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Opposition To Data Centers Isn’t What The Tech Right Thinks It Is

It’s not the data centers themselves that people fear, it’s the AI revolution they will enable. That’s what no one wants to talk about.

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One of the most striking things about the ongoing debate over AI data centers is not just the widespread opposition to them but that the opposition spans political and demographic divisions at a time when Americans from different walks of life and different political persuasions have trouble agreeing on much of anything.  

In polls, people say they’re primarily concerned about environmental factors like the amount of water and electricity the data centers will consume, as well as things like pollution and the destruction of farmland. Because these objections dovetail with anti-capitalist and pro-regulation ideas of the left, it has been easy for such concerns to be dismissed by some on the right, often with open contempt, as either climate doomerism or moronic Luddism. “Oh you don’t like data centers? And you’re complaining about it online? On the internet?”

As a tactic to silence data center skeptics on the right, this isn’t going to work. For one thing, concerns over rapid technological and societal change are not hypocritical simply because those who raise them use technology or participate in society. “If you don’t like what the internet has done to society then stop using it,” is not a substantive or persuasive response — as if those who notice the deleterious effects of smartphones, for example, are disqualified from noting those effects if they personally own a smartphone.

More broadly, the tech right is failing to persuade data center skeptics because their skepticism is rooted not in the policy particulars or the mechanics of how data centers work, but in deep anxiety about the digital revolution we have been living through for the past two decades — a revolution that artificial intelligence, powered by these new data centers, will intensify and accelerate.

In other words, you can talk all day long about how over 20 years in Quincy, Washington, data centers reduced the poverty rate and decreased residents’ property taxes and funded a new high school, hospital, library, and so on. You can explain how the new AI data centers will more than pay for themselves, how they will generate their own power needs, how they will create jobs and revitalize local economies. You can do all this, but if all you do is talk about the economic upsides........

© The Federalist