Cracks on data centers deepen on right

Resistance to the construction of data centers has largely been from the left, but it’s quickly bubbling up as an issue dividing the political right and the coalition that helped elect President Trump. 

On the one hand, tech-right visionaries with influence in the Trump administration argue that the U.S. should do everything in its power to become dominant in artificial intelligence, or else lose ground to foreign adversaries. 

Tech investor David Sacks, co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, made that argument while highlighting the effectiveness of a new Chinese AI model. 

“Meanwhile America is tying itself in knots: politicians and bureaucrats are banning new data centers, piling on state regulations, and pushing for new federal agencies to pre-approve frontier models,” Sacks, who was also formerly known as Trump’s AI czar, posted to social media on Friday.  

“This is how you lose the AI race. The rest of the world won’t play by our rules if we bog ourselves down,” he wrote. 

But those concerned about the impact on local communities, as well as privacy hawks, are getting more vocal — a response to organic pushback to data centers from the public. 

Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts last week pointed to a number of data centers being proposed “along the banks of the Shenandoah River.” 

“The people there feel like something is being taken from them. They’re not anti-free market,” Roberts said on Fox Business. “They’re just saying, can there be some trade-off here, or some assessment of the trade-offs?” 

“I’m with those people who are skeptics who also want to have the win-win so that we can continue to reap the benefits of this great technology,” Roberts added. 

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has also long been a loud populist-right voice pushing back on the tech industry’s influence in the Trump administration and how it is shaping AI policy. And commentator Tucker Carlson has said that Trump is supporting data centers across the country that “abet” the “more surveillance, more spying on Americans.”  

Polls show that a majority of Americans aren’t eager for a data center to go up in their area —- and Democrats are more likely than Republicans to be “strongly opposed” to local data centers, voicing concern about the use of resources and effect on the environment as the reason for their data center skepticism. 

But the pushback isn’t strictly partisan. Gallup data from May found 56 percent of Democrats and 39 percent of Republicans saying they “strongly opposed” a data center being built near them. 

Top figures close to the Trump administration are publicly recognizing policy issues that come with data centers without fully parroting data center and AI skepticism. 

White House deputy chief of staff James Blair, in direct response to Roberts’s Fox appearance, argued that the real issue is energy suppliers, not the data centers that use that energy. 

“The problem is people who are supposed to provide power generation to Kevin’s area,” Blair wrote on the social platform X. “Electricity Demand is high and the suppliers are failing to produce.” 

Discussion of energy issues at that level is an indication of how even AI and data center advocates “have to kind of bend their knee to the current political circumstances” as the data center backlash grows, explained Aiden Buzzetti, president of the........

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