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

Hernando County, Florida, just did something you don't see often these days: its county commission voted unanimously to freeze data center construction for a year. Not a split vote, not a partisan fight. Unanimous. That single word tells you something strange is happening in American politics right now, and Verge policy reporter Gaby Del Valle went down to see it firsthand, attending a protest organized by a conservative group called Humans First.

What she found wasn't a simple NIMBY story about noise and traffic, though that's part of it. In humid Florida, residents worry about groundwater contamination and PFAS chemicals leaching from cooling systems built for facilities that, ironically, don't even suit the climate. In dry Arizona, Del Valle found the mirror image: people furious that anyone would build a water-hungry data center in the desert. Every community has a locally flavored reason to be angry, and somehow they're all pointing at the same target.

The political scrambling is the real story here. Humans First was founded by a former Tea Party organizer, and Del Valle describes the fight less as left versus right and more as populists versus technocrats — a divide that cuts through both parties. Diehard Trump voters are showing up to protests waving concerns that sound like they came straight out of a progressive climate rally. One woman told Del Valle she'd vote for a Democrat before backing Florida gubernatorial front-runner Byron Donalds, a Trump-endorsed candidate who has taken serious money from AI and data center interests.

Some of the backlash veers into pure conspiracy — a viral rumor about stillborn cattle near data centers traced back to a single unverified claim from one Texas farmer. But underneath the wilder theories sits a real grievance: these facilities create a burst of construction jobs and then almost nothing permanent, often just a few hundred maintenance positions once the concrete dries. Meanwhile the AI products these buildings power aren't winning anyone over. People don't love what comes out of the data center — feeds full of slop, chatbots blamed for fractured friendships, and in places like Tucson, buildings tied to companies that work with ICE.

Governors and county boards are caught in the middle, torn between chasing tax revenue and facing voters who now treat a rezoning meeting like a referendum on the entire AI boom. Florida's Ron DeSantis backed a law forcing data centers to pay for their own utilities, then reportedly pushed to water down which facilities that law actually covers. Nobody's fully satisfied, and with the midterms approaching, this fight over concrete and cooling towers looks like it's just getting started.