Data Centers Are the Enemy We’ve All Been Waiting For

The startling rapidity of the bottom-up revolt against Big Tech shows people will indeed get off the sofa for the right fight.

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........

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