“What up, Council?” said the comedian J.T. Parr, greeting the Pasadena City Council in a surfer persona. Then he got to the point: “Americans are united in our hatred of data centers. They’re big, ugly water guzzlers.”
He’s right. America the Polarized has found some agreement at last. While President Trump guns it on building data centers, 71 percent of Americans oppose them, including a majority of Republicans. In Michigan, Pennsylvania and Texas, Republicans are breaking with Trump and issuing stern warnings about the massive facilities that increasingly pock rural America. And now Humans First, a conservative group that says it supports an “America First AI policy,” is planning a nationwide data-center protest on July 18.
Data centers are also shaping up to be a rogue issue putting torque on the midterms. South Florida Representative Byron Donalds, now a Trump-endorsed gubernatorial candidate in his state, has quietly defied the big guy, pledging to “protect Florida’s families and communities from data centers.” In one ad, he even seems to support government control of electric utilities. (Welcome to the struggle, Comrade Donalds.)
So who supports data centers? Only politicians who benefit from Big Tech’s ambition to dominate global AI. Parr, who himself ran for city council in Berkeley, Calif., in 2024, further said of data centers: “We’re just supposed to accept them because we might lose a race with China. Dude, where’s China?”
That Homer Simpson-esque question might just nail it, and it should be taken seriously if not literally. It suggests just how vexed Americans are with Big Tech’s ongoing effort to sacrifice regular people to the global ambitions of billionaires.
Thus we have a mass mobilization focused squarely on protecting American hometowns from oligarchic exploitation. According to Data Center Watch, protest groups against data centers now number an eye-popping 833 across 49 states. That’s a genuine movement. For more than a year, the protests have roused corners of America that not long ago were stuck in tribal stalemates focused on the personality of Trump.
Out of these protests, a surprising, hopeful, and effective rural progressivism is emerging. Data centers, which never close, consume vast amounts of electricity. They also drain millions of gallons of local water for cooling and churn out air and noise pollution all day every day. No wonder the data-center protesters have keyed in to AI’s environmental impact. Contrary to popular belief that Americans are dismissive of climate concerns, 70 percent of Americans now worry about the ravages of data centers.
Populists of every stripe have further grown wary of the brutally expensive ruling-class projects that jeopardize our daily lives: Silicon Valley monopolies and the war in Iran. A big faction of the anti-globalist set has further turned its attention away from the right-wing bugbear of immigration and toward causes that elsewhere are derided as “communist”: working people and the climate.
And the protests are surprisingly tactical. When it comes to affecting policy, they put the bigger No Kings demonstrations, which largely exist to express anger and ideological affiliation, in the shade. According to a watchdog group, data center opponents blocked or slowed more than 75 projects nationwide, worth $130 billion, between January and March alone. What’s more, 141 moratoria have been proposed at local, county, state, and national levels. And dozens of cities have actually implemented temporary bans, including Birmingham, Alabama; New Orleans; and Tulsa, Oklahoma.
“Communities have internalized an opposition playbook,” wrote Data Center Watch. “As political resistance builds and local organizing becomes more coordinated, this is now a sustained and intensifying trend.”
If these communities keep at it, and keep notching wins, they might just show the way out of the defeatism and blind rage that have stymied American progress and policy for the better part of a decade.
“We are anti sacrifice zone,” said protester Megan McDonough at a Pennsylvania State Capitol demonstration last week. A sacrifice zone is a municipality that is thrown to the wolves of Big Tech.
“We are anti being told that billionaire tech bros deserve more protection than the people who drink the water, breathe the air, pay the taxes, and live with the consequences.”
McDonough’s speech and Parr’s what’s-China comedy spiel really point to what’s most galvanizing about the protests. The data-center opponents are ordinary Americans. They embody a national everyman type we need more of in politics: the wise child, forever underestimated, who asks Socratic questions.
This archetype is so American it should be featured in a pavilion for the 250th. Its vibe draws on centuries of unlikely American heroes: nonconformist Yankee Doodle, outlaw Huckleberry Finn, naively principled Mr. Smith, anti-authoritarian Jeff Spicoli, and, of course, skeptical realist Homer Simpson.
These fellows are friends to the obvious. They don’t like abstractions. The data centers are right in front of our faces. They’re not one of the intangible threats of technology that preoccupy anti-woke and anti-tech faddists like Jonathan Haidt. (Citing Haidt’s out-of-step philosophies and opposition to D.E.I., dozens of students booed and walked out of his commencement address at NYU last week.) Instead, the data centers are physical outposts of AI empires—ugly water-guzzlers that don’t even pretend to serve communities.
At least Homer’s nuclear plant keeps him employed. A massive data facility uses automation and, once built, rarely employs more than a few dozen people. Data centers really only benefit the Big Tech emperors, to whom, according to a growing American consensus, we are no longer willing to sacrifice our towns.
