A road trip through the data center debate

The midterms are approaching, and as the discourse heats up, one of the big new villains is: a kind of building. Data centers. Reporter Jasmine Sun took a road trip through two swing states to meet the people living at the center of these debates, and to understand where this all might be headed. no data centers in my backyard https://jasmi.news/p/no-data-centers-in-my-backyard by Jasmine Sun

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 2:37Speaker 00

  I follow the news closely, but I'm not an election junkie. I know who's running. I keep an eye on the big and medium races, but I just, look, there are people who enjoy elections the way they enjoy sports, and I don't enjoy elections. Actually, the way I also don't enjoy sports. Not for me. And because of that, sometimes I will notice that the midterms are approaching in a backwards way to sneak up on me.

• 3:04Speaker 00

  I will just become aware, as an otherwise pretty active news and internet consumer, that the vast national jacuzzi that is our discourse has been getting hotter and more bubbly. Leftists and liberals howling into each other's respective voids at a shriller timbre. The sudden arrival of random new politicians dunking or being dunked on. Haley Stevens, an unusual talker here today, gone tomorrow. Abdul El Sayed, sounds like Obama but says different things. This is my level of tracking. It's blurry. But what I noticed sharply is how all the political attention changes conversations I actually do care about. One of them being technology and how it affects us. And technology is very much in the jacuzzi this year.

• 3:48Speaker 00

  Really, data centers. The internet infrastructure powering the AI boom, which we've covered on our show. Last year, we did a two-episode series we called Colossus, where we dug into Elon Musk's gas turbine-powered data center project in Memphis. In case you missed it, links are in the show notes, but where we landed with that investigation was on a skeptical view of the size, speed, and cost of this data center built out. Since we published those stories, though, data centers have just become a much bigger topic. They're now a part of this year's midterms, with politicians on both sides understanding there's a lot of popular sentiment, much of it extremely negative, directed at this form of infrastructure. I understood this broadly, that there were plenty of factors driving the backlash, but

• 4:32Speaker 00

  reporter Jasmine Sun wanted to investigate in more acute detail, to talk to voters and politicians in two swing states in the run-up to the election.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  I spent about 10 days in Michigan and in Wisconsin, driving around between cities, small towns, data center sites, to just talk to a ton of people and figure out, do people actually hate these data centers? And if so, why?

• 4:55Speaker 00

  Jasmine Sun is one of my favorite reporters covering the San Francisco tech scene. She spends a lot of her time writing about and talking to the people we constantly hear from in the AI race, the people who work in AI. But this summer, she wanted to talk to everybody else, the citizens deciding what they think about all this, whether they actually want these supposed gifts they're being offered. So she hit the road.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  So the first data center site, or proposed data center site that we visited, was Janesville, Wisconsin. I had heard of Janesville when I was actually doing research on AI and potential labor impacts, because I had been interested in deindustrialization and what happens when a bunch of jobs disappear.

• 5:36Speaker 02

  Once the economic cornerstone of Janesville, the giant GM plant, in its heyday, employing 7,000 people.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  Even I was dispatched. And Janesville is most famous recently nationally, because they had like a 100-year-old GM plant that closed in 2008 during the financial crisis, and this decimated the community.

• 5:57Speaker 02

  When the plant idled in 2008, unemployment soared to 13%, and the town became a nonpartisan symbol of the Great Recession.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  Thousands of jobs disappeared basically overnight in not that big of a town. It was the economic centerpiece of the town. People were not able to successfully retrain into new jobs. It was really bad for the community. And now, with the old GM site, which has been laying dormant for 15 or so years, there was a data center proposal where it's like, why don't we take this brown field and build a hyperscale data center on top of it?

• 6:46Speaker 01

  Okay. Sorry, if we can start just one time over, that'd be great. Thank you.

• 6:53Speaker 03

  So I am born and raised Rock County, so Janesville, Milton area, my entire life. Been strictly pretty much Janesville area the last 15 years of my life.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  So the first person I talked to, his name is Adam Schultz. He had spoken up on a city council meeting in favor of the data center, which is pretty rare, because there's not a lot of people at these meetings who are pro-data center, or at least vocally so. And for Adam, it had been his job for five years to actually sell the brown field that this GM site had been on.

• 7:24Speaker 00

  Because from his perspective, it's like, there is a dead spot in town that is doing nothing.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Right. It's like kind of in the middle of downtown. It's like literally a five-minute drive from the main downtown corridor.

• 7:35Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  It's super close, and it's literally a gigantic 100-acre concrete slab with a bunch of weeds overgrown on it. There is nothing going on there, and there has been nothing going on. And the reason that there's nothing going on is because there's a bunch of contamination and hazardous waste that GM never cleaned up, that nobody else wants to buy land full of.

• 7:55Speaker 03

  Nobody could ever make sense of the contamination and the numbers to develop anything there.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  What were some of the other businesses that you tried to sell the site to? What kinds of businesses are these?

• 8:07Speaker 03

  Typically, you know, it's a, it's a heavy industrial site that's kind of in the middle of town, really good infrastructure for heavy manufacturing. I mean, that's what it always was. So those types of users were most of the conversations.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  And this guy was so frustrated, because every interested buyer said, I don't want to clean up the waste, they left. It's no longer his responsibility, but when a data center showed up, and they were like, we will pay the $30 million to clean up the waste. He was like, finally, we will have something that isn't just a slab of concrete in this community.

• 8:38Speaker 00

  So he wasn't even like personally in a position to make money off of it. He was just like, this is land that human beings have found too expensive to make suitable for humans. His perspective was, why wouldn't you want a factory for computers here?

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:51Speaker 03

  I've said it a number of times, I wasted five years of my life marketing the GM property. I'm confident that we will have a data center down there, or we will have a giant slab of concrete. End of story. Like, you will not get a developer to spend money there outside of this industry. It's just not going to happen. And I'd love to be proven wrong. I don't believe I will be.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  I mean, he just kept saying over and over, like, it's gonna be a data center or it's gonna be a concrete slab. The economics do not work for literally any other commercial buyer to buy this plot of land that's contaminated. I know because I tried. And he said, you know, like, I'm from Rock County. I've had GMers in my family. It's kind of a slap in the face to take what was once an economic centerpiece of the community and just let it lie there. And so for him, it was actually important to bring the business back in order to bring Janesville back, which has been, again, a sort of icon of one of these more economically depressed areas after deindustrialization.

• 9:49Speaker 04

  The city of Janesville has yet to confirm what will go up at the site of the former GM plant. But Janesville residents at tonight's common council meeting are making it known what they don't want to go up at the site.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  On the other hand, though, when I met the activists who were organizing to get the data center blocked, they were, A, definitely not the sort of TikTok adult idiots that some Silicon Valley types might caricature.

• 10:17Speaker 00

  And TikTok adult idiots would be like, like, for instance, when you see people debating about data centers online, there is a lot of evidence that data centers, because they use a lot of electricity, can like raise local electricity prices. The concerns about water usage tend to be like pretty overblown or sort of misunderstood. So TikTok adult activists would be like, people who think that a nearby data center is gonna drain the lakes or something like that.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And I'm not, there are definitely some people I'd met in general who had said, these data centers are draining the Great Lakes. That's why they're building them here. These organizers were not one of them. In general, the activists tend to be pretty informed. They brought a copy of the local zoning code. That's the GM site there, right? Yep. So we're right here. Yeah, we are, we're on the GM JACCO site right about there. So this is how the city of Janesville is zoned out. So anything with that yellow kind of coloration is actually residential zoning. So you can see very strongly. They said, yes, this area is industrially zoned, but we don't like that it's next to a residential area. They knew a lot about the local environment. They were willing to admit uncertainty about questions like water pollution. They were not saying, this is going to drain the Great Lakes.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  What they were making arguments for was, A, no one's done long-term environmental studies of hyperscale data centers, which is pretty true. But what I was actually more surprised by was these folks were really, really angry at their local government. They were really angry at the old Janesville city manager and the city council. I think there's a feeling from a lot of these places, which tend to be more rural, tend not to be like the richest areas, that we get screwed over by corporations all the time. And we always get the short end of the stick. And how are our part-time city council members getting like 5,000 bucks a year supposed to get a fair contract with these corporate lawyers who can always find a way to back out of a deal? Who can leave a brown field full of contaminated waste that you never cleaned up for 15 years?

• 12:10Speaker 05

  Yeah. So we're talking about small communities that don't have the legal budget to negotiate well. They're not on equal footing. And then they don't have any room for wiggle if something happens on the other end. I mean, you'll never hold a company to a contract. They could bury us in legal fees.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  Like have some sort of exception clause?

• 12:30Speaker 05

  Right, or whatever it is.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  If this happens, we can give up on the whatever.

• 12:32Speaker 05

  Right, so there's no way, there's no municipal funding for enforcement and legal fees and stuff like that.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely very asymmetric.

• 12:39Speaker 05

  It's very asymmetric. It's predatory. It's extractionary. It just, the whole thing feels just not right.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  And because this is shrouded in secrecy, like, I still don't know the level of involvement of, like, city council members or... NDAs. NDAs galore.

• 12:58Speaker 00

  Wait, tell me about the NDAs.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  So a lot of data center developers, when they come into a community, they'll have a municipality sign an NDA to not reveal the customer, not reveal the environmental costs or what they're gonna build there or what electricity use they would demand. All people would see is maybe a vague project like Project Cannoli or Project Nova that shows up on a city planning meeting. No one knows what it is. No one knows it's gonna be a data center. No one knows it's gonna be for OpenAI or Anthropic or whoever.

• 13:28Speaker 00

  Why are they, why do the companies want these NDAs?

• 13:31Speaker 01

  I've heard different reasons. So partly it's so that they can try to have different localities compete for deals against each other if they haven't made a decision yet. Partly it's to not immediately raise the land value of all of the neighborhoods around the data center.

• 13:47Speaker 00

  Oh, because it's a way to have negotiating leverage against...

• 13:51Speaker 01

  I think a lot of it has to do with negotiating leverage. Yeah, but like frankly, every single person I talked to, even including every pro-data center person I talked to on this trip, was anti-NDA. They thought it made the distrust much worse. They thought the lack of transparency meant that rumors could spread on social media and the city councils would not be able to stop them because they weren't able to talk. So Microsoft has decided to stop doing NDAs, for example. They just didn't realize how much distrust it would sow.

• 14:17Speaker 00

  Interesting. So were you finding the activist argument more sympathetic than you'd imagined before the trip began?

• 14:22Speaker 01

  I think I was. I mean, I think like I had obviously not lived through something like the GM plant closing. I had not lived through in Mount Pleasant, where Foxconn promised 13,000 jobs. The village in Mount Pleasant and the local county, I think, took out like over $100 million in loans for infrastructure investments. And then Foxconn pulled out, built maybe a smaller factory with 1,000 jobs and just kind of like left the village and the county trying to figure out what to do with all that land now that they'd invested over $100 million for, you know, a town of a couple tens of thousands of people.

• 14:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's funny. I mean, my search engines editor, Shruti Pindamanani, she did a story about that Foxconn deal. Before it had completely, I'm trying to think of a more uptown way to say like shat the bed. But like, there is an asymmetry where big corporations can go town to town looking for the best possible deal. And those towns are not necessarily equipped to make a deal for themselves where the risk is distributed in a way that is good for them.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  Exactly. And like, one of the most egregious examples I saw during the road trip was in Celine, Michigan.

• 15:28Speaker 06

  Celine Township is a small town with just over 2,200 residents. They have a lot of fight in them. And many of them voiced their concerns over a new data center coming into their community.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  Celine Township has, I think, 3,000 people in it. So it's really small, really rural, like we're driving down a dirt road. That is the location of a new Stargate site that is being built for OpenAI and for Oracle. So these are gigantic tech companies coming in. It's gonna be a huge 1.4 gigawatt data center. And initially in that case, Celine Township actually voted for one against having the data center.

• 16:02Speaker 06

  In September, Celine Township board members voted to deny rezoning the 575 acres of farmland needed for the $7 billion data center project, which will house Oracle and ChatGPT owner OpenAI.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  The city council was not excited about the trade-off. And what happened was, they got sued. They got sued by the data center developers over exclusionary zoning, saying that, according to state law, you cannot bar all industrial zoning. You have to have some land allocated for industrial use. You can't just leave it all agricultural. And a count of 3,000 people is not going to win a lawsuit against OpenAI, Oracle, and the data center developers. So they settled for $14 million. And people were angry about the settlement.

• 16:46Speaker 07

  Nobody's here to protect me. Nobody's here to protect us. I am angry. And maybe you can't do anything about it, but I'm angry you didn't fight harder. How dare you? How dare you? That's it.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  I think it feels to people who live in that community like there was a democratic decision by the local government to say, no, thank you, please go somewhere else. And the data centers and AI companies said, screw you. We're doing this anyway and we have our lawyers to make this happen.

• 17:20Speaker 08

  You know, we've all lived here, most of us all lived here all our lives. You're just coming in here and taking away this. You know what? I can't believe this. I really can't believe it. The thing with this, it already started already.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  And the feeling is that AI is a project that mainly helps some people somewhere else. People who are working computer jobs in San Francisco and New York, maybe.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  Most people who I talk to, they might use ChatGPT to write emails or make memes, but it's not an essential part of their lives. And so I think that there's this sense that these outside coastal corporations who are building something for their own, whether ego, race, their own software companies, whatever it is, they feel that they can decide what your town should look like. And they will use their asymmetric power in order to accomplish their vision. And you are mere collateral damage in that process. And so I think this feeling of who gets to shape the future, this feeling of, oh, these corporations, like, they don't even care about what we think. They don't even care about democratic process.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  They're happy to sort of force democratic process to their will. And it's all for this thing that isn't really producing anything that helps me, I think was the big feeling there.

• 18:43Speaker 00

  They feel like they had Google Search and it was working fine. There's this new version of Google Search, which for some reason is massively expensive and requires all these new factories. It's as if there's a big machine in San Francisco that they find a little bit useful, but not that useful. And the big machine requires a giant exhaust pipe in the middle of their town. Maybe not literally in terms of pollution, but in terms of, you will take the negative externalities of this. And whether you like it or not, it's kind of gonna happen.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, two different people. One activist and one public school teacher in Madison, who I talked to offhand, just said, why doesn't Mark Zuckerberg build the data center in his backyard?

• 19:18Speaker 09

  Like, they aren't building these in San Francisco. They're coming to one of the poorest counties in our state with a property that's been vacant, knowing that like people are thirsty to have development here or to have something here. Like, it feels predatory.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  I think there's this question of if this technology is so important to those people in San Francisco, can't they just put it there? Why are they taking the externalities and imposing that on us? And that feeling, I think, doesn't feel good to people.

• 19:50Speaker 00

  And it's funny, it's not as if, you know, in the reign of like, American auto companies, people didn't want the factories in their towns. It's not like they were like, I don't understand why Henry Ford doesn't just live in an auto plant.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  It's just kind of intangible. I mean, like, I think a lot of the public policy problem is you have pretty abstract and diffuse benefits. They don't see the outputs, but then the harms are so tangible. The fact that there's now an ugly building near you and people hear things about water and pollution and electricity rates. Yeah, it's tangible, narrow harms and like diffuse abstract benefits that will maybe come to our community and maybe somewhere else. And again, these deals mean that sometimes the property taxes don't show up for like 10 or 20 years. And people think, what if the data center gets abandoned by then? What if the AI bubble pops? Like, it's not necessarily true that just the property taxes mean that you are going to get a tax break next year. Sometimes it means the property taxes are going to be used

• 20:46Speaker 01

  to pay off the infrastructure improvements to build the data center. And then maybe in 10 or 20 years, after they've finished paying for their streets for the data center, they will pay for the schools.

• 20:56Speaker 00

  So it's like obvious costs, theoretical benefits.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  I think so, yeah. One thing that was really shocking to me was how often anti-data center folks told me, I don't believe that that's going to happen. So like, I would say something like, if you could guarantee that your electricity prices would stay the same for the next five years while this data center is being built, would you be more open to it? Because they all say, no, we're not going to let your rates rise. We're going to cover it, right? That's what they all say. Is it just like, we don't believe it based on their history?

• 21:24Speaker 10

  No, it's completely false. Everyone that is involved in these fights understands how it works. So we know that's bullshit. And they know that we know that that's bullshit. Does it matter? Not really, so far. So they're either dumbasses or liars. It's one of the two. Or both. Or both. Yeah, because that's not how that works.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  And people will say, I don't believe that they're not going to raise the rates. DTE, the utility provider in Michigan, has raised rates almost every year for the last five years. Why would they stop doing it?

• 21:53Speaker 11

  I don't believe them because we know their grid can't support it without adding more generation. And I think what I think of now when I say that, oh, they're not going to overtax the grid or anything like that, to me, when I read in between those lines, it's because, oh, instead of a big, noisy data center next to your community, we're also going to stick a private gas generation power plant on the same property or nearby, or a small modular nuclear reactor. And I can't think of anything worse than having a data center, except to have a data center and a nuclear reactor next to your kid's school.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  Or if I said something like, this data center is expected to pay 10, 20 million in property taxes year after year. Like, that could go towards the streets. That could go towards the schools. Does that interest you? Folks would say, I don't think they're going to do it. I think that they're probably going to write themselves a carve out. What if the AI bubble pops before they even do that?

• 22:55Speaker 10

  It's infuriating that if, at some point, the AI bubble bursts in such a way that they just collapse, which is extremely possible, you know? Then there's nothing, there's no protections for what happens to this land? What happens to communities that have already been burned? They can't recoup money, they can't recoup. And that's our tax dollars, you know? So it's just like, supporting what feels like right before the 2008 crash, except for much worse.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  And so it's not even necessarily that getting the deals slightly tweaked, learning the exact facts on water use or energy would have changed their minds. The fundamental thing going on was this repeated, I don't believe them when they say they're going to pay their property taxes. And I can point to an example in the past where we got screwed over by a big company. So why should we believe them this time? And I think it's an incredibly hard problem to make a deal in an environment of trust that low. And in that sense, I do sympathize with local officials who are trying to raise revenues, trying to bring economic development to their communities and who are running into a roadblock because there is an element of trust that's required to sign a contract. And you can't guarantee everything will go perfectly.

• 24:10Speaker 00

  We're going to take a short break. We've visited Janesville and Saline, two midwestern towns with high levels of data center antipathy. When we come back, our road trip continues to meet a union leader who wants these data centers and a politician, Abdul El Sayed, who's fighting against them.

• 24:56Speaker 00

  Welcome back to the show.

• 25:00Speaker 00

  A lot of what Jasmine had captured in her microphone on her mini-American tour was semi-organized rage towards these data centers. I'd wanted to hear more about people like the real estate agent we'd heard from, though. People who actually wanted these buildings. Who were you, like, in your road trip? Who were you running into who wanted this? Besides people, obviously, who work for AI companies? Like, who was pro-data center?

• 25:24Speaker 01

  I would say that the few categories are, there are definitely some local officials who are really excited about data centers, again, for tax revenue reasons. I mean, in Mount Pleasant, Microsoft is paying $20 million a year in taxes to this city of, I think, like 28,000 people. And so it is a huge boon for the tax base. And it means that these towns don't have to raise taxes on their actual residents. And they can invest in infrastructure as costs go up. And that was something I heard a lot of from local officials. In addition, you have labor. I mean, maybe the first question, very basic, is just how you got involved in this union, in Local 139, and just the basic mini-history.

• 26:03Speaker 12

  Well, that goes back. I started when I was 14 years old at a local excavating shop. I would shovel the garage floor at night, change tires on the trucks.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  I talked to a union leader named Terry McGowan, who gave me his whole backstory. He's with the International Union of Operating Engineers. And he told me that with all the data center projects bringing up around Wisconsin, the skilled trades have been kind of booming. People are getting these super well-paying jobs. The apprenticeship program that the union runs is doubling in size and enrollment. Companies are literally dangling these cash per diems at workers because there are so many shortages and there's such high demand. And so he said, from his perspective, the data center boom was such a windfall for the skilled trades.

• 26:51Speaker 12

  It's just been a windfall. I mean, when I started in this business, it was a roller coaster. Okay, work was good, work was bad. Work was good, work was bad. This has just been a steady stream. I grew up just outside of Milwaukee. Milwaukee was an industrial city. And back in Milwaukee's heyday, when I was a young man, noise was money. And you know what the thing was? The citizens of that area revered these huge, massive industrial factories because this is the engine that's paying our bills, sending our kids to school, feeding us, you know, housing us. And they were hailed.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  And so, construction workers, the trades workers, are pretty excited about data centers. But other than local officials who really grok the tax revenue and maybe the few thousand people who are in the trades, there's not really a super-strong pro-data center constituency in the way that, at least with housing or with solar farms, there's usually some group of people, like environmentalists or people who want to move there, who are kind of excited about it. One really interesting thing that shows up in the polling is data center opposition is pretty equal, no matter whether you actually live near a data center or not. So if it was just NIMBYism, you would think, people who live near the housing might not want the new housing. But people who don't live near there would be excited about housing, right? That's sort of normal, standard-issue NIMBYism.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  What you see in data center polling is that whether or not you live near a proposed data center, everyone kind of hates them equally, which suggests that it is more anger at data centers or a dislike of data centers than it is specifically, I want data centers, just not near me.

• 28:30Speaker 12

  It's funny, the very same people that are afraid of AI, and I think that's what it is more than anything. They're just afraid of the advanced technology. They're so afraid of AI taking over everything or their media or their brain, that the negative people, the people against AI, have actually gotten in their brains. That's what I feel.

• 28:53Speaker 00

  But so it's like, what you're seeing, it sounds like, is the support basically comes from local politicians who say, this is going to be great for the tax base and skilled tradespeople, like, those unions like them. Otherwise, it sounds like the picture of the opposition that was starting to be drawn for you is, if one of the big questions around AI is like, if this is really going to be socially important technology, how are those spoils going to be shared? The deals around these data centers, it's like one of the early battles. It's like, are the companies going to negotiate deals for themselves where they keep most of the spoils? Or is some local city councilor going to be able to learn from a local city councilor somewhere else to carve out a deal that makes sense? And like, the intuition that activists have, that people have, is that these are bad deals.

• 29:37Speaker 01

  The intuition is that there is such a power asymmetry that they don't really get to choose.

• 29:43Speaker 13

  Please welcome the next United States Senator from the state of Michigan, Abdul El Sayed.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  So one of the most interesting things was going to Lansing, Michigan, a rally that Abdul El Sayed hosted with Bernie, with AOC.

• 30:02Speaker 14

  There are things happening in this country that people everywhere are shocked by. A government of, by, and for the oligarchs.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  This was kind of bundled into the Bernie AOC anti oligarchy tour. A lot of it was also about dark money and politics. That was sort of the narrative that was hit again and again. Dark money could mean AIPAC, dark money could mean Big Pharma, dark money could mean the utility company everyone hates, but dark money also meant these data center deals.

• 30:29Speaker 15

  We've got each other. Folks who may never understand the lives that one another lead, locking arms together to say that we will not have our future dominated by the likes of your big tech company to put a data center in our backyard.

• 30:43Speaker 01

  And it was very interesting to see in speech after speech, even though no rally speech was completely about AI. AI fit perfectly into the story of the oligarchy. The idea that corporations are colluding with the government, are paying off your elected officials in order to make decisions that are good for the billionaires and bad for you. And so to go from that experience of like being at this rally where Abdul is saying, when big tech buys a senate seat, they're buying a data center in your backyard. When DT buys a senate seat, they're buying your local officials staying quiet while they raise the rates on you.

• 31:21Speaker 15

  When they tell us that they're going to raise our electricity rates, we won't back down. When they tell us they want to put that data center in our backyard, we won't back down. When they tell us that they want to take our tax dollars and give them there, when we've got kids who need them here, we won't back down.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  Going from that experience about hearing AI slotted into the money and politics story to Celine, where the developers have literally sued the democratically elected city council in order to build a data center that nobody wanted there. It really became clear how the oligarchy story played together with the data center story.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  Hey, so nice to meet you, Jasmine.

• 32:14Speaker 00

  Jasmine, nice to meet you.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  Thanks for taking your time.

• 32:17Speaker 00

  And so what was Abdul El Sayed like?

• 32:19Speaker 01

  I mean, so I sat down with Abdul for 30 minutes the day after the rally in Ann Arbor, because the team decided it would be a better venue to go deeper on AI policy. And he has a long, long list of demands in terms of regulating AI that go from, we should force a divestment of Anthropic from Amazon or Microsoft and OpenAI to make sure that you don't end up with AI monopolies. To, we should have an international treaty with China so that we can pause and slow down AI. To, we should have an FDA merged with the SEC, merged with some other regulatory agency solely dedicated to regulating AI.

• 32:54Speaker 16

  These corporations have too much incentive to do things that are terrible for humanity, but very good for making money in the short run.

• 33:02Speaker 16

  If we take seriously the risk to the social contract, then public ownership has to be a part of it, right? Similar with utilities.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  He had a big laundry list of demands for AI regulation.

• 33:12Speaker 00

  And what did you think?

• 33:14Speaker 01

  It was a very big list. I'm not sure that I agree that these policy proposals all made a ton of sense. I mean, I think that what I felt was that populist politicians like Abdul in Michigan or Francesca Hong, the Democratic frontrunner for governor in Wisconsin, who's advocating a moratorium on data centers, to, they are tapping into real anger. And I left with a lot more sympathy for the anger and the suspicion that people felt. I didn't leave thinking that all of these very ambitious regulatory ideas were necessarily the right ones. But it became clear that we are going to need some AI plan, maybe at the national level, maybe at the state level, that tackles a bunch of these issues, labor stuff, the data centers, kids' safety,

• 33:59Speaker 01

  and makes people feel that someone has us under control. Because the other thing that people kept telling me, like activists, for example, was like, our local government, our mayor, they're not doing their homework. They're in over their heads. They don't have us under control. And so I think having state or national governments tell people, this is how we're thinking about AI. This is how we're thinking about the AI industry. We understand your concerns about labor issues, about the environment, about whether this could be a bubble. And this is what we're going to do to ensure that you're not left holding the bag as normal Americans if the AI companies do this or that. That's the kind of leadership that the public wants right now and that they're not getting, which is leaving a vacuum

• 34:42Speaker 01

  for a lot of more blunt populist mechanisms.

• 34:47Speaker 00

  It's tough, though. I mean, like, the idea that no one's in control, I'm very sympathetic to. Who should be in control, I find very confusing.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  Yes. I mean, I don't think the answer to me is that the government is in control of like what we use AI for. I think that the thing that people want is protection against downside risk. And I do think it is the government's job to protect people against downside risk, whether that is a data center becoming a stranded asset if the company decides to up and leave, or whether that downside risk is people losing their jobs or whatever else people are worried about.

• 35:18Speaker 00

  I mean, can you imagine a world where you basically have a bunch of states that do data center moratoriums? You end up with some localities negotiating better deals because anti-A backlash means that there's only a few places you can do data centers. And so you get to a good outcome because of all of this politicking?

• 35:37Speaker 01

  I mean, in a way, absolutely, right? Like, I think it is a great thing that Microsoft has said publicly, they're not doing NDAs anymore on these. I think that I would expect other AI companies and developers to follow suit. That seems good to have more transparency. I've heard both from people who are in these communities as well as from folks from the AI and tech side, that the deals are getting better for communities. They are extending more in community benefits. The question that I'm getting from people I know in AI world is, what do we have to give these communities? What do we want? What can we promise them? We really want to build this data center. Just tell us how we can use money to solve the problem. And so I think that there's not a world anymore where some small town has to give a subsidy to Meta. Like, no one should have to be subsidizing Metas built out, you know?

• 36:22Speaker 01

  And so I think that the deals are getting better because of the level of backlash. I think the main thing that I'm thinking is, I suspect there is a way to do the deals right. There is a way for places like Janesville, which does in fact have this giant concrete slab in the middle of the city and could use some commercial revenue to find a way to get a good deal out of the AI companies. Whether or not they are set up to do so at the moment is unclear. I mean, the best case that I heard for, for example, Kathy Hochul's data center moratorium, is that it can bring the standards for these deals up to the state level because the state is significantly more equipped to figure out what should go on. So that's actually the justification her team has been giving, both in public, and I've talked to them also about this briefly as well,

• 37:07Speaker 01

  where they're saying, in the same way that like Gretchen Whitmer set standards on solar farms in Michigan, which were very controversial, you shouldn't leave these tiny towns to figure out how to negotiate with Meta. You should pause, set a bunch of standards at the state level, have Kathy Hochul team negotiate with the data center developers and the AI labs to figure out what's possible and what's not, release statewide standards saying, you want to build a data center in New York State? You're going to do closed loop cooling. You're going to use X percentage renewable energy. You are gonna not sign an NDA. And then once those standards are set at the state level, it hopefully becomes much easier to make the local deals.

• 37:40Speaker 00

  It solves the part-time city councillor, like, asking like ChatGPT, what's a good data center deal problem?

• 37:46Speaker 01

  I think so. And I actually think that like, if that's actually what's going on, that might be a smart way to do it.

• 37:52Speaker 00

  So are you more positive towards stuff like the New York State data center moratorium than you were before you went on the road?

• 37:58Speaker 01

  I think I am. I mean, again, to be clear, like, I am more positive on it if it means the thing that I just said and not just like, it's a permanent moratorium, we're never going to deal with this ever again. Because sometimes people say moratorium, what they mean is ban, right? And like, that I am not sure if I believe in. But like, if the actual thing that's happening is that your state government is figuring out, what are these standards that we can set? What are the terms of engagement for New York towns for data centers? I think that's pretty interesting.

• 38:26Speaker 00

  So you actually came across, like, I feel like the upside of your trip is like, it doesn't just feel like a polarized nation screaming at each other based off things they saw on TikTok. It feels like a country trying to figure out a deal that makes sense.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  And how to make those deals in an environment that's already solo trust.

• 38:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:49Speaker 00

  So that's what I learned from Jasmine Sun's road trip. It honestly made me feel a little better about things. As somebody who has both hopes for and deep reservations about AI as technology, one of my main issues with it is just that it can be so undemocratic. A small group of people are making choices that the rest of us will have to live with the consequences of. And just hearing as citizens and politicians hashed all this out in swing states, that was reassuring to me. We are a democracy. We do get to decide. This is the process by which our country figures stuff out, and that's what's happening right now. As for Jasmine, you can find her ongoing, very excellent coverage of AI, San Francisco, and the political currents this wave of technology

• 39:32Speaker 00

  is shooting through our culture at her Substack, Jasmine Sun. We'll have a link in our show notes. I do not miss a post. Neither should you.

• 40:12Speaker 00

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  Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. This was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Shruti Pinnamaneni. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. Emily Malter is our associate producer. Our production intern is Piper Dumont, who also fact-checked this week's episode. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Our executive producer is Leah Reese-Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey, Rob Mirandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor-Moore, Karin Josephine Francis, Kirk Courtney, Vanessa Tancati, and Hillary Schiff. If you have a business and would like to advertise on our show, please send us an email, [email protected], subject line "Advertising." You can also send your questions there if you have a question you'd like the show to answer. If you're a listener and would like to not hear ads on the show, you can sign up for incognito mode. It's our paid feed.

• 42:40Speaker 00

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