allows is fabrication, in the sense that people can do or make fake things. AI encourages a society where people lie about their own capabilities. It can simulate knowledge and intelligence without any of the thought or effort that make it possible. At worst, it offloads a person’s mental capabilities and may ultimately diminish them, causing “cognitive atrophy.” Schools and universities are confronting an epidemic of AI-driven cheating and plagiarism by students, harming their long-term educational performance. In short, AI appears to be making people dumber and less trustworthy.
There is no real social value or moral justification for using AI. Some proponents now claim that it could be used to invent new medicines or diagnose illnesses more quickly, hoping that this would blind us to the deeper harms. More troubling is how aggressively AI proponents actively praise its harms. It’s as if the good people at Phillip Morris and R.J. Reynolds wouldn’t shut up about how much their cigarettes cause cancer or bragged about how much secondhand smoke they produced.
Earlier this month, ChatGPT CEO Sam Altman offered what he thought was a fun use-case for his company’s product. “Cool use case of chatgpt work I heard last night: connect your family calendars and explain your kids’ interests,” he wrote. “Every morning for the drive to school, have it make a podcast that talks about one kid’s soccer game that afternoon, one kid’s upcoming birthday, some news, etc.”
Back in 2023, Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen wrote an essay titled “Why AI Will Save the World.” His eagerness to promote AI as a public good is unsurprising since his venture-capital firm is intertwined with so many AI startups that the Justice Department has reportedly opened an antitrust investigation into it. I wrote about his essay-slash-manifesto a few years ago in the context of our Second Gilded Age, in which Andreessen plays a central role.
To usher in this imminent utopian age, Andreessen said, Americans need only let his AI companies do whatever they want as long as it didn’t threaten other AI companies and their investors. “Big AI companies should be allowed to build AI as fast and aggressively as they can—but not allowed to achieve regulatory capture, not allowed to establish a government-protect[ed] cartel that is insulated from market competition due to incorrect claims of AI risk,” he argued. And if you don’t, he said, China will win the AI race instead, injecting a little bit of nationalistic fervor into the mix.
That doesn’t sound so bad, right? One problem is that there isn’t really a need for it beyond mere convenience. I am skeptical that the AI industry has spent trillions of dollars to help me figure out who the Los Angeles Dodgers are playing this week or when my wife gets home from work, especially when Silicon Valley’s existing products already help me with those tasks. I’m sure there are some people who would enjoy that. No doubt a few of them will email me about it after this is published. But it seems like an extraordinary gamble to assume there will be a critical mass of users willing to pay for it, and insufficient to justify the knock-on harms that AI will also bring.
Data centers by themselves do not create many jobs. Constructing them does create growth in construction sectors while they are built, of course, but they do not produce lasting economic benefits for a community. AI proponents tend to obscure this by lumping together the short-term construction work needed to build them and the permanent staff needed to maintain them. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that an OpenAI facility in Abilene, Texas, employed about 1,500 people to build it and will only need about 100 employees to operate it.
So too did Texas Governor Greg Abbott, whose state has a separate electrical grid from the rest of the nation. His office revealed earlier this month that ERCOT, the state grid operator, was considering “approximately over 474 gigawatts of requests to connect to the Texas grid,” which alone represents more than five times the state’s record for peak electricity demand. About 90 percent of that energy would go to planned data-center projects, the governor’s office said.
A report by InsideClimateNews earlier this week estimated that roughly a dozen gas plants in the planning stages for data centers in Texas would emit more than 100 million tons of carbon emissions every year, which the outlet compared to the annual emissions of a “mid-sized industrialized country.” This problem is not exclusive to Texas, either: The Guardian recently reported that two planned data centers in central England would produce more carbon emissions than ExxonMobil. Even if the AI doomers are wrong about its apocalyptic capabilities, the infrastructure behind AI might make it impossible to stave off the worst effects of climate change.
Tradeoffs are common when talking about modern industry, and we often accept them if only on a subconscious level. Abolishing oil and gas consumption would solve climate change overnight while also collapsing our civilization. With AI, any benefits for the average American are marginal at best, while the immense personal and societal costs are immediate and increasingly visible.
Silicon Valley’s top leaders also made a disastrous choice two years ago by throwing in their lot with President Donald Trump. There may have received some immediate benefits from this alliance in the form of deregulation and federal funding. The long-term costs of the association will likely be far greater. Linking the industry with the most divisive figure in American public life, one whose majority-level public support after the 2024 election eroded almost immediately. Ironically, his illegal war against Iran also caused an energy price shock that many red-state Americans are probably more willing to blame on AI data centers than Trump’s Middle East mistakes.
If there is one thing to take heart from, it is that the AI backlash exists at all. After the 2024 election, there was a palpable sense in elite tech circles that they had somehow permanently solved politics—that their newfound alliance with the MAGA movement would supercharge a new golden age for the American tech industry, making all of them important and influential and fabulously wealthy. What they are experiencing now is a blunt, painful reminder that 340 million other people live in this country with the oligarchs, and they still get a say in how things work for now.
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