Data Center Hate is the Great Unifier

Around the world, elected officials are responding to Big Tech and private equity’s data center pressures differently. But citizens, across the board, are heated up and fighting back.

If you ask any random person on the street whether they support data centers, I doubt anyone right now, regardless of political affiliation, would express even moderate support for them. Farmers and rural land owners facing multimillion dollar deals dangled by companies like xAI and Amazon are turning them down. Homeowners are expressing concern over reduced water supply and skyrocketing energy bills.

In this age of extreme division, disliking data centers actually seems to be a unifying belief, across age, gender, and ideology. While opposition has been percolating in the last year or two, cities and states are taking concrete action in the last few days to impose moratoriums. And tech companies are catching on to this optics problem: just yesterday, Meta went on the offensive by announcing a data center buildout “jobs program,” presumably an attempt to counter the reality that data centers don’t even create that many local jobs, a typically reliable business narrative.

To-date, the tech companies’ data center initiatives have been primarily geared to appeal to stock prices and shareholders, prioritizing speed and scale above all, while committing local officials to tight NDAs to obscure the sausage-making of building and permitting.

As a result, the hyper-growth stories have focused on overcoming challenges to data center growth, to show each tech behemoth as a true contender in the race. While data centers have historically been powered by the grid, new centers plan to sustain themselves with natural gas. Google was noted by the WSJ a few days ago for its strategy to “secure its own power supply” (although experts point to this natural gas strategy leading to higher electricity prices across the region.) Meanwhile, in Ohio, Meta is now holding chips in tents, an attempt to cut the time to build compute in half—described by one reporter as “like a scene out of the movie Mad Max.”

And regulators around the world have responded in different ways—some with moratorium legislation, others cloaking its tacit support in lazy “economic imperative” language. In Europe, there is concern over the European Commission’s latest tech sovereignty package, which, in the words of local watchdogs, “rolls out the red carpet” for Big Tech.

Pierre Terras at Friends of the Earth and Beyond Fossil Fuels, a non-profit fighting for a renewables energy sector, told me that an “impressive game of regulation and lobbying” from U.S. tech, including amendments written by companies like Microsoft, have led to the Commission paving the way for data centers to have what they want at the expense of the environment.

When asked why the Commission failed to protect the public from overreach of Big Tech here, Terras responded that the “so-called AI race” is “seen as the North Star of this act instead of the European economy, climate objectives and strategic autonomy.” Regulators, he continued, are giving a “blank check to big tech, and have blindly believed in the narrative that if Europe does not adopt the path of the U.S., the continent will be drawn into economic decay.”

Yet in the U.S., data center opposition movements have been heating up in the last few days, driven by grassroots and community activism—perhaps catalyzing new narratives around “jobs” and not just resource hoarding and hyper-scale. In Hays County, Texas, activists are pushing for delays to data center buildouts, citing negative impact to people’s drinking water supply. In Ohio, one bill would end tax breaks on data centers, while Kansas City is exploring a data center moratorium, as are Nashville and Charlotte (which actually approved a 150-day moratorium).

Meanwhile in Wyoming, residents are revolting against plans to build a “man camp” to house thousands of out-of-state workers flocking to the region to build massive data centers. And in New York, a one-year data center moratorium bill has already passed the House and Senate and is heading to Governor Kathy Hochul’s desk as we speak. If passed, New York would be the first state to impose such a moratorium.

The flurry of activity in New York comes after a 500 megawatt, $19.46 billion data center proposal—now being pushed by private equity firm Apollo Global Management as its flagship data center project—faced relentless campaigning and opposition from hundreds of local community groups, including faith, climate, environmental justice, and consumer protection groups.

While governors in Maine and Vermont vetoed similar bills intended to pump the brakes on the ravenous goals of data center developers, Ryan Howard, Indigenous Solidarity Director at NY Renews, pointed me to the backlash against Maine Governor Janet Mills after she vetoed a moratorium as a reason that might deter Hochul from following the same path. They also referred me to a recent Buffalo newspaper quote from Governor Hochul, where she said that New York communities need to benefit “much more” from data centers, and that the “status quo can’t continue.”

That much remains true. Faceless data centers gobbling up power, water, and land without proving any benefit to real people is quickly becoming one of the environmental and moral imperatives of our time. While legislators and regulators may acquiesce to the increasingly tired “AI is inevitable” narrative, the tech companies don’t seem to have much more in the form of narrative persuasion—which is likely why Meta is suddenly promoting a “jobs program.” And as they flounder to find a reason beyond money to convince people that they are a net good to the world, communities on-the-ground and resistance movements have proven that data centers may not be the only entities to heat things up.