Why Everyone Hates AI Data Centers

Data centers are quickly becoming the most polarizing buildings in America. On this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel speaks with the reporter Jael Holzman about the backlash to the buildings powering the AI boom. Why have data centers become controversial? What are the environmental, economic, and political impacts? How does the backlash track along left/right party lines? This episode demystifies the data-center fight. Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Atlantic subscribers also get access to exclusive subscriber audio in Apple Podcasts. Subscribe today at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:19Speaker 01

  Do you want to hear about visionaries creating a better world? People working in conservation, exploration, science and tech alongside storytellers imagining and creating a better future. I'm Alex Honnold, professional rock climber and founder of the Honnold Foundation, bringing you season six of Planet Visionaries. This season, I speak to guests like National Geographic photographer Tom Pescek and Anna Rappam, executive director of the Jane Goodall Institute, USA, in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Watch Planet Visionaries on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:49Speaker 02

  The conversation around data centers is easily a pain sponge, but you've got to wonder where that water is coming from and what that sponge really is made of. Because what that sponge is made of is so many local conflicts stitched together.

• 1:10Charlie Warzel?

  I'm Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today, we're going to talk about the most polarizing buildings in America, talking about data centers. Data centers have been around for decades. They've been powering much of what we do online, but the AI boom has created this ravenous need for more computing power. And in the process, something extraordinary seems to be happening. People across the political spectrum are coming together in opposition to these data centers. The AI backlash has galvanized people like Bernie Sanders and AOC. They've proposed a data center moratorium in Congress, but also the populist right, where figures like Steve Bannon are arguing that tech elites who are investing billions

• 1:54Charlie Warzel?

  in the AI infrastructure buildout are, quote, "totally out of control." Most notable, though, is the reaction from regular citizens. A May Gallup poll found that 70% of Americans oppose the construction of an AI data center in their community. Across the country, in local town halls, in Community meetings, grassroots activists and concerned residents are coming together to protest these projects, and in many cases, they're winning. As the website Heatmap reported this month, at least 20 proposed data centers were canceled following local opposition in the first quarter of 2026. The stakes of this fight on either side are reasonably clear. The big tech AI hyperscalers are investing historic sums in these buildings. According to my colleague Mateo Wong, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Google alone have already

• 2:38Charlie Warzel?

  spent more on data centers since the launch of ChatGPT than the federal government spent to build the entire interstate highway system. Tech companies need to keep building these facilities, and they need to do it fast in order to keep up with demand, but also this expectation that these models get better and better. But data centers are expensive, they take a lot of time to build. And data centers have become this potent symbol for those who are skeptical of AI. They represent a physical incursion of big tech into the communities. Many data centers are loud, some are powered by natural gas turbines. There are local fears here about energy use, water use, pollution, and there are national fears about data centers driving up energy prices. Some of these issues are clear-cut. Data centers are huge, they're loud, they're industrial.

• 3:22Charlie Warzel?

  But other issues, like water use, those are highly contested by people who say that the concern may be overblown. Like so many political issues, the data center fight seems to cleave people into two distinct camps: those who see the buildings as wasteful, polluting, as the engine of a technology that they are anxious about, and those who see data centers as an engine of progress, part of an American infrastructure boom. This conflict is still incredibly new, and there's a lot of confusing or bad information out there about data centers. It seems clear that AI is about to collide with electoral politics, both in the midterms and in the 2028 race. What's the real economic and environmental impact of these buildings? How do the politics of data centers track against left-right party lines?

• 4:05Charlie Warzel?

  What do these people stand to lose and gain when these buildings pop up in our towns? JL Holesman is a reporter for the climate website Heatmap and the author of its newsletter "The Fight." She's been covering environmental conflicts in politics like mining, renewable energy, and industrial decarbonization. And for the last few months, she's turned her focus full-time to reporting on the data center backlash and the policy fight therein. Her work has been instructive in demystifying what's actually going on inside these buildings and across the country. She joins me now to talk about it all.

• 4:40Charlie Warzel?

  Jael, welcome to Galaxy Brain.

• 4:43Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 4:44Charlie Warzel?

  So I want to start extremely basic here. What exactly is a data center? Like, how do these buildings very broadly work? And why, in really, you know, the last year, last six months, as a structure, have they become so controversial?

• 5:02Speaker 02

  Well, data centers aren't a new thing.

• 5:06Speaker 02

  Their invention goes back to the early to mid 20th century, the rise of computing in general. Now, we're seeing a rise of data centers specifically because of artificial intelligence and the sheer amount of compute, you know, computers whizzing and buzzing, et cetera, et cetera, needed to do all of what Claude and ChatGPT enable our modern society. Why are people upset about data centers? I've been spending a lot of time as a journalist trying to understand that question as of late. I think people have a lot of reasons they say they don't want these projects. We find that it's an incredibly bipartisan concern right now.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  Recent data from Heat Map News' Pro platform has found local opposition exploded in the first quarter of this year to record highs. I was just registering examples where local data center fights were showing up in local media or in local community meeting minutes, things like that. This is happening not just because of the impacts that people claim, but it's worth saying that just a broad social change like this is almost necessarily going to invite a huge amount of upset and angst. You know, we've seen that with all other sorts of technological innovations. I see a lot of people who are saying they're upset about data centers,

• 6:30Speaker 02

  who were upset about vaccines before that, who were upset about masking before that, as well as about renewable energy. People who were worried about getting cancer from wind turbines now worried about getting cancer from a data center. Picking apart fact versus fiction, understanding people's motivations,

• 6:47Speaker 02

  Never been more important and we're honestly still in the beginning phases of getting any of this, just as new as AI itself.

• 6:54Charlie Warzel?

  Talking about that backlash, there's this recent Gallup poll, it's been passed around, seven in 10 Americans opposing constructing data centers for AI in their local area. Forty-eight percent coming in as strongly opposed, barely a quarter in favor. What are those fights, since you've been covering them, like, what do they look like on the ground level? Is this, you know, response inside of communities, like really loud and boisterous city council meetings, we're talking about, you know, on the street protests in these communities? What is the, the shape of the fight on the ground?

• 7:24Speaker 02

  So here's how it looks in so many rivers and dells across the United States right now. A real estate company or a shell company shows up and says that they would like to develop property either for a data center itself or for a tech campus, and it's broad, but then it eventually becomes a data center. Who the ultimate inheritor of that property is going to be? Whether it be one of the, you know, several, but not that many tech giants that are using these facilities? Or whether it be, you know, an individual magnate who's going to benefit enormously from the transaction? A lot of that information is actually shielded from the public view.

• 8:09Speaker 02

  There's not the kind of years-long disclosure process that you and I are used to seeing in things like, oh, they're going to build a giant wind farm, it's going to go through a big permitting process, et cetera. A lot of the time, because this stuff is showing up as real estate projects first, the public is learning about these projects as they're being approved, many of the time. And, and I'm sure companies would argue that they are trying to get out ahead, but I've yet to see a lot of instances where that's really the case. Too often, I find it's a shell company or it's a quote-unquote startup that showed up and then is ultimately going to give its property to Amazon or to Google or somebody else.

• 8:51Speaker 02

  If you're living around that, that area, you almost naturally are going to be upset. You're like, wait, I didn't sign up. For this, I didn't have a vote on this. And you're also not really accustomed to your local leaders having such consequence in your life. We haven't had a big industrial build out like this in so long. And so you're seeing people flood out to local meetings where before this, people weren't even paying that much attention to their city council or their county commission. Suddenly they are showing up, they're learning who those people are, and this is how they get to know them. You know, I was reading this morning about someone running for municipal office who left the Republican Party in a small county in the middle of Kentucky

• 9:30Speaker 02

  because he was so upset at how the political alignment just isn't responding to the angst over data centers. So you're seeing this pushback, these forces directed and vented in new ways that we're not used to seeing. We're used to politics being nationalized and these fights being nationalized.

• 9:46Charlie Warzel?

  Right.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  This is going to have impacts throughout our politics for years to come, and this is only the beginning.

• 9:51Charlie Warzel?

  I think it's really interesting to talk about those, the structure of some of those real estate transactions, the non-disclosure of it all, or the shell company part of it, because even if it's not necessarily structured to be nefarious in any way, it feels that way when it comes into your community. If you're like, whoa, now you're telling me this is Amazon? And whereas like an Amazon facility, you know, a distribution facility with all the trucks, like you kind of do, you know what it is. And there is that way in which the secrecy behind this is a real factor here than I wasn't really thinking about that way.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I think also people are just not used to, the ordinary Josh Mo is not used to dealing with the energy and tech development space, right? So on the left, what this reminds me most of is actually the anti-mining movement in the US and where it has sat for the last 10, 15 years. We've tried to have a bit of a mining boomlet in part due to the demand for things like batteries for electric cars and cell phones, mining stuff like lithium, cobalt, graphite. And the progressive left in this country really couldn't define the evil there. It was kind of running headlong into the climate movement and the push to. To develop more stuff to decarbonize.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  At the same time, there was this push against renewable energy on the very far right conservative sect that started to gain steam over the past five years, in part driven by the the push for this energy transition away from fossil fuels. You saw this push against solar farms and wind farms on farmland. These concerns about battery storage technology and and potential Chinese control there, which are baseless for the most part, but like I, once again, we're talking about movements. We're not necessarily talking about facts, right? Either way, both of these movements failed to really define a political mainstream. They could affect things on a local level. They could affect individual politicians' conversations on these issues.

• 11:54Speaker 02

  But they didn't really have a place for them all to congregate at one time. And when you boil these movements down, they really do represent a left right horseshoe theory of of politics that is far more complex than NIMBYism, but does ultimately wind up in a similar place where you're kind of just arguing against development that is happening in other countries that other countries are going to do to try to dominate. And it's not like AI is going away. The folks who push on this movement oftentimes would argue that that the the the solution is to just not use artificial intelligence, but that rarely works in this country, let alone elsewhere.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  And so you wind up in this place where there's ripe fertile ground in preexisting political movements on both sides of the political spectrum that do sort of operate in a similar space, which allows for this movement to be so powerful. The time has never been more apt for a very grassroots populist movement against very wealthy, you know, tech magnates, energy industry magnates with fuel prices going higher. The issue here is like, what is the end goal, right? And this is what I'm trying to best understand is like, what is the end goal of the anti data center movement right now, aside from just banning it indefinitely? And on top of that, like, where is the movement?

• 13:17Speaker 02

  To get the industry to actually be more socially responsible, to get more, you know, socially responsible projects, less, you know, kind of Colossus XAI situations where you hear about the NAACP suing for environmental racism.

• 13:33Charlie Warzel?

  And that, by the way, just for listeners, the Colossus is one of the sort of best-known data centers. It's in Memphis, right?

• 13:40Speaker 02

  There's two facilities in the Memphis metro area, and there have been reported issues around them operating gas turbines without proper permits, alleged in part because Elon Musk and XAI have just kind of publicly moved forward in this way. Like, it's not exactly like they're hiding the situation. It's more of a move fast and break things approach to land development and in large industrial facilities that Silicon Valley is exporting into rural areas. And now we're seeing the results.

• 14:16Charlie Warzel?

  But just for the record, Musk has also said that the turbines are mobile. He said they're temporary, and thus they are exempt from the more stringent air permitting. But first, a quick break.

• 14:35Speaker 00

  If you're trying to get news today, you'll find a lot of biased algorithms, rage bait, and AI noise. Think social media. That's where Inpress comes in. It's a social platform on top of factual journalism, not the other way around. Track your reading and earn points. It's like Strava for your brain. Plus, you can connect with other users in your city who share your genuine curiosity. Ditch the echo chamber for reality with Inpress. Download it today for iOS or Android at inpress.app. That's I, N as in news nerd, press.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  Do you want to hear about visionaries creating a better world? People working in conservation, exploration, science, and tech alongside storytellers imagining and creating a better future. I'm Alex Honnold, professional rock climber and founder of the Honnold Foundation, bringing you season six of Planet Visionaries. This season, I speak to guests like National Geographic photographer Tom Pechek and Anna Rappman, executive director of the Jane Goodall Institute, USA, in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Watch Planet Visionaries on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 15:41Charlie Warzel?

  One of the things that I'm seeing is this like constant conversation about resources. Can you talk to me a little bit about like using water as an example? How this conversation is so polarized?

• 15:51Speaker 02

  What I find is that when I cover a community that's upset about water, this is also a community that was already upset about how much water was being used. It's additive, right? I think the headline becomes people hate data center because water use. When in reality, people hate data center in that case because here's another water user. Right? I don't think people are just looking at it in a vacuum, the way that some folks, the loudest folks on the internet might seem. That being said, water is far less of an issue to your day to day life in data center development, as far as what my reporting shows, than the energy impacts, than the noise impacts. I think one of the things we don't talk about that is one of the most profound impacts

• 16:34Speaker 02

  of data center development in a particular community is the noise. And there can be many forms of noise pollution from a data center, both heard, as well as what some people claim is perceived from the vibration of things like large gas turbines or the whizzing of air cooling facility. You're in a position where these projects really do impact communities. And there are too many examples now, like the XAI data center. I visited a project of Vantage Data Center in Sterling, Virginia, the VA2 project, where the noise pollution is so profound that when you go there, you feel it in your body. You can't even hide it. And you feel the vibration and then you smell the air and it doesn't smell right. It smells tainted.

• 17:17Speaker 02

  There's something to be said for how there aren't enough good cases. And as a journalist, I'm looking for those and I'm excited to tell those. But you know, I hate to bring them up again, but it reminds me too much of the hard rock mining industry. The hard rock mining industry has modernized over the past few decades and there are much cleaner mines than what people today think of when they think of guy in hard hat goes and creates open pit gold mine. You know, especially in technologies like lithium, where the extraction processes, they do have negative impacts. But it's not this sprawling, you know, for lack of a better term, colossus of a site, right? I feel like the data center industry, and we're starting to hear people even in VC

• 17:58Speaker 02

  world, explain the data center sector, the tech companies behind it, there is a need to get better at storytelling, to hire people in community relations who have a background in those communities. You know, the oil industry has said for a long time that they're able to work so well in places like Texas because they get good land agents. You know, they've invested their time and livelihoods for a very long time into getting the land and using the resources. People are so upset in part because the tech sector is treating data center development like bug testing. You know, it's like A B testing. You're trying out a community and you're going to see if it works. And if it doesn't, then they go away. Philosophically, that makes sense if

• 18:38Speaker 02

  you've been doing it for a long time. But that's not how large real estate projects work. That's not how large energy projects work in this country, or at least it hasn't been for a very long time.

• 18:50Charlie Warzel?

  What is the flip side here, right? Like, what is the upshot of a data center coming to your town? Economic benefits, tax breaks? What does a town stand to gain from letting a data center get built here?

• 19:00Speaker 02

  I think data centers offer a lot to a community in a moment with declining revenues from state and federal governments to fund crucial social services for you and I. There is an argument to be made that the sheer magnitude of tax revenue going into some of these communities could replace cuts to Medicaid, could replace cuts to Head Start. One can easily make an argument that this is where the money is coming from. You should really consider taking that money and rolling with it. There is a credible argument there. You know, look at Northern Virginia. So much tax revenue goes to Northern Virginia now from being data center

• 19:44Speaker 02

  alley, as some folks colloquially call it. The flip side, it can be found in Loudoun County, or in a state like Alaska. I mean, the corollary here is that if you rely on oil and gas revenue for your state's budget. Eventually, you will kind of be reliant on that industry to a point where you're not able to successfully regulate it effectively to what the people want. And that's what's happening in Loudoun County, where within the past couple of weeks, staff for the county have started warning that their budget is on track to be 60% data center revenues, and they're actually very concerned about how much data center money

• 20:24Speaker 02

  is providing a foundation for their living and recommending against relying on so much data center money. But I would argue there is certainly benefit to a tax base in particular. Aside from that, these facilities don't really do much. It's not like they're providing milk or power themselves. One argument that I have heard, though, from this guy Duncan Campbell from DER Task Force, Smart Energy Wonk, that I follow on Twitter, this idea of if they're going to build onsite power, you could connect them to the grid. And then when they're not fully operating, or if you force them to curtail their power for a bit, all of a sudden, you're building all this new electricity generation riding

• 21:08Speaker 02

  on the coattails of the data center industry. Stuff like that, which I think is pretty novel, could help to make this a win-win situation. But that's going to require policymakers to do a lot more than they're doing now.

• 21:20Charlie Warzel?

  Well, let me ask about the electricity part of this. I feel like you see data centers connected to or connected to driving up these electricity costs. And I know it's complicated, but how do you, if you're at a bar with someone who's concerned about this, like, how do you calibrate that concern?

• 21:39Speaker 02

  I think because energy prices are up across the board and because the economy currently for a lot of people feels like it's not properly designed to benefit those in the lower and lower middle class, I think you're going to just incessantly find people upset about the new thing, whether it's a data center or Walmart. If I'm talking to someone about data centers at a bar, the first thing that comes up is like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, not the energy bill. And the reason for that is because data centers make a really, really Good symbol for populist politicians to rail against the, for lack of a better term, quote unquote, Epstein class or Bill Gates class or, you know, name your very wealthy, controversial person.

• 22:23Charlie Warzel?

  The oligarchs.

• 22:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, the oligarchs. It's like, oh, here come these big tech guys coming in and putting in a giant thing I didn't want in my community. No one listened to me. I didn't know about it until later. Oh, and there's secrecy too. I'm doing a lot of reporting now on the online right wing and how they've embraced the anti-data center movement. Folks like Matt Walsh and Tucker Carlson have even picked up the mantle and it's hard not to look at this from a layperson's perspective as absent some intervention, absent some very smart political communication and PR from the tech industry. It's going to be hard to bat back this just elites coming in and, and, and trying to take over our community argument for a lot of, of low information laypeople, Joe Schmoes in America.

• 23:09Charlie Warzel?

  This brings me to how, and we've touched on this a little bit already, but how this breaks, this fight breaks along, because it is sort of united on the left and the right, as we've said, but how it breaks along these partisan lines. Can, can you describe for me a little bit of the, you know, where the left splinters off on this and where the right does? I, you sort of alluded to it with the Matt Walshs and the Tucker Carlsons there for the right, but I, I'm curious to make that a little more legible for people.

• 23:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. So what HeMap News's data shows is that one of the top predictors, if not the top predictor of opposition to whether it be a renewable energy project or a data center project is if they voted for Barack Obama for president and then Donald Trump. It is, without a doubt, a fantastic nexus for the left to right horseshoe politics that looks a little bit like NIMBYism, but is far more complex and intermingled in class grievance, politics, paranoia about surveillance, paranoia about elites. Where the right and the left converge here is a political coalition that

• 24:20Speaker 02

  Might prove quite powerful in the future. You have, you know, campaigns like what we're seeing with Graham Plathner for Senate in Maine. I recently interviewed the candidate and he explained to me how terrified he is of AI and the idea that AI data centers are just going to be built out without any regulation, as he put it, in place at all. It's the same thing that folks like Congresswoman Nancy Mace, who's running for governor in South Carolina, she tweeted yesterday asking if she should ban data centers in South Carolina for at least a year. You're seeing this animus picked up on both a far left and a further right convergence that, to me, where it leads is the bigger question.

• 25:04Speaker 02

  I'm not entirely sure what drives this convergence, except a lot of commonalities that both parties had and may not have realized until right now. And the last thing I'll say on that note is I don't really know where the constituency is for the pro-data center movement in the United States. I think that's yet to be fully determined.

• 25:27Charlie Warzel?

  You talked about your interview with Graham Plathner, presumably the Democratic nominee in Maine. He talks about the AOC Bernie data center moratorium idea. I'm curious about that, this idea of, you know, of pausing and where you see that, because I don't quite know whether the idea of the moratorium is more symbolic or is it actually, in your mind, much more of a political opposition of, no, no, no, no, we like do not want these being built.

• 25:54Speaker 02

  It's a yes and. There is a negotiating argument, as the proponents will say, and I've spoken to folks throughout the movement for a national moratoria that provides leverage in the push to further regulate the sector, that maybe by calling for a moratorium, some people in the middle will go, okay, well, we don't want to ban this, but we should probably regulate it more. But what's interesting is that I'm not just seeing people calling to ban it from the left.

• 26:21Charlie Warzel?

  Right.

• 26:22Speaker 02

  You know, like, I'm starting to see people call for banning it on the further right of the US political spectrum in the mainstream. And that, I think, is rooted in people's concerns about their utility bills. Like, I think that is just, when you get down to it, enough people are afraid of this and want to push pause. Local governments have been enacting moratoria on developing certain kinds of things until they develop zoning ordinances as long as local government has existed. This isn't exactly a newfangled thing on that scale. The idea of a national AI data center moratorium sounds ridiculous if you think of the federal government as divorced from that.

• 27:04Speaker 02

  But maybe AOC and Bernie Sanders want to turn the federal government into a zoning opportunity. I'm not entirely sure. I think we still need to learn more about where they want this to go. You know, even when you dig into the legislation, like the bill itself, on an AI data center moratorium, it's not entirely clear on when it would end. You know, it references the need for more study. It references until such regulation is in place, but it's not really clear cut. And I think even folks like the Senate candidate, Graham Plutner, in our interview, pointed that out to me, saying, I don't want a moratorium for the sake of just a moratorium. We need to regulate this industry. We need to make sure it's actually responsible. And it wouldn't surprise me if we see more voices on the left and the right calling for, you know, we don't want to ban just for a ban.

• 27:48Speaker 02

  We want to actually have smart policy here. We've yet to really get to that discussion, but that's where I think it's going to head.

• 28:03Speaker 00

  If you're trying to get news today, you'll find a lot of biased algorithms, rage bait, and AI noise. Thanks, social media. That's where InPress comes in. It's a social platform on top of factual journalism, not the other way around. Track your reading and earn points. It's like Strava for your brain. Plus, you can connect with other users in your city who share your genuine curiosity. Ditch the echo chamber for reality with InPress. Download it today for iOS or Android at inpress.app. That's I, N as in news nerd, press.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  Do you want to hear about visionaries creating a better world? People working in conservation, exploration, science and tech alongside storytellers imagining and creating a better future. I'm Alex Honnold, professional rock climber and founder of the Honnold Foundation, bringing you season six of Planet Visionaries. This season, I speak to guests like National Geographic photographer Tom Pescek and Anna Raffman, executive director of the Jane Goodall Institute, USA, in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Watch Planet Visionaries on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 29:09Charlie Warzel?

  A climate part of the data center fight that is very fascinating to me is the idea that for the time being, these data centers, many of them are being powered by decidedly not green energy means. It seems to me that broadly speaking, a fear here would be that the proliferation of these data centers is essentially halting any possible clean energy build out, right? Wouldn't that necessarily be something that someone on the right would want to latch on to to say, hey, yes, let's get more reliant on the natural gas, on this, on this, on this beautiful clean coal, you know, like where's the tension there?

• 29:48Speaker 02

  Well, that's what the administration is doing. That's what the Trump administration is doing. That's what, you know, what I would call conservative energy world is sort of bandying around. At the same time, I talk to folks who are worried about the fact that a lot of the capital that was going to go towards renewable energy build out, when the Inflation Reduction Act, the country's first climate law, was passed under Joe Biden, is now going toward building these large data centers. At least that's what they say. The data there is actually a little more mixed. I mean, the data centers were already going to be built out. AI was already coming, right? So there's a complicated argument there. And now the debate within the environmentalist space, within the climate advocacy space,

• 30:33Speaker 02

  which is not the same thing, is around, do you ride this wave and try to make it as clean as possible in the hopes that it can be a gush of demand on the grid that then? And brings about the kind of rapid energy build out that folks had long wanted. Or do you oppose this because it's not possible to make it cleaner? That there is no amount of regulation that's really going to happen here that will suffice. And by slowing it down, you delay what could be dirtier in order to make it cleaner. Right? Like, I think that there's a, there's a growing number of people calling for moratoria.

• 31:12Speaker 02

  Until there's like a regulation in place that says, hey, all of the power needs to be solar, wind, nuclear. The issue here is I don't think that the climate movement calling for moratoria for a ban on data centers is in any way the same as the anti-renewable energy people that are also calling for a ban on data centers. And so my concern as a journalist is that I talk to too many people who are calling for moratoria, who don't seem to understand what ramifications could come with them getting in bed with a movement that wants to ban solar energy and wind energy for conspiratorial means.

• 31:54Speaker 02

  I don't see anyone really reckoning with that kind of game with fire.

• 31:59Charlie Warzel?

  To complicate the, the data center part, though, even more is you have someone like Sam Altman making arguments on podcasts that like, unfortunately, there's, you know, gas turbines powering these things. That's not ideal. But if we can get enough compute to train the models to be good enough and to be powerful enough, perhaps they will help us, you know, with perfectly clean fusion technology. Is anyone buying that argument?

• 32:20Speaker 02

  When I was talking to of someone this morning for my newsletter, we, we were struck, both of us, in how we agree there's not really anyone leading right now through this. Ordinarily, I think with an industry this, this insurgent, you would expect someone like the US president to be kind of guiding the, the country through this. But it feels like the administration is so supportive of AI data centers. It's a let a thousand flowers bloom situation where, yeah, there might be a couple of fights, but also by approaching it in a deregulatory way, maybe you can just have such a booming economy that people aren't really complaining as much about that. I don't know how that's going to work in an era with higher fuel prices, but.

• 33:04Speaker 02

  We are where we are. And so I think someone's going to need to step in either through a lower political level, or through a race for the presidency, or through industry vectors, or maybe even new media, to be kind of a leading voice on this issue. It feels like we don't really have one. We have a chorus of pro-AI voices who say a lot of things that ordinary people, because there's so much suspicion about technology, just don't really take on face value. And then we have an environmental constituency, an activism constituency, that a lot of people also see as, you know, one-sided, and motivated in

• 33:42Speaker 02

  part by specific aims. So I feel like we're still in this open field with a lot at stake, but no one really driving the car through the field, if this metaphor is going to end with us in a ditch in a field.

• 33:58Charlie Warzel?

  We're somewhere in a field.

• 34:00Speaker 02

  We're somewhere in a ditch in a field.

• 34:02Charlie Warzel?

  That's all we know. I'm curious how much of this you feel is totally genuine, right? Or if there's an element of the tails wagging the dog here, right? Of media coverage about data centers, then creates more media coverage, which leads to more ambient anxiety and anger and this politics and this movement. And I'm curious, when you see it, going into these communities of reporting, how much of this moment right now feels entirely grassroots versus a product of the cycle that I'm describing?

• 34:34Speaker 02

  I do not in any way wish to diminish the many people who just learned about this large thing coming to their community and then told everyone in their community on Facebook. That does seem to be quite often the case. What I do think is happening now is that there are digital media outlets, organizations like by the names of like More Perfect Union, for example, that do get a lot of internet engagement off of telling people stories of conflicts around artificial intelligence data centers. What I also know is that when people talk about this stuff on social media, it gets a lot of traction. And so you have these authentic moments of virality, and then other figures do come in and then see that. Decide to start talking about that, too.

• 35:16Speaker 02

  The thing is, your average person wasn't paying attention to a local government meeting before that data center conversation came in. And I still don't know how an online din is leading to people showing up in their city council hearing. I've spoken to folks in places like rural Pennsylvania who worked in healthcare and then suddenly found themselves making videos where they exposed the inner conversations between data center developers and the state government. Like, I, these people do exist and they're not being bankrolled. I think it's just the internet conversation is forming its own kind of, uh, orboros. Like, I think Twitter is eating its own tail on data centers.

• 36:01Speaker 02

  And then in the meantime, with that din going on, there are just real fights happening in so many communities around this issue that does bind so many motivations on not just the left, but also on the right.

• 36:16Charlie Warzel?

  I find myself wondering whether the anger and the backlash at all of this and, and all of the, what we're talking about, the algorithmic salience of all of this stuff. I wonder if it's correctly calibrated, or whether people are mad at the wrong thing, or whether any of that really matters. Because, you know, I, there's this low grade concern about AI that, that, that people have everywhere, right? My, my kids are using it in school or whatever. My boss is making me use it. I love it.

• 36:44Speaker 02

  I hate it. Some of this too, right? I mean, some of this is just people upset at data centers because they know the more data centers, the more AI compute.

• 36:52Charlie Warzel?

  Right. And, and so I, I, what, you know, you, you talked about them as this symbol. I, I have been thinking of them as, as a, like a national pain sponge, right? Like, they just represent whatever fears or concerns you have, and you can direct it at the project. But part of me wonders if there isn't just the bigger, like, the omni fear, which is just the idea that, like, there are going to be winners and losers in the AI boom. And there has been very little messaging and very little indication from these big AI firms and the culture. That regular, average Joe Schmo is going to be the winner.

• 37:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:29Charlie Warzel?

  And so what all of this really is, is just this reaction to who stands to profit, right? Who stands to consolidate power?

• 37:38Speaker 02

  The conversation around data centers is easily a pain sponge, but you've got to wonder where that water is coming from and what that sponge really is made of. Because what that sponge is made of is so many local conflicts stitched together. And it feels wrong to lose sight of the, the real concern, the very real fear that your average farmer in rural Pennsylvania and rural Ohio is having. And I think dealing with that is something that's generational. Like, this is going to be a generational fight over how we even reckon with the politics around data centers.

• 38:15Charlie Warzel?

  Do you feel that the coming national politics part of this is going to distort what this whole fight is about and muddy the waters for, you know, the generational fight that is to come?

• 38:29Speaker 02

  Well, before we talk about the generational fight and the politics that are to come in the midterms and the, in the 2028 presidential race around AI data centers, it's also worth noting how much money AI sector is spending on elections right now and how much of an impact they're trying to have on not just federal races, but state races, even local races. I think you're going to see an even greater role played in 2028 than in this election cycle. And I also think that you won't always find the critics of the AI data center sector winning out, because I don't necessarily see the far right having a different view than the far left on AI data centers right now. I think both, both polls really want this to stop.

• 39:13Speaker 02

  It's just for entirely different reasons, which I think those sides are going to need to sort out and figure out how they feel about that. What's going to happen, I think, is you're going to have this very techno-optimist middle rise up. And it may be such a large tent that it brings in enough voters to be a durable political coalition and that techno-optimist future. Goes, no, let's not ban data centers. Let's figure out a way to build a better society with it. You know, let's figure out how to take that tax revenue, put it towards transmission, infrastructure upgrades, wires that then bring the data center power back onto the grid. And then all of a sudden, look, we have cheaper power and, and I can cut your taxes now because the data center helped with that. I think you're going to have that push.

• 39:55Speaker 02

  And the question is whether or not in this very populist political environment, you see this, this middle win out, or if those two diametric poles that are very, very angry at this elite class and a infrastructure build out that they don't really think they're going to benefit from at all, whether or not those poles are actually the more powerful ones. I think that because the Obama Trump coalition is such a good predictor and, and touchstone for the anti AI data center angst, it might be that the same forces that elected Donald Trump are the forces behind this backlash. And it's yet to be determined yet, but I feel like that's honestly more likely than the left being the anti data center camp

• 40:39Speaker 02

  and the right being the pro data center camp. So, I mean, I think in the future, it may be that there's actually a race for president in 2028 where I, both candidates of both parties are criticizing data centers and trying to figure out who is the most anti data center candidate out there. That feels like more likely than, you know, a polarization over whether or not to develop them.

• 41:00Charlie Warzel?

  Here you say that I think it's a very safe bet to, to assume that the politics are going to be fractured and weird and potentially incoherent in ways and very coherent in other ways. I think that's like a very good bet. It's going to be really fascinating to watch this play out. Hopefully we can have you on again to talk about it as, as it goes. But, uh, Jael, thank you so much for coming on and demystifying, you know, the, the, the next great local national fight.

• 41:34Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me on, Charlie.

• 41:40Charlie Warzel?

  That's it for us here. Thank you again to my guest, JL Holesman. This episode of Galaxy Brain was produced by Renee Klar and engineered by Miguel Carrascal. Our theme is by Rob Smersiak. Claudine Abaid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. If you liked what you saw here, new episodes of Galaxy Brain drop every Friday. You can subscribe on the Atlantic's YouTube channel, or on Apple, or Spotify, or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you want to support this work, and the work of my fellow colleagues, you can subscribe to the publication at theatlantic.com/listener. That's theatlantic.com/listener. Thanks so much, and I'll see you on the internet.

• 42:32Speaker 00

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