For the surging number of Americans who now live alongside constantly humming computer-filled mega-warehouses, it is clear AI datacenters come with significant drawbacks.

Opposition to datacenters grows on both sides of the political aisle as developers plan to invest $8tn to build them in the coming years. The bet is massive – roughly a quarter of our country’s entire GDP – but AI CEOs think it will pay off because they believe this technology will allow businesses across industries to rake in profits by cutting out their largest expense: labor. If all goes according to their plan, AI data centers will enable corporations to redistribute workers’ salaries to themselves.

This is why I have been so concerned to see the North American Building Trades Unions (NABTU) sign agreements with corporations such as Blackrock, Meta and OpenAI to collaborate on this massive data center expansion. While I applaud the NABTU’s success at securing well-paying temporary jobs for their members, these deals ignore the fact that all workers, including construction workers, are part of a class whose replacement is the explicit purpose of AI, and that data centers themselves produce a minuscule number of long-term jobs. With these deals, union members will build the factories of computerized labor that put millions of other workers out of jobs – potentially even themselves.

Our data fuels their algorithms, our taxes fund their development and our communities host their hardware

Until strong regulations are........

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