From the aging strip malls of Kenilworth, it’s hard to see this blue-collar borough as part of northern New Jersey, one of the richest regions in the country.
But on Saturday it was hard to see anything at all. Carcinogenic compounds from the Canadian wildfires saturated the air, extending the long days of grayscale gloom. Making matters worse was the flood watch. Cars in nearby Manhattan were submerged. Still, the voices outside the red-brick borough hall sounded defiant. “We want water, not AI!” a clump of protesters shouted, as the clouds obliged and dumped down hard rain.
“It looks like mostly lefties here,” mused a woman in a Cato Institute jacket. She turned out to be a New York Post writer who believes the hazards of AI are greatly exaggerated. The dozens of protesters in rain gear didn’t look like lefties to me, exactly, but it’s true that she was the only person in Cato merch.
The turnout in Kenilworth was part of the National Day of Action, a set of demonstrations against AI data centers announced not by the usual tired hippies but by the right-wing nonprofit Humans First. The protest day had 120 construction projects across 37 states in its sights, including one in Wasilla, Alaska, and 18 in Texas. All week, Humans First chair Amy Kremer, a MAGA firebrand, had been beating war drums. These protests, she’d prophesied in RealClearEnergy on July 14, would power a Tea Party–scale revolution against the technopolitical machine that’s steadily choking out American life.
The Kenilworth protest wasn’t a revolution. But there was a current of real radicalism on the wet street. The protest did manage to conjure the Tea Party in the 2010s, but also, on closer examination, Occupy Wall Street of the same period, when figures like Keli Carendar and David Graeber rose up against corporate-political corruption, including the Wall Street bank bailouts.
Jennifer Wilkes, a voluble activist from nearby Roselle Park, approached me. She was fired up.
“Everybody is starting to revolt,” Wilkes said. “They call us crazy because of how we act. But everybody is tired. What else can we do but act crazy? The frustration level is up to here.”
We want water, not AI had a unifying beat. It was hard to argue with the idea that human cells have hydration needs and robots don’t. Maybe humans have finally found something we can dehumanize without guilt: machines.
Only the media representatives who were present, including reporters from NewsNation and an AI newsletter called Transformer, puzzled about the protesters’ ideologies. At a time when Americans wear their political allegiances like rib-splintering corsets—and in the very same month that white supremacists marched on D.C. and Democratic factions nearly came to blows over the future of the party—the grassroots coalition was maddeningly hard to read. It seemed to belong to the future.
“We are the 99 percent,” the Occupy protesters had said. When the enemy is the billionaires, our numbers grow. Perhaps it’s time to think of a coalition made up entirely of nonbillionaires. “We are the 99.999 percent,” a new slogan might go, if it were easier to chant.
“The issue of data centers cuts across all political lines,” said Tony Faber, from Scotch Plains, about five miles away. “I run a little anti-Trump protest on Route 22,” he said. “But on any political spectrum, people are against data centers. There are so many volunteers and grassroots groups that fight them across New Jersey—this is as authentic as it gets.”
Cars honked their support. “God can, God will, God did,” read one man’s T-shirt, which also showed a crucifix. Another shirt said “Faith, Family, Freedom.” Faber’s own shirt said: “Free Palestine.”
“There’s an opportunity to replace some of the machine politics that has never been there before,” Faber continued. “It’s an opportunity in New Jersey, and the Democratic Party at large, for this whole corporate tax-break system to get broken. The data centers are a place where that begins.”
The nemesis today was CoreWeave. Founded in the late 2010s as a bro-driven cryptominer called Atlantic Crypto, CoreWeave is now an AI cloud computing juggernaut based in posh Livingston, New Jersey, where Jared Kushner grew up. Last August, the company announced it would operate, and had largely purchased, the 108-acre tract that once headquartered the pharmaceutical company Merck & Co. (Merck moved to nearby Rahway in early 2024.)
Then, in November, CoreWeave broke ground on a $1.8 billion data complex, taking advantage of a five-year, $250 million tax credit award from the state. The former Merck campus became a mud pit, and massive steel utility pylons went up along residential streets without explanation. When it became clear in the spring that construction was barreling on, and that evidently three data centers were in the works, community members were incensed. They hadn’t been informed, much less consulted.
That’s when local teenagers started knocking on doors. Kids were raring to explain the CoreWeave insult to the less AI-literate adults of Kenilworth, because they might actually do something about it. “We all know what affects our water bill, electric bill,” Shawn Smith, one teenager who lives across the street from the new facility, told an ABC affiliate at the time. “AI companies claim to use less water than they do,” Smith said. “They’re building poles to tap into their supply, but we all know it’s based on the area usage.”
Starting in the spring, council meetings in Kenilworth began blowing up. In May, residents showed up with cowbells and whistles. On June 16, a meeting ran for nearly five rowdy hours. More than 100 residents packed into the overheated room and crammed into the hallway. Signs advertising data center protests read: “Do not let your children and grandkids ask you one day, ‘Why didn’t you do anything to stop it?’”
The teenagers had proven singularly good at breaking town elders out of their tribal standoffs and engaging them in the anti-corporate campaign. “These young coalition activists are awesome,” Wilkes told me. “They file open requests and force transparency.”
Gradually, and then all at once, it seemed the whole town of Kenilworth understood that CoreWeave, in league with compliant or corrupt politicians, had edged them all out of the democratic process. Now the company had seized their land. It became hard to see the data center any other way. When the company issued a stilted P.R. statement saying, “CoreWeave views data centers as investments in the communities that host them,” it sounded like bunk. It sounded like AI. Far more than gerrymandering, the rollback of the Voting Rights Act, or the proposed SAVE Act, the CoreWeave invasion got Union County’s residents into the streets for democracy.
“We all know AI is coming,” Wilkes said. “But the way it’s being done is so horrible and dystopian. The best thing that ever happened is CoreWeave brought our political parties together.”
From this distance, CoreWeave sounds like a cartoon Satan. It’s like Lumon in Severance, or maybe Doofenshmirtz Evil Incorporated. Up close, it’s the opposite of a phantom. As it rises from the New Jersey mud, it’s a vast and goony AI facility—a massive, colonial barracks for the imperial Valley-Beltway overclass. The complex stands on Galloping Hill Road, next to Graceland Memorial Park, a nonsectarian cemetery where locals who died in the Spanish Civil War are buried. When it’s finished, CoreWeave will consume 400,000 square feet of Kenilworth—a massive bite for a borough of just two square miles.
And so the people of Kenilworth, chafing at their exclusion from decisions about their own town, decided to refuse CoreWeave what AI companies call a “social license to operate,” or SLO. Even when these companies can bring elected officials onside and zoom through zoning red tape, it’s still Tocqueville’s America. Uppity American associations can still delay or even sabotage AI imperialism by withholding their SLO, which used to be called the consent of the governed.
Linda Karlovitch, the mayor of Kenilworth, is not a favorite with the data center protesters. For months, she has tried in vain to reassure them that CoreWeave, which will pay significant property taxes, represents a boon for the town. In response to public concerns over land and water, Karlovitch further insists that a complex “closed-loop cooling system” involving propylene glycol means “there will be no water use” at the data center.
This claim is hotly contested, and Karlovitch’s use of Silicon Valley talking points suggest she’s not exactly reading the room. Quibbling over the fine points of wattage, water use, and noise pollution as if she’s at an Aspen corporate retreat won’t mollify people who have long suspected that establishment politicians and Big Tech are arrayed against them. Technocratic language only alienates them further. As does the charge that their uprising is ungenuine, the handiwork of shadowy “outside instigators.”
“She said she agrees that we’re outside agitators from China,” Wilkes told me of the mayor. Wilkes then told me she supported Trump and, in many or most circumstances, ICE. It was admittedly hard to imagine Wilkes could be a paid agent of DeepSeek or the Chinese Communist Party.
But could America Firsters or Effective Altruists be pulling strings? Wilkes didn’t even recognize the name Humans First, let alone Effective Altruism. Then she got exasperated.
“No no no no no. This is insanity. I’m part of like six different volunteer groups around New Jersey. Everybody is talking about it. Everybody who is not political is talking about it. To say this is astroturf is the most asinine thing you can say.”
On Tuesday, July 21, the resistance to American data centers escaped containment. Iran’s leadership announced that, in response to Trump’s continued aggressions, it had destroyed Amazon’s central data center facility in the island nation of Bahrain. It also designated as “legitimate targets” Microsoft, Google, Apple, Nvidia, Oracle, and all of Elon Musk’s companies. Reached for comment, one of Saturday’s protesters in Kenilworth condemned the violence, and assured me he was not an outside instigator in Iran’s military operations.
CoreWeave’s stock is volatile lately. But what’s rocking CoreWeave is not Iran or popular uprisings, but grinding financing matters. Its rival in cloud computing, Nebius, has started to secure its debt with graphics processing units, or GPUs, possibly suggesting that a “non-dilutive funding model” can work at scale.
Boohoo. Like the rest of the AI bubble factory, CoreWeave is hyperfixated on its financial high-wire act. It’s entirely built on circular financing, the multilevel marketing schematics that let the companies perpetuate AI zealotry for one more day. “AI is a generational, maybe multigeneration, change,” Michael Intrator, CoreWeave’s CEO, told The Wall Street Journal Tuesday. “We know what we’re building. We know why we’re building it. We know how we’re building. I’m pretty comfortable that I’m on the right side of this.”
“Pretty comfortable” sounds a bit like anxiety. But for now choosing machines over human beings probably does feel like the right side. Infrastructure providers keep investing in AI start-ups, who then use that money to buy the investors’ wares. This lets OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Google, Microsoft, and all the overleveraged juggernauts keep pretending there’s consumer demand for their products. It also lets them continue to show sky-high valuations. Until they can’t anymore.
Back on the American street, at any one of the 142 protests across 42 states that materialized on Saturday, the brotherly solidarity of the protesters should encourage anyone who’s spent a decade scanning the horizon in despair for pluralistic and grassroots campaigns that confront the oligrarchy with courage and grit.
What’s especially striking is how focused these protesters are on specific goals. If they maintain this focus, they’re less likely to get waylaid by infighting.
As the protest dispersed, Wilkes admitted she was worried about the “hardcore Muslims taking over New York City” but promptly reached out to the lefty Faber—a buddy-in-arms. This seemed like the end of a weepie about a terrible civil war. We were all drenched. She looked at Faber’s pro-Palestine shirt. “I agree with that,” Wilkes said. “That cuts across party lines too.”