In short order, America’s data centers have come to stand in for a broad range of apocalyptic threats, from the climate crisis to the surveillance state to Trump’s kleptocracy.
Data centers are an excellent symbol for the Halloween season—sinister in every way. They combine the ugliness of strip mining, the creepiness of a CIA op, and the affront and destruction of a military invasion. They’re hard on the land. They’re loud. They’re built with exquisite tenderness for GPUs, and near total disrespect for human beings.
Finally, the output of data centers—artificial intelligence—has spectacularly failed to win American hearts and minds. AI now seems to exist chiefly so oligarchs can spy on us, confiscate our wealth, lay us off, and finally wipe us out altogether.
No chatbot oozing charisma, let alone a charmless CEO, seems to be able to persuade Americans that AI has our best interests at heart.
With the midterms less than a month away, suspicion of data centers has reached a fever pitch. Sixty-nine percent of respondents to a September poll by NBC News oppose AI data centers in their areas, and 45 percent “strongly oppose” the buildouts. So candidates in both parties are running hard against them.
Political attacks on data centers reliably conjure a nightmarish extraction economy, in which the powerful are sucking the very life out of the people. “Big corporations gobble up energy to feed their data centers,” Ohio Democratic Senate candidate Sherrod Brown says on the campaign trail. “They devour your land. They suck up your water. They leave you with the bill.”
In Texas, Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico echoed Brown on CNN: “These data centers are popping up in our communities, soaking up all our water, driving up our utility prices.” Talarico described Ken Paxton, his Republican rival, who used AI deepfakes in an attack ad last month, as “bought by the data center industry.”
This means that, in spite of promises by the AI companies, local electricity bills will almost certainly rise. After all, they’ve already shot up in U.S. states that have data centers, and the price hike is dramatic. Over five years, energy prices rose 41.6 percent in Pennsylvania and Ohio, which are studded with data centers.
The public’s pushback has been fierce, especially in contested districts. Twenty of the 43 most competitive House districts are contending with data center proposals, and protesters have managed to pause about a quarter of them.
As popular resistance to data centers has solidified, the political geography of the buildout has shifted. Most data centers built up through 2024 were erected in Democratic counties, while the new proposals, for the bigger centers, are mostly in Republican ones. This may explain why Republicans have turned so sharply on the buildout. According to Renshaw, support for data centers in their own communities was at +36 among Republicans in July 2025; by August 2026, it sank to −30.
This whiplash has caught at least 16 AI-boosting politicians off guard. These include House candidates in tight races across Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Virginia, along with Republican Senator Susan Collins and Republican Representative Ashley Hinson, candidates for Senate in Maine and Iowa. All have supported data centers in the past, and while some are trying to downplay their records, others are leaning into them. Republican Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, whom Newsweek recently ranked as the top data center booster in a competitive race, has told voters in his district that the U.S. “simply can’t afford to slow down the buildout.” With six in 10 Pennsylvania voters opposed to the centers, it’s Perry’s room-reading skills that might need building out.
There’s something especially satisfying about the oligarchs and their Republican friends crashing into, of all things, American democracy. Because while opposition to data centers could help decide the midterms, the midterms could also shape future data center policy, leading to pauses and moratoria. This would destabilize AI investment and undermine market gains. For the very rich, that’s the real apocalypse.
