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Across the country, communities are fighting back against the construction of AI data centers and winning. In this episode of Movement Memos, Kelly Hayes talks with Saul Levin, host of The Hum, about the growing movement against Big Tech’s infrastructure boom and the strategies organizers are using to stop these projects. They discuss how unlikely coalitions are building power, sharing tactics, and challenging the political and corporate forces seeking to override local communities.

Music: Son Monarcas, Jobii, and David Celeste

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today we are talking about the movement against data center construction. Big Tech has spent years embedding itself into nearly every aspect of our lives. It is an industry that’s devouring every other industry, degrading our information ecosystem, systematically deskilling us, and looting the world, all while trying to convince us that its dominance and its products are inevitable.

But the infrastructure required to sustain the current AI boom is creating a political problem for these companies. Data centers require large swaths of land and consume enormous amounts of water and electricity. They can drive up utility costs. And when tech companies have attempted to bring their material infrastructure into communities around the country, many people have fought back.

Michigan Governor Joins AI CEOs at Ceremony for Controversial Data Center

So what can we learn from these ongoing struggles? And how can we build the power we need to challenge Big Tech and fight for the kind of resources and infrastructure our communities need and deserve? Today, we’ll be hearing from Saul Levin. Saul is the Program Director at the Center for Nonviolent Conflict Research and host of “The Hum,” a podcast about data center resistance. We’ll talk about how people are stopping data center projects, and what tactics and strategies can be replicated in struggles around the country.

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Kelly Hayes: Saul Levin, welcome to “Movement Memos.”

Saul Levin: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, Kelly.

Kelly Hayes: How are you doing today?

Saul Levin: I’m great. I’m feeling energized about organizing happening all over the country, even as I’m worried about the march of big tech companies trying to take over everything.

Kelly Hayes: I hear that. Well, I’m so glad to be in conversation with you today. Before we dive in, could you take a moment to introduce yourself and tell the audience a bit about yourself and your work?

Saul Levin: Sure. My name is Saul Levin. I use he/him pronouns. I host a podcast called “The Hum.” “The Hum” is a podcast dedicated to the fight against AI data centers, and we interview people fighting big tech in different ways, but primarily fighting AI data centers. And we interview farmers and social workers, beauty salon workers, as well as researchers and journalists and politicians, all about why they’re opposing AI data centers and what are the different things that are bringing them together with other people and what are their strategies. So that’s a big project right now.

I also coordinate a program called The Movement Incubator where we coach up-and-coming activists on their fights against all manner of things. And it’s an educational program where we help people figure out how to design campaigns. And just for a little more context, I’m from Michigan originally. I live in DC, and before I was doing this work, I was the political director at The Green New Deal Network. I worked for Congresswoman Cori Bush and [former Interior Secretary] Deb Haaland doing climate and labor policy on Capitol Hill. And during that time, I co-founded the Congressional Workers Union with a bunch of friends and we started unionizing Capitol Hill for the first time. So I come from a climate and labor organizing background to this fight against big tech and authoritarianism.

Kelly Hayes: So what prompted you to start talking with so many people involved in fights over data centers? What were you trying to understand when you began those conversations?

Saul Levin: Honestly, I was worried about where I’m from. In the state of Michigan, Governor [Gretchen] Whitmer and the Democratic Party, we were so excited to support getting into office to have democratic control in Michigan, started pushing through industry-friendly policies. They were trying to give unlimited Great Lakes water to companies. They were pushing forward huge tax abatements and incentives and I just felt like there was so little reporting about it. And someone told me about it and I thought that should be bigger news. If there was ever a bipartisan issue in the state of Michigan, it’s that we don’t want to give away our water or pollute our water. And there was so little reporting.

And I called a reporter who had written one of the only stories about this, a couple years back, and he was like, “You’re one of the only people that’s called me and I’m bamboozled. I mean, this is absolutely astronomical amounts of potential harm and we’re barely talking about it.” And so I started looking into the data center issue where I’m from, because I heard about it and was very worried. And I started asking around and people were like, “I don’t really know what you’re talking about. I don’t know.” And then suddenly people started calling me back and saying, “Hey, we have the same problem. Did you figure out what to do? This is really awful.” So it was really just finding out about politicians selling us out to tech companies back home in Michigan.

Kelly Hayes: And since then, some of those betrayals have become more public. Some of our listeners will remember that, back in June, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer was caught on a hot mic during a conversation with Oracle CEO Clay Magouyrk about a proposed data center in Saline Township. In the clip, Whitmer was widely reported as saying, “We’re used to people saying ‘fuck no,’ and doing it anyway.”

Saul Levin: Yeah, it was pretty horrifying. I mean, her actions backed that up, but I think for a lot of people who haven’t been as engaged on the issue, they realized, “Wow, Gretchen Whitmer’s smart and she really knows what she’s doing,” which is siding with industry against the wellbeing and desires of Michiganders. And that’s a really scary thing when a politician that you elected to represent you is actually representing some really rich people from Silicon Valley.

Kelly Hayes: I really relate to what you’re saying about seeing a gap in the way stories are being told and feeling the need to step into that role. That’s how I got involved with movement journalism, back in 2014. I was frustrated with the way the campaigns we were organizing and the protests we were waging were being covered. Sometimes the coverage wasn’t there at all, and sometimes our stories were so mangled that most of what mattered had been filtered out. So I started trying to tell those stories myself.

And I hope that, in addition to whatever people take away from this conversation about the fight over data centers, listeners also feel empowered by that idea. If something is happening that you care about, and you’re in a position to learn about it and understand it, there is real value in helping other people understand it too. Especially given what’s happening to the media landscape, we need to deconsolidate knowledge, to have more people learning, documenting, explaining, and circulating what our communities need to know. And we need people writing this work into the pages of history, or at least creating a record that makes that possible, because within a fairly short set of years, a lot of stories get lost if we don’t try to preserve them.

You’ve talked about seeing a lot of potential in these fights for broader transformative change. What is it about data center organizing that makes you think these struggles could become something larger than battles over individual projects?

Saul Levin: That’s a great question, Kelly. I mean, it’s because of what people are saying. And as you mentioned, I got into doing this podcast, not because I… I never wanted to have a podcast. I don’t even like podcasts that much. I mean, everyone: keep listening to Kelly, but I was hearing amazing stories from people about why they were fighting data centers and how creatively they were fighting back despite limited resources. And I was honestly profoundly inspired by what I was hearing, and none of that was being captured in half a sentence quotes that were making it into the newspapers or headlines that said, “Farmer opposes data center,” and weren’t capturing not only the story, but the feeling that people had about these projects. And so that’s what inspired me to record these conversations in the first place. I was so moved.

The reason that we believe that there’s so much power in this fight is a few reasons actually. The first one is that data centers are just a really bad deal. There are about 20 to 25 different reasons we hear from people about why they’re fighting AI data centers regularly. There’s so many things not to like. Of course, most people know they can raise your utility bills, they use and pollute water, they can interrupt fertile lands, they power dangerous, “super intelligent” AI. All of those things are true, but there’s a much longer list.

And so one reason is that it’s such a bad deal that people from all walks of life have something to hate about data centers and AI data centers and very little to gain. And so that brings all kinds of different people together for potential movement building.

The second reason is that we see or I see AI data centers as a physical manifestation of really so many feelings and experiences that all of us have of a loss of control. When we think about, let’s say you’re going to a concert and your ticket has a huge fee on top of the price of the ticket, or your kids come home from school and they’re immediately addicted to social media despite your best efforts or what have you, that’s really upsetting and a data center is a physical representation of so many of those things that are so deeply wrong, if that makes sense.

Kelly Hayes: It really does feel like a culmination of what Big Tech has been doing to our lives. We’re talking about an industry that has been eating every other industry for years, contributing to the atomization of our communities, while trying to make privacy — or even the idea that your own words and art can belong to you — obsolete.

And now, the mass theft of every piece of art and writing these systems could devour has helped fuel a kind of monster that also needs these companies to devour huge swaths of land and unthinkable amounts of water, while jacking up the cost of powering our homes. It feels like an escalating, physical materialization of something that’s been many years in the making.

And I think that becomes especially clear when we understand AI not as some particular technology, because it isn’t any one thing, but as a political project, and one that can only perpetuate itself by devouring the things we make and the things we need.

So can you talk about what happens when people come together and rally against that political project by opposing data centers? Beyond stopping individual sites, what are people reclaiming in the process?

Saul Levin: The developers go around saying there’s so many pros to AI data centers. The biggest benefit I’ve seen from AI data centers is actually the social connections that people make fighting them. There’s so many amazing friendships and stories of different kinds of people coming together.

One interview that we did was with a woman who actually works in IT. Her name’s Lorraine. She told a wonderful story of how she loves using AI at work and uses it every day, but she was really concerned about an AI data center project coming in right next to the residential community that she lives in in rural North Carolina. And she described, as almost everyone we talk to does, a totally motley crew of folks. There was a public school teacher and her, an IT worker, and the mother of an autistic child who had gotten experience lobbying politicians to try and fight for her son’s rights and education and different health care settings and a retiree.

I mean, they just got a group of folks together who never would’ve known each other otherwise and maybe didn’t agree politically or socially on everything, but they said, “You know what? We can agree on one thing, this data center project is for someone else. It’s not for us. It’s going to be harmful to us, and let’s use everything in our power to fight back.” And they won a moratorium in their town, and that’s the story we’re hearing over and over again, these beautiful new acquaintances, friendships, camaraderie that’s developing out of people recognizing how harmful these projects are and coming together.

Kelly Hayes: This reminds me of a story I heard from an old friend of mine named Heather Lynn, who is organizing against a data center project in Grayslake, Illinois. Heather told me that opposition had become so overwhelming at public meetings that officials just started canceling them. But people kept showing up anyway.

So instead of people going inside and challenging their elected officials, people just gathered outside the canceled meetings, networked, and built relationships. It was a huge miscalculation on the part of those officials, because pissed-off people were finding each other, connecting, learning from each other, and building solidarity. And it was all centered around this experience of the government trying to shut them down, which really had the opposite effect.

To me, that’s such a powerful example of how we can leverage the missteps of elected officials when they slight us and underestimate our communities, and really turn these efforts to shut us out of what’s happening into new openings for political action.

Is there a moment you’ve heard about in your conversations for “The Hum” that you think really captures the potential of this moment?

Saul Levin: Sure. Gee, there’s so many. One that comes to mind is a conversation that I had with a guy named Drew Small in Nashville. He’s a music advertiser, producer, has a family business where he, as he’s described it, buys Facebook ads for musicians. And I asked him about, “You have these skills, they’ve helped you in making social media accounts to talk about the data center fight. That’s really interesting that people are using their professional skills after work in these fights.” But I said, “Where’d he get started? I mean, I assume you don’t know about soil quality testing or land use zoning or things like that, and here you are working with your neighbors to fight an AI data center in Nashville.” And he said, “Listen, they thought we were dumb and we actually didn’t know this stuff, but we’re smart and we know how to learn things.”

And so he went to the public library and worked with the librarian at his local library in Nashville to go through 200-plus pages of this document........

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