The left and right agree on one thing: no data centers

Our guest today is Gaby Del Valle, a policy reporter here at The Verge, and we’re discussing the growing backlash against AI data centers. Gaby recently reported a fantastic piece about Hernando County, Florida, where last month the county commission unanimously approved a year-long moratorium on data center construction. So I wanted Gaby to talk me through what these protests look like on the ground, from voters whose party affiliations have typically aligned them with big business. Read the full interview transcript on The Verge. Links: Right-wingers protesting data centers have a lot in common with the left | The Verge No data centers in my backyard | Jasmine Sun Who’s afraid of the big, bad GPU? | The Verge NY becomes the first state to enact a data center moratorium | The Verge The fight against AI data centers is just beginning | The Verge Florida gives millions in tax breaks to data centers under DeSantis-backed law | Tampa Bay Times Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder! Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Decoder is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and edited by Ursa Wright. Our supervising producer is Greg Ott, and our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:37Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge. And Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking with Gabby DeVae, a policy reporter here at The Verge, about the growing backlash against AI data centers. Gaby recently published a fantastic piece for us about Hernando County, Florida. Gabby attended a protest there organized by a group called Humans First, a conservative grassroots movement focused on combating AI data center build outs. You'll hear Gabby explain that the protest was part of a bigger, broader, and bipartisan opposition to data centers. Not only the physical buildings, but also the infrastructure that powers an AI boom taking local jobs and filling our feeds with slop. So data center construction has become a proxy for the public's feelings about AI, something physical they can aim their fear and frustration at,

• 2:22Speaker 02

  and even create enough pressure to stop through community organizing and protests. I wanted Gaby to talk me through what these protests look like on the ground from voters whose party affiliations have typically aligned them with big business. You'll hear Gabby say data centers are scrambling party lines, turning diehard Trump voters into protesters who care about traditionally left-coded issues like groundwater contamination and forever chemicals. It's a time of great political realignment. And my prediction is that data centers and the politics of AI will play a major role in the midterm elections coming later this year. So I suspect this won't be the last time we hear from Gabby on movements like Humans First. Okay, Verge reporter Gabby DeVae on the bipartisan data center backlash. Here we go.

• 3:15Speaker 02

  Gabby DeVae, you're a policy reporter here at The Verge. Welcome back to Decoder.

• 3:18Speaker 03

  Thank you. Happy to be here.

• 3:20Speaker 02

  I'm excited to talk to you. You were on previously with our friend Alex Heath, but this is the first time I've gotten to talk to you on Decoder. And I think the story you just wrote about data centers and conservative backlash in Florida is just a real preview of what tech policy going into the midterm elections is going to be like. You were just there. You talked to a bunch of people who are protesting data centers. It is a real alignment scramble in terms of our politics. Tell us what you found.

• 3:48Speaker 03

  What I found was people are really, really, really, really mad. And the reasons why they're mad kind of are different depending on the community, but they're also all kind of the same. They have localized concerns. Like, they were telling me, you know, like, Florida's really humid. It doesn't make sense to build a data center that needs to be kept very cool and dry in such a humid place. A lot of them are concerned about their groundwater. They were concerned about PFAS getting dumped into the water. But I've also talked to people in Arizona who have the opposite concern. Arizona is not very humid. Arizona is very dry. And they're also like, it doesn't make sense to build a data center in the desert. So like, whatever your community is, you're like, it doesn't make sense to build a data center here because of X reason.

• 4:33Speaker 02

  The thing that really strikes me in reading your piece and hearing about the other reporting you're doing for pieces to come is that data center build outs and data center protests do not neatly map to the usual right-left culture war alignment that we have seen play out for so long. And I'm curious for your view on that. Why can't Elon Musk just command his army of followers to be pro-data centers?

• 4:58Speaker 03

  This is like a little bit of backstory that's going to answer your question. The woman who organized Humans First, which was kind of bipartisan and now is focusing only on organizing conservatives, was an early, I don't know, a founder or organizer, what the right word is, with the Tea Party. And this kind of has a similar vibe to me. It's not like a left-right thing. It's kind of like a populist technocrat divide. And you're seeing that on the right and the left. So like, for example, at the Abundance Conference last year, it was like center-right to center-left-ish. And everybody was like pro-nuclear, pro-AI. And it was like, these things are here to stay. We have to figure out how to like, do it smartly. Whereas like, the populist left and the populist right

• 5:42Speaker 03

  are both skeptical of tech development, to put it lightly.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  That skepticism plays out across a number of dimensions. I couldn't help but be struck, as I read your story, by how many strains of conspiracy thinking there are about data centers. And I'm curious if they're just visible, right? They're so big, and they require so much development and so much build out that you can just glue any concerns you have onto them. This big thing is happening, and I don't feel any control. And I'm also worried about 5G. And I'm worried about Chinese government interference. And I'm worried about XYZ. And I can just point it all at this very big thing by which there's a process to say no, right? I can go to my local town board meeting and literally say no.

• 6:31Speaker 03

  I mean, I think that's part of it. I think it's interesting because the, I think there's like a spectrum of like conspiratorial thinking to, I guess, like misinformed thinking. Like, on the water use question, you know, we now know that they don't use as much water as we previously thought, et cetera, et cetera. But like, on the far end of the spectrum, like, one of the people I talked to told me that cattle born near data centers are all stillborn. And I tried to track that down. I was like, where did this come from? And it was one farmer in Texas who claims he had one stillborn calf on his cattle farm. So like, that got spun out like via, you know, the internet rumor, social media mill. I think like, that's part of it. And I also think like, there's this issue of like, social collapse

• 7:16Speaker 03

  that I think, like, once you talk to people a little bit, comes out. Like, one of the women I talked to was like, you know, I have, I had this friend who ChatGPT told her she couldn't be friends with me anymore. You have all of these stories of like, people harming themselves or going off their medication or whatever because like, they've been talking to like, a chatbot, and it goes awry. And I think like, this gives people a feeling of control. They're like, I can go to my community, like, board meeting or my council members meeting or whatever. And like, I can say like, I don't want this big building that houses the scary thing that is like fracturing my community here. So it's not just like the actual building. I think it's like, a broader backlash to generative AI and to LLM specifically.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  One of my ideas that I've been pushing on lately is that the AI products are not winning over hearts and minds in the market. So if the data centers just said Netflix on them, maybe people would like them more. But instead, that's where the slop is coming from. And that's where the jobs are going to go away into. And that's where Mark Zuckerberg is just going to get even wealthier. Is there a dynamic of that? That people just don't like the thing that the data centers make?

• 8:28Speaker 03

  They don't like a lot of the things that the data centers make. It's not just AI. I think AI is a big part of it. In Arizona, there's a, in Tucson, there's like a data center project that's getting built out. And the people I talked to there were like, yeah, this might be like an Amazon Web Services facility. And Amazon works with ICE. So like, this technology is fueling mass deportations like through, you know, not like directly, but like, creating the kind of non-sexy infrastructure that like, that surveillance is built on. Like, there's two things to it. Like, part of it is like a kind of like NIMBY, I don't want this thing in my backyard, literally. I don't want my town to get polluted. I don't want this, I don't want that. I don't want to see it. I don't want the noise pollution.

• 9:13Speaker 03

  And then the other thing is like, I do not like what this big building represents and what it has wrought on society.

• 9:21Speaker 02

  Does that cut across bipartisan lines? Or is that more culture war-coded?

• 9:26Speaker 03

  It cuts across culture war lines in that people like, have different concerns about like, what LLMs do. So like, the woman I spoke to was talking about like, the fracturing of social bonds. On the construction front, she was like, we're like a kind of rural-ish community. We don't want this like, big blight on our like, nice rolling hills. So that's like, kind of a right-coded thing. And there was a lot of like, Um, anti-development stuff that is kind of neither right nor left. Both sides, I think, are concerned about the job losses through because of AI. And both sides have kind of caught on to the fact that these facilities don't really like have a lot of long-term job prospects.

• 10:10Speaker 03

  Like, you know, there's like the big construction boom. There's like an HVAC situation, but like to actually maintain these facilities, it doesn't require that many people. And I think just people have caught on to that, like the, the promises of like the AI boom will lead to jobs related to data centers is like not actually true.

• 10:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, at most it's, it's a few hundred jobs for each of these facilities, at least in the data centers we have now. Why do you think some of the protests make national news? Like the, the Kevin O'Leary data center in Utah is a national story. And maybe it's just because he's a cartoon character. And then, you know, there's a project in Georgia where there might be a huge open AI facility that seems to go under the radar. There are all of the projects in Florida that you are reporting on, but don't seem to be explosive in the way that some of the other ones are.

• 10:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's a good question. There was one in Florida that was explosive and it was just because it was near Mar-a-Lago. I think like that one pretty obviously made the national news because it's like kind of related to the president. I honestly think like a cartoon character at the center of it is the deciding factor a lot of the time on whether it'll become a national story or not. And then also like the numbers, like the Utah one, I don't remember off the top of my head how big it's supposed to be, but it's supposed to be like huge. So then like that becomes kind of a, a proxy for all data center development. They're being planned everywhere. And I think what's so interesting is the backlash exists kind of everywhere too. And I think local publications, like I relied a lot on like, for example, the Tampa Bay Times to like figure out the background for this story.

• 11:40Speaker 03

  They're on top of it. They're going to like these meetings and watching people get yelled at and asked, did you sign an NDA, yes or no?

• 11:50Speaker 02

  We need to pause here for a quick break. We'll be right back.

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• 13:43Speaker 02

  We're back with Verge reporter Gabby Devine, who reported on the ground from Florida's Hernando County about why local residents really do not like data centers.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  Do you think the local governments are being responsive, right? You've now gone to some of these protests. You've talked to people on the ground in, in various counties across the country. You know, the basic unit of democracy is supposed to be your local government because you know those people and you can yell at them in the grocery store and the town board meeting. And we're seeing there's, there's a wall going up in some of these cases where the local governments are saying, no, we have to do this development. This is the only economic development available. And the people are saying, no, we're going to throw you out. Do you think local governments on the whole are being responsive or not responsive at all?

• 14:23Speaker 03

  I think it really depends. In Hernando County, they did pass a moratorium. There's a lot of counties in Florida where they've passed moratoria. But in Tucson, the city government is responsive to what the people want and the county government isn't. And like, they're kind of at odds with each other. There are all these videos, you know, of like people yelling at their representatives about like NDAs again, and then them being like, we cannot say whether we signed an NDA. Yeah, I think it really depends on a lot of things. How small the communities are, for one. How vulnerable the people in office feel to like getting voted out, I think is another big one.

• 15:01Speaker 03

  In Florida, the Republican primary for governor, I think, might be affected by this issue. The primary is in a few weeks and the frontrunner Byron Donalds has taken a lot of money from AI industry and like data center development groups. And people are mad. People are really mad. Like he was endorsed by Trump and everyone I spoke to, proud Trump voter, was like, I don't understand why Trump would endorse him. I'm not going to vote for him. One woman I talked to who told me she's opposed to everything Democrat is nonetheless, like she said she would vote for a Democrat or an independent if Donalds won the primary.

• 15:40Speaker 03

  And Donalds has also kind of changed his, not his stance on data center development, but the way that he talks about it in response to a lot of this backlash.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  How has he changed the stance? How, how is he talking about it now?

• 15:53Speaker 03

  He previously said he got a lot of flack for this from at least the people I talked to, that he wants Florida to be the financial capital of the world. And, you know, like that to a lot of people would sound great, but these people are really upset by this. I mean, there's a lot of other things at play here, like housing costs in Florida have gone up like exponentially, not only in big cities like Miami, but like in the suburbs of Tampa, for example, like housing prices have shot up to like levels that I, as somebody who grew up there, just like don't understand. Like I literally can't wrap my head around it. So I think like a lot of the backlash to development and to data centers is also like to people's cost of living going up and like to these like out, like in their words, outside

• 16:37Speaker 03

  developers coming in and like changing a community that's already changing. So he has since said that, you know, like we need data center development, but we need to do it responsibly. He is championing a bill that would prevent data centers from driving up utility costs now. And I mean, Ron DeSantis, the current governor of Florida is another really good example of this. He supported a bill that would require data centers to pay their own utilities and also would let counties require them to use reclaimed water, which would address the water issue. But the Tampa Bay Times reported that he also supported legislation that gives massive tax breaks to data centers and also that he pushed to like amend that law, which I think was signed in 2017, recently pushed to have it changed to only apply to hyperscale

• 17:22Speaker 03

  data centers, which are the ones that people have problems with. Like the people I talked to, they know that there are currently data centers in Florida and they're smaller. There are no hyperscale data centers, but there's like around a hundred, you know, smaller ones for, you know, Netflix or whatever. And they're okay with that. One woman I talked to, she works in IT. She's like, I understand that like data centers is like a boogeyman, but like we need them for stuff, but I don't want this like massive facility using all of our power emitting these frequencies, et cetera, et cetera.

• 17:50Speaker 02

  Wait, can you, can you, can you just explain what emitting these frequencies means?

• 17:55Speaker 03

  Just like the noise. I talked to these guys at the border security expo who work for a data center company and they all live in Virginia. And even they were like, yeah, it sucks. They were like, I hate walking around my neighborhood because I just hear it all the time. And they work in data centers. Yeah. So like they don't want, yeah, I don't, I don't think she meant like 5G is going to whatever you.

• 18:20Speaker 02

  It's a real element of this, right next to China being a villain of whatever persuasion you need China to be a villain of. So I was just very curious because again, there's just a piece of all this where it's a big thing that you can stop, right? The, the power of NIMBYism can stop this. And maybe we can't stop everything else. We can't stop Facebook from doing targeted advertising that feels like it's listening to you. No one knows how to stop this. It's bad. We don't like it, but no one knows how to stop it. I can stop this building from being built. Seems like. Not only does it scrambled our culture war lines, it's scrambling politics, right? Byron Donalds saying he wants Florida to be the financial capital of the world.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  One is very funny in that he has to contend with the existence of New York and London and Beijing and Amsterdam and like, go down the line. Like, there's a lot of places that would can compete for that title where Miami might not be in the running. But doing it via building data centers is not the path to that result, right? It's just a bunch of economic development that might result in some short-term gains. And it feels like people have clocked it, and they've clocked that it's a thing you can stop. And I'm curious if there's anything else. You've spent a lot of time covering the right. If there's anything else that scrambles the lines like that. Because in almost every other case, you know, let's build stuff, let's, let's tear down the White House and build a ballroom is fine, right? Like, building

• 19:46Speaker 02

  things is, is better, and it is coded in one side of the culture war.

• 19:50Speaker 03

  I mean, this is again, like, so Florida specific, but it really surprised me how much of the politics around this were scrambled. Like, one of the women was talking about this ballot initiative that's going to pass, it's going to, like, give more, like, tax exemptions to homeowners, which, like, you know, I feel like kind of a standard Republican thing, lower taxes for homeowners, people would like that. And she was like, this is terrible. It's going to deprive county governments of funds that they would otherwise get from homeowners, which will then even, like, entice the counties even further to have data centers come into our communities. So she was, like, thinking of, like, the second and third order effects of this, even though, like, that's a pretty, like, populist initiative, or like, a populist thing to do. But yeah, it's all so scrambled.

• 20:34Speaker 02

  How do you see the scramble, right, inside of the right and then carrying over to the populist left? The idea that a bunch of billionaires threw all of their weight behind Donald Trump in 2024, and that led to, I don't know, a bunch of podcast bros throwing their weight behind Donald Trump in 2024, and there was a cultural wave of, I don't know, Peter Thiel and Mark Andreessen and Elon Musk and the All In Podcast, you know, driving a cultural wave about building and tech in the future. It feels like that has come to one kind of end, right? I don't, I don't think that that, that that wave is driving the culture anymore because of the backlash to AI, right? We can all see the

• 21:14Speaker 02

  college students booing at graduation. If the, the backlash is there against the data centers, against AI taking the jobs, against billionaires in general, what does that turn into on the right? Because that was the animating force of the right for so long.

• 21:31Speaker 03

  I think that is still an open question. I think the question is whether this backlash is strong enough to, like, shake people's, um, other partisan concerns. Like, if you've got, you know, a Democrat candidate who is anti-data center development, but also, like, not super gung ho about, like, deputizing all Florida police officers to do ICE arrests, like, where does that leave someone who supports Trump's immigration policies but doesn't want a data center in their, in their neighborhood? I don't, I don't know. I think that's kind of like what the party is struggling with right now. I mean, I think Trump is like,

• 22:13Speaker 03

  this perfect avatar for people because he, like, somehow stands for, like, anti-elite sentiment, but also for, like, hard work and capitalism. Like, he's just like this perfect blend of, I don't even know how to describe it. Like, he, he contains multitudes, I guess. And nobody else can contain multitudes like him. Like, I don't know, they don't have the juice. Like, they just don't have it. Um,

• 22:40Speaker 02

  Like, can I make the argument? I can, I think I can make the argument. And this is, you know, I grew up in Wisconsin, which has many, many similar dynamics to maybe Florida, in that people in Wisconsin remember a time when there were big factories. In the town I grew up in in Racine, there used to be a case factory that made tractors, and there was a Chrysler factory in Kenosha that made Jeep Wranglers. Like, this is like a real thing that occurred. And all those things are gone. And so Trump would promise all of this huge economic development that basically looked like manufacturing. I think what, what his version of this with, even with tariffs, was we will bring manufacturing back to all

• 23:22Speaker 02

  of these places. And that manufacturing will require a lot of hard work, but there will be dignity and hard work. And at the end of it, you're going to get to point to a Modine air conditioner and be like, I made that thing. Like, my community made that thing. And I think that is very seductive. I think, I mean, Trump spent years promising that we would build iPhones in America, right? Like, this, I, and that's Wisconsin and Foxconn and all this stuff, right? And maybe none of those things were ever going to come true because that's not how anything gets made anymore. And that's not even the kind of work people actually want to do in America anymore. But you take all of that energy and you're like, actually, what we're going to make is data centers. And no one can see

• 24:03Speaker 02

  at the end of that, I made a Jeep Wrangler. They get to see that Elon Musk got richer, right? And they just lost their jobs. And their children feel like they have no future, and their feeds are full of slop. And I feel like something gets disconnected in the multitudes, where you can tell everyone, yeah, the best I can do for you is make you the world's richest factory foreman. And people are like, that sounds awesome. That's better than whatever nonsense I'm doing online. But you can't be like, I'm going to make Sam Altman richer, because that doesn't mean anything to anyone. And all of this construction doesn't do anything for anyone. And I, I look at the backlash and I just look, all I see is a lot of people

• 24:44Speaker 02

  across the political spectrum have come to that realization. You can tear down our communities to build bridges and factories, and you can pollute the skies with, like, smokestacks, as long as we all get jobs. But if you're going to do all that, and all I get is more, like, AI-generated movie posters on Amazon Prime, whose price keeps going up every month, like, screw you. And I'm wondering if that connection is, that's my guess. I'm wondering if you see any hints of that connection in your reporting, and you talk to all these people.

• 25:14Speaker 03

  I think so. I think the Florida version of making a Jeep Wrangler is like, there were orange groves and cattle ranches, and now there are not. Like, literally, like, I used to drive past an orange grove when I was a kid. That orange grove is gone. It's a Publix now. Um, like, there was a old cow field, now that's a mall. And on the one hand, like, that's kind of what people want. Like, people want, like, consumption. But they also, at least in Florida, liked thinking that they lived near an orange grove. Like, oh, maybe the guy's using tons of pesticides. Like, maybe actually the orange grove is worse for your health than the data center. I don't know. I don't have, like, the stats on this. But, yeah, like, you could see the, like, tangible effects of, like, what your economy

• 25:58Speaker 03

  was producing. And now it's just like, there's a building that none of us can go in. It makes a horrible noise, and I think it's drinking all my water? And yeah, and then it's also, like, making your kids dumb and alienated and, like, losing, or making everybody lose their jobs. Um, and people don't like that. And again, these aren't, like, Luddites. Like, the women I talked to were like, I found out about the humans first organizing via Facebook. And they were like, I know there's an irony in that. I know, like, there's an irony in, like, me working in IT and opposing this data center. Like, they're not dumb. They understand that, like, all of these things that we have built our lives around

• 26:38Speaker 03

  require something to power them. They just don't want that something to be within driving distance of their house. They want it somewhere else.

• 26:47Speaker 02

  And it's unclear where that somewhere else should be, apart from space.

• 26:51Speaker 03

  Apart from space.

• 26:52Speaker 02

  Which is a very different episode of Decoder. But that's, you know, that's one answer the industry has, is these, these people, their stupid concerns are too annoying. We'll just put the data centers in space, and maybe they'll solve that problem. Who knows? The other answer is, we'll just horsepower over the concerns. Like, this is too important. We're going to do it anyway. And maybe we'll just subsidize a bunch of education in some community. Maybe we'll just pay a bunch of extra money. Maybe we'll pay for everyone's electricity. And I don't know if those have gotten any traction. Is there anything that the tech companies or the neo-clouds could do in these communities to overcome the objections? Could they just pay for healthcare? Or is that just a non-starter?

• 27:34Speaker 03

  I don't know about paying for healthcare, but I, something that I didn't include in the piece, because it was extremely dry, um, and very technical, was that the small protest, um, ended with about, like, an hour and a half-long presentation from a land use expert on, like, how to write zoning, like, local zoning ordinances to prevent hyperscale data centers from being built. Like, really specific stuff. And it was like, you could have them, like, on multiple small parcels of land, like, you could look at the, I, like, it was, like, really, like, like, dry, specific stuff. Um, it was, like, you could require them to use this amount of reclaimed water, da-da-da-da. And I think,

• 28:19Speaker 03

  honestly, what people want more than the data centers not being there is, like, a degree of community input on, like, how they're built, if they're going to be built. I think if they got that, they would maybe not be pacified, but they would at least not feel like there's a big external force coming in and, like, steamrolling their community, when, like, they already feel like that in, like, every other aspect of their life.

• 28:47Speaker 02

  We have to take another short break. We'll be back in just a minute.

• 28:59Speaker 04

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• 30:32Speaker 02

  We're back with Verge reporter Gabby Devine discussing the data center protest movement and how growing opposition to AI is scrambling all sorts of party lines. So much of our politics and our culture has been nationalized, right? Everything happens at the national level and the fact that the mayor of New York is a national political figure is at once very silly and also just the funniest thing that has happened in a long time. Data centers are very local. They're happening to people in their backyards and a data center being built in Florida or Georgia or Tucson has nothing to do with me in New York. It's far away enough and maybe what you're hearing from everybody is just somewhere else. And as we get to somewhere else, I won't care, but it is very local and then it is very in person. People are going to the meetings or encountering one another.

• 31:17Speaker 02

  There have been stories of bridges across party lines from people who would never like each other normally because they both hate the data centers. Is there an element of a return to actual local politics and actual community building here that could be catalyzed by opposition to data centers?

• 31:35Speaker 03

  I really think so. Like I, again, I'm talking to organizers in multiple states who are going to like these like community or like town council or county council meetings and just like yelling at their representatives. And sometimes it's like hundreds of people. This is like maybe a weird analog, but it reminds me of the right wing organizing in like local education policy, which is kind of like where a lot of the anti-trans backlash started at like the school board level. You know, like you'd go into the school board and you'd be like, I don't want this gender stuff being taught to my child. I don't want my kids to know that slavery was bad. I'm not comparing them in terms of like value judgment.

• 32:17Speaker 03

  I just think it's like at a level of like local engagement that is at the same time like a national issue where it's like these really, really, really localized policies that may end up driving if not national policy change and like national policy discussions or like even just like national political vibes, like whoever wins the Democratic and Republican primaries and runs for president in 2028, like what are they going to be saying about data centers? I don't know, but I know it's going to be informed by what happens this year and next year.

• 32:50Speaker 02

  I'm actually very curious how Trump handles it. As you said, he contains multitudes. He is very good at reading his own base. It feels like the Trump base is very much polarized around data centers. There's a lot of people who love Donald Trump but hate data centers. And then there's his money, which loves the AI build out and loves data centers. And that is a fracture as deep as anything. A lot of those folks will say AI just has a marketing problem, right? If we only could convince people of the benefits of this build out and the superintelligence to come, they would be on board. And the best marker they could have for that would be Donald Trump, but he doesn't seem to be willing to make those claims at the level that they might need.

• 33:32Speaker 02

  And certainly he is very attuned to his base hating AI. How do you think he's going to play it? And how do you think the sort of MAGA coalition will respond to it?

• 33:43Speaker 03

  Do you remember when Trump was talking about H1B visas or like, not even when he was talking about it, but just the whole swirl around like, what are we going to do about these? And he goes, I think we should stamp an H1B visa to every foreign student's college graduation diploma. And I was like, what are you talking about? Like your administration is charging $100,000 for these visas and you're like, these kids are really smart. We need them in America building chips. Like, I think he's just going to do it like that. Like the thing about Trump is that he can say literally whatever and he can do literally whatever and the people who like him will continue to like him. Sometimes they'll be like, oh, I don't like this particular policy of his.

• 34:26Speaker 03

  I don't know why he endorses candidate, but they're still going to back the guy.

• 34:29Speaker 02

  But enough, enough to split the difference on this issue. Every, in every other issue, he could polarize the electorate and he would get there, but I'm going to put a data center in your backyard and it's going to make that noise. Maybe not enough.

• 34:42Speaker 03

  But they don't see it as coming from Trump is the thing. They're like, these companies are coming into our community. And like, if you like, you know, connect the dots, it's like, who supports those companies? The president? Who is giving the president a lot of money? You know, all these different companies, but that's not how people see it. They see it as like these tech oligarchs who are just disconnected from politics and disconnected from anything because of all their money. They don't see that as having like a connection to the president. They see that as like having a connection to the governor, to like the board of commissioners or whatever. But Trump is like floating above it all. I, I just, I don't know why.

• 35:23Speaker 02

  Well, I'm curious and maybe we should end it here. The Florida gubernatorial primaries are coming up. If Donald's loses, even with that Trump endorsement over the data center issue, do you think that that will be a signal or a predictor of what will happen in the midterms?

• 35:40Speaker 03

  I think it would be a massive signal if only because Donald's is pulling so much further ahead than everybody else. He's the clear front runner and the lieutenant governor who's kind of pulling second is also kind of pro data centers. If any of the anti-data center candidates win the Republican primary, like that is going to be huge and completely unexpected by everybody in the state. But it could happen. crazier things have happened.

• 36:08Speaker 02

  We're going to be doing a lot of coverage of this in the months to come, especially ahead of the midterms, because this scrambling of party lines, this scrambling of the culture war seems very important. Like the politics we've had for so long, it, they don't seem like they can hold up to everyone hating the same thing. And maybe that's all America needs. It does seem like every American hating these big buildings that make loud noises might be the thing that unifies us, which is good or bad. You can, you can make your own decisions, but I can't think of anything else. Like there's nothing else that's cutting across party lines this way. Can you?

• 36:45Speaker 03

  Literally nothing, nothing at all. And it's cutting across party lines, I think, not just in that people hate it, but like I had these again, like deeply conservative women talking to me about like local environmental and ecological issues. They were talking about like pesticides and like forever chemicals in their water, which you wouldn't expect looking at Republican politics like five, 10 years ago, like that this is where we would have ended up.

• 37:12Speaker 02

  We're still doing climate change hoax at the, at the national level and on the ground, we're talking about pesticides. There's something there. Gabby, we're going to have to have you back as this story develops and certainly as we go into all these elections. Thank you so much for being on Decoder.

• 37:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 37:26Speaker 02

  I'd like to thank Gabby for taking the time to join me on Decoder and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else at all, drop us a line. You can email us at [email protected]. We really do read all the emails or hit me up directly on threads or Blue Sky. We're also on YouTube. You can watch full episodes at DecoderPod. We also have a TikTok and an Instagram, same handle at DecoderPod. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Decoder is production The Verge and part of the Box Media Podcast Network. Show is produced by Kate Cox, Nick Stat. This episode was edited by Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is Red Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.

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