Politicians Suddenly Notice Everybody Hates Data Centers
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Andrew Egger , Brendan Hartnett , and Benjamin Parker August 20 Upgrade to listen 14 minutes 513 246 38 Fresh off freezing up on a question on Taiwan at a primary debate this week, Sen. Darline Graham hustled to Sean Hannity’s Fox News show last night for a little damage control. “I don’t speak politician,” she said by way of explanation. “I think people in South Carolina are more worried about making ends meet. They’re concerned about boys in girls’ sports. One lady talked to me extensively about that today. They’re concerned about the Second Amendment, they’re concerned about the Save America Act, illegal immigration. So they’re concerned about a lot of other things other than Taiwan.” She doesn’t speak politician yet , but she’s trying to learn. Happy Thursday .
(Photo illustration by Sarah Rogers/ The Bulwark | Photos: Getty) A Data Center? In This Economy? by Andrew Egger
A few months ago, I went to an after-work D.C. event for folks in the AI space. The drinks were flowing and the vibe was cheery, mostly young would-be tech tycoons talking their book with chipper GOP policy staffers. But at one point, I talked to a different sort of character—a rumpled older guy who turned out to be an academic researching public attitudes toward AI development. How was that going, I asked. He looked at me with haunted eyes. It is so, so much worse out there, he said, than anybody even realizes.
What a difference a few months can make. Across the country, politicians are waking up to a simple fact: Voters hate AI and are gearing up to punish elected officials who seem to like it. Mostly, their ire has come to land on data centers—the factory-size banks of chips that power the cloud-based internet and are its most visible real-world incarnation.
Everywhere you look, politicians are suddenly sprinting away from data centers. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who had formerly rolled out the red carpet for the AI buildout, signed a moratorium on new data centers this month pending a state “audit” on their energy use. Just last night, Abbott bragged about having “halted up to 1,800 data center projects.” Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro followed Abbott’s lead this week, inking an order heaping up red tape on new proposed data centers. He, too, was until recently a fan .
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This week, the National Republican Senatorial Committee raised the alarm explicitly in a memo about the Ohio Senate race, where Republican Sen. Jon Husted is trying to stave off a challenge from Democratic former Sen. Sherrod Brown. “Ohio is one of the leaders in building these AI factories,” reads the memo, which was first reported by Axios :
Brown has made his opposition to them the centerpiece of his campaign against Husted. Brown is using it because it works. More than any other thing in this race, data centers are the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck. If he loses and data centers get the blame, politicians across the country will take notice.
But it’s not only Democrats making use of this attack. In Wisconsin’s Democratic gubernatorial primary, Francesca Hong ran hard against data centers, while her opponent David Crowley took a more centrist approach: Not to ban them, but to require they be powered by green energy and built by union workers. Now that Crowley is through to the general, however, Republican Tom Tiffany is hitting him hard on the issue, describing him as “Data Center David Crowley” in ads: “Crowley’s campaign is funded by the people building them. Big Tech wins. Wisconsin pays.”
If you’ve been paying attention, it’s been clear for a while that we were heading here. Back in March, I wrote about the massive latent political energy surrounding AI, noting that neither party had yet won voters’ trust on the issue. “The party that can win the argument over AI is set up for a political windfall,” I wrote, “and then will be tasked with shepherding the country through massive disruption toward a prosperous rather than a dystopian AI-integrated future, if possible.”
The problem is that public hysteria over data centers has reached the point that there’s essentially no debate happening at all. Politicians are simply turning the phrase into low-calorie ragebait: If my opponent won’t pledge to stop letting companies plug in a bunch of chips in a warehouse, that’s because they’re owned by Big Data Center.
AI has remarkable potential for good: The tech’s capabilities just keep growing, and it is already paying major dividends in fields like medical research . And of course, AI has incredible potential for harm—it could eventually kill us all, or enslave us, or just feed us slop until it turns all our brains into soup. It’s a pretty big range of possible outcomes!
But while there are certainly good reasons to be anxious about AI development, concerns about data centers’ local effects are often wildly overblown . There’s something bleak about seeing the policy debate over how we ought to shape and regulate this massive, unbelievable, titanic technology collapse down into what’s essentially a NIMBY squabble over where to park the chips that power it.
As The Bulwark first reported , the Green Party of Michigan may have nominated a Republican plant to run on its ballot line in Michigan’s competitive 7th Congressional District. Our investigation uncovered that 25-year-old Shane Dedrick was chosen as the party’s nominee after joining the Green Party of Michigan’s April nominating convention on Zoom—during which he kept his camera off, seemed to know little about the party platform, and went through practically no vetting. Dedrick is not active on social media, does not have a campaign website, and has yet to register with the FEC.
Despite multiple attempts, The Bulwark was unable to get in contact with Dedrick. We’re not alone.
Following our story, Michigan’s WLNS reached out to Dedrick…
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