The left and right agree on one thing: no data centers
The Verge Nilay Patel
Local governments across the US are approving moratoriums and facing furious backlash against AI data centers, and it's coming from left and right alike. Turns out nobody agrees on AI, but everyone hates the giant buildings that power it.
Based on reporting by The Verge, Nilay Patel — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
There's a story Gaby Del Valle tells about Hernando County, Florida that sums up where AI politics actually stands right now. Last month the county commission voted unanimously — unanimously — to freeze new data center construction for a year. Del Valle went to the protest that pushed them there, organized by a group called Humans First, which started out bipartisan and now leans conservative. The people yelling into microphones at that meeting weren't the crunchy activists you'd expect. Plenty were lifelong Trump voters worried about groundwater contamination and forever chemicals, issues that used to live comfortably on the left.
That's the pattern showing up everywhere, according to Del Valle's reporting. In humid Florida, people say it makes no sense to build a facility that needs to stay cool and dry. In dry Arizona, people say the exact opposite — too little water to spare in a desert. The specifics flip depending on geography, but the anger is identical. Del Valle frames it less as a left-right fight and more as a populist-versus-technocrat divide, the same split you saw at last year's Abundance Conference, where center-left and center-right attendees were united in being pro-nuclear and pro-AI, while populists on both ends remain deeply suspicious of the whole build-out.
What's striking is how much unrelated anxiety gets glued onto these buildings. Del Valle traced one particularly wild claim — that cattle born near data centers are being stillborn — back to a single Texas farmer describing one stillborn calf, which then metastasized across social media into something bigger. But underneath the conspiracy-adjacent stuff sits a real grievance: people don't like what the technology inside these buildings actually produces. Slop in their feeds. Chatbots blamed for fractured friendships and people going off medication. In Tucson, residents flagged that a facility under construction might be an Amazon Web Services site, and that Amazon works with ICE — meaning the
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
placeholder
Read more about this at: The Verge