From the article:

The only solution seemed to be hitting the road, going to the towns where data center fights were happening, and talking to as many people as I could: activists, yes, but also workers, planners, politicians, and residents. I wanted to learn: Do most people actually care about data centers, or just a passionate few? What’s motivating these revolts—is it about AI, or energy costs, or good old NIMBYism? How did local opposition become a national issue? And how is AI moving elections?

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My conversations make me wonder if the technical content of data center deals is mostly beside the point. Closed-loop cooling systems? “I don’t believe them.” Paying millions in taxes? “I don’t believe them.” Creating a thousand jobs? “I don’t believe them.” I hear a reflexive skepticism of every claim.

Rather, the way that AI companies engage with communities—forcing NDAs, dangling billion-dollar promises, pushing environmental externalities far away from AI’s wealthy user base—resembles a classic story about dark money in politics. Your politicians are being bought by billionaires and gigantic corporations to screw you over. It’s not Skynet: it’s the oligarchy.

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So: what is driving the data center fights erupting across America, from rural farmers to feminist academics, from conservative NIMBYs to Bernie bros?

First, the material impacts: AI data centers are big, ugly, noisy, and very energy-hungry. Construction processes are long and locally disruptive. Water consumption and air pollution is generally minimal, but there are exceptions. In a vacuum, most people would choose to live by a flower field over a data center. But these costs are not so different from other industrial developments like manufacturing or solar farms. Those don’t go up without dissent, but have not commanded the shared hatred that data centers have.

Second, process failure. Many people living near data center sites don’t feel that they got a choice. In San Francisco we see how desperate the industry is for compute—atoms still do not scale as seamlessly as bits. That tremendous financial pressure is materializing as fast tracks, fat checks, and limited time for public input. It looks like Big Tech cheating the system, engaging in cronyism and bribery, throwing money bags at politicians and hoping the dollar signs substitute for a positive case.

Third, weak benefits. There is no compelling pro-data-center, pro-AI faction. Charles Franklin, who runs the Marquette Law Poll, emphasized that you only get sentiment this skewed when one side fails to make a case. The AI and utility companies are unsympathetic, permanent workers are not numerous, and most consumers do not feel that AI products are essential to their lives. At least nuclear power and public housing has its advocates (especially among those who live far away). Data centers are hated whether you live near one or not.

Moreover, tax contributions can be delayed, and many in deindustrialized areas aren’t sure if they’ll ever pan out. In the era of the K-shaped economy, being “pro-growth” in the generic has lost its sheen. Several activists assured me they were not anti-technology—I didn’t hear much about specific AI harms—but that an email-writing widget was not worth a data center in their backyard. And more crucially, they did not want their town to be the collateral damage in a few tech billionaires’ pointless ego race. If AI is a bubble, they didn’t want to be part of the pop.

Finally, grievance is amplified by a national environment of historically low trust in corporations and the government. Americans of all parties feel the economy is “rigged” against them; “corruption” and “affordability” regularly rank as top concerns. News articles and viral TikToks teach people to link their local complaints to these bigger political messages: data centers are enriching politicians and billionaires while raising your electric bills. Facebook groups convert solo concerns into social movements. Everywhere in my interviews, people suspected their opponents of being paid off.

You cannot detach the data center backlash from these broader trends in American political culture. “AI populism” is more about populism than about AI.

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Back in San Francisco, it is striking how little the AI industry understands its own unpopularity—the reasons that people resist. They ask if it’s a problem of benefits not being generous enough, or else a big misinformation campaign. (By the end of the trip, my friends and I felt slightly ashamed of the caricatures we originally believed in. In general, one should be cautious about assuming your opponents are just reading fake news.)

In Wisconsin and Michigan, sometimes bigger numbers made observers more suspicious. People saw them and thought: I’m being bribed. There must be a catch. It turns out that politics is more than an optimization game; voter interests are neither stable nor reducible to dollar amounts. It is also about thymos: the desire to be “recognized as a human being… with a certain worth or dignity,” who can sacrifice material survival in service of higher ideals. Through Fukuyama’s lens, elections and town halls and social media debates matter not because they are maximally efficient preference aggregators, but because they are “a stage for the expression of thymos”—a place where people make their values heard.