I Took AOC to Deep Trump Country. They Agreed On One Thing.

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: When the blasting started, it went on a couple of months. [00:00:03] Speaker 2: My sister-in-law's ceiling come crashing down. Nobody from Amazon has bothered to say one word. It was three blasts a day, seven days a week for months. This is unbelievable. [00:00:16] Speaker 3: What happens when you take Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the heart of the data center revolt? [00:00:21] Speaker 4: And they're just trying to say that no one should cover this? [00:00:24] Speaker 2: Yeah, and I'm sorry, but I'm on a social security check. I can't afford to do that. [00:00:28] Speaker 4: You didn't blow up your ceiling. [00:00:31] Speaker 3: We wanted to know how voters who feel politically homeless And raise your hand if your electricity bill has gone up and your water bill has gone up. From the black suburbs of Atlanta [00:00:41] Speaker 4: Are the local politicians supportive? No! [00:00:44] Speaker 3: To conservative rural communities. [00:00:47] Speaker 5: This is not a party issue, this is a people issue. That's right. So it doesn't matter what party you are, it's wrong. [00:00:54] Speaker 3: How are voters going to respond to a Democratic Socialist from New York? [00:00:58] Speaker 4: Look, people want to call me woke, whatever. This is about power. [00:01:02] Speaker 3: With the Trump administration pushing for more data centers... The AI race is a big deal. The construction of colossal data centers... We have to get this stuff built. Where does that leave regular people, like Beverly Morris? [00:01:16] Speaker 6: Well, I feel trapped, because I have no way out. Mm-hmm. [00:01:20] Speaker 3: How is the backlash against a data center boom the key to unlocking America's politics? [00:01:25] Speaker 4: We've never been more polarized. I just think we've got to show up in these places and see these things for ourselves. [00:01:34] Speaker 3: Well, do you want to show us, there's been some damage to your house? Of course. [00:01:37] Speaker 7: Yeah, sure. [00:01:38] Speaker 3: Come on. Yeah. Pamela Felder purchased her dream home three years ago. [00:01:42] Speaker 7: So the first initial thing I saw was the crack in my porch. Oh, sure. Wow. All the way across. [00:01:49] Speaker 3: All was well until explosive blasts started to shake her home earlier this year. [00:01:54] Speaker 7: It sounded like someone picked up my house and went boom. A week after that, that's when I started seeing cracks all throughout my house. And I found out they're putting a data center in my backyard. [00:02:09] Speaker 3: The two million square foot hyperscale data center is being built less than a mile from Pamela's home. [00:02:15] Speaker 7: You can still see where the paint is ripped all the way up my stairs. I noticed the ceiling that looked cracked across there. My dad worked in construction, so. Oh, he did? [00:02:30] Speaker 4: So if I look like I'm really sticking my nose in here. No, I don't care. Because I'm taking a real look. And your neighbors are experiencing the same thing. [00:02:39] Speaker 7: We're all sending letters out to the blasting company. And what are they saying when they deny it? They say at my house was settling. Oh, so everyone here's house is settling at the same time. At the same time. [00:02:51] Speaker 3: Pamela's neighbor also came by and insisted we see a giant sinkhole she said was caused by the blasts. [00:02:58] Speaker 7: Makes you want to cry. No one's listening. Why a data center? Why now? Why here? [00:03:06] Speaker 3: Unprecedented amounts of money are behind the race to build. Meta is investing $600 billion in data center infrastructure through 2028. OpenAI has pledged over $400 billion. Even the real estate company responsible for this site just closed a $3.25 billion funding round. [00:03:26] Speaker 4: If these tech folks love these data centers so much, put it in your backyard. [00:03:29] Speaker 7: That's right. That's right. You put it in your backyard. [00:03:32] Speaker 4: Put it away from people's homes. This is why we're saying we need to slow the roll on this because they're moving fast. We're just saying pause it so that we can move forward in a more just way. That's right. In a fair way. Yeah, for everybody. For everybody. Yeah. [00:03:54] Speaker ?: You're welcome. Thank you for your... [00:03:55] Speaker 3: But far from the black suburbs of Atlanta is much Trumpier country. And the idea of AOC isn't as enthusiastically received. There's some really extreme liberal views out there. Before they met her, I asked folks what they knew about AOC's politics. [00:04:12] Speaker 8: Just from an overall view, very fringe left. [00:04:16] Speaker 5: I'm probably a lot more conservative than she is. [00:04:19] Speaker 3: How are your politics evolving? They're evolving. [00:04:23] Speaker 6: I'm not real impressed with the politics on either side. [00:04:28] Speaker 3: We first met Beverly Morris and her husband Jeff last year when they showed us how the construction of a 2.5 million square foot Meta data center is contaminating their drinking water. A charge which Meta denies. [00:04:41] Speaker 6: This is my cold water pressure in the kitchen. [00:04:45] Speaker 3: So you can see the sediment from the data center. [00:04:49] Speaker 6: And this is what's in all the pipes, too. They should be responsible for that, not us. [00:04:57] Speaker 3: When we were here last year with them, Meta was still building this data center, but now it's operational. [00:05:06] Speaker 6: I worry about using the water for everything. [00:05:09] Speaker 4: Yeah. [00:05:09] Speaker 6: I don't use the water for cooking anymore. I did for a while, you know, I thought, oh, you know, I've got to use it. I wouldn't drink it. I haven't drank the water here in years. I mean, it should be. [00:05:21] Speaker 4: I mean, this is my view, but it should be a right for you to be able to turn on your tap and drink what comes out of it. [00:05:27] Speaker 3: The Morrises aren't alone. Other residents also came to us with stories of their contaminated water. [00:05:32] Speaker 9: This is the sediment that it's picking up. The cold water pressure everywhere is pretty bad. You cannot take a shower and wash dishes or take a shower and fill up the horse's water. You just can't. You can't. [00:05:45] Speaker 10: You can't take a shower because our refrigerator broke or HVAC broke. [00:05:48] Speaker ?: Mm-hmm. [00:05:48] Speaker 10: We have issues with the pool. So anything that's water related, we have issues with. And this is the filters from the filtration system after we pull it out, so. [00:06:01] Speaker 4: And you used to change those filters once a year or? [00:06:04] Speaker 10: Yeah. [00:06:04] Speaker 4: I think typical people are probably six months, two a year. [00:06:07] Speaker 10: Yeah. [00:06:07] Speaker 4: And now you're doing it once a month? Yeah. But you feel stuck, right? You feel like you can't, even if you want it to move, you can't. [00:06:14] Speaker 9: No, not in be able to get the value that we've put into our home. [00:06:20] Speaker 3: Well, let's keep going down the line here, Connie. [00:06:22] Speaker 11: Our fight is in Coweta County. We just had a large parcel of land rezoned for a data center, but we don't know who it is yet that's coming. [00:06:31] Speaker 1: Yes. And I'm Tina, I live in Oxford, Georgia, and it's the Amazon data center. [00:06:39] Speaker 5: We're not just fighting Facebook or Amazon or any of these data centers. That's not who we're fighting. We're fighting the entire institution that allows it. [00:06:51] Speaker 4: They think people aren't paying attention. They'll go sniffing around, jiggling every door handle to see what county they can push these things through on. [00:07:03] Speaker 5: It is necessary. I understand the need for it. But the manner in which they're going about it is not only wrong, it doesn't even make sense. [00:07:15] Speaker 11: I don't blame Amazon. I don't blame those businesses. I blame our government. That's who's supposed to be taking care of me. My commissioners should have been looking after our community. Our governor should be looking after our state, like it goes up. A business is a business, and it's about making business, and they don't care what they're doing to people. They don't. But they're greedy and they don't care. [00:07:38] Speaker 5: That's the way it is. Yeah. We appreciate you taking the time to come hear about it, because until someone at a national level gets really serious about it, nothing's going to happen. [00:07:52] Speaker 4: We should be starting congressional investigations on the effect on these and figuring out with precision how we protect our water supplies, how we protect your power bills and water bills, and keep people from getting sick. [00:08:09] Speaker 3: Fifty miles away from the Morrises, a group of residents successfully pushed for a moratorium on a 95-acre data center project. [00:08:18] Speaker 1: Wait a minute. Where do I know you from? [00:08:20] Speaker 4: I'm a congresswoman from New York. Oh! Come on, man! [00:08:25] Speaker 12: Hey, you my girl, you know what I'm saying? [00:08:27] Speaker 9: Oh, thank you! [00:08:28] Speaker 8: Thank you! [00:08:29] Speaker 9: Yeah! [00:08:30] Speaker 12: We organized because we know what we want in our community. And they did not anticipate that when they had the Board of Commissioner meeting that hundreds of us were going to show up. They couldn't deny us. They had to stop and say, "Wait a minute." [00:08:48] Speaker 3: Across the country, more than 50 local data center moratoriums have already been enacted, with dozens more proposed or under consideration across the U.S. But this patchwork approach has left a lot of communities vulnerable. [00:09:01] Speaker 13: We're in a neighborhood that's in unincorporated Clayton County, but just over the fence line is the city limits of Forest Park. Wow. And that is where the facility is being built. Wow. [00:09:11] Speaker 4: Okay. All right. So, the county has a moratorium. Yes. But the city does not? Correct. Wow. Wow. And so, the city, even though the city is inside the county, it's not covered. Correct. All right. Talk about a loophole. [00:09:27] Speaker 3: Yes. For now, the local fight continues. [00:09:31] Speaker 12: The community has said we want walkability in our neighborhoods. We want clean air. We want clean water. But we have to keep fighting. It's like a continual fight. It's like we're surrounded by piranhas, you know, that just keep trying to pick at us, but we just keep fighting. [00:09:49] Speaker 3: In March, 2026, AOC and Senator Bernie Sanders introduced legislation at the federal level called the AI Data Center Moratorium Act. It's both a response to growing opposition to these facilities, but also about the need to establish a nationwide policy about their construction. [00:10:06] Speaker 4: Our responsibility is to take care of people, and that is what we're here to do today. [00:10:12] Speaker 1: What you're proposing is a national moratorium. [00:10:14] Speaker 4: Yes. And it's, you know, it's not the same thing as an outright ban, but it's saying we need to meet some basic protections for people. We need some guarantees on your water, on the air that you breathe. We need to make sure that the jobs that stand to be wiped out, that there's a plan for that, and we're not just leaving people, you know, out to dry. And we need to just have some really basic, common sense protections for people. [00:10:46] Speaker 3: The bill would require a building moratorium until the federal government passes laws mitigating job losses, preventing utility rate hikes, and establishing environmental protections, among other things. The question is whether this is enough to persuade conservative voters to support someone far across the political aisle. Do you think that people here could get behind someone like AOC and her ideas for AI and data centers? [00:11:14] Speaker 5: I think they would get behind anyone who was going to fight for their rights to clean water and to live their life without dealing with this. [00:11:25] Speaker 4: Now the tide on this is starting to turn. The politics on this, because everyday people are starting to catch on to what's going on. [00:11:33] Speaker 8: She may be on the left, but on the data center issue, seems more centered and genuinely concerned [00:11:40] Speaker 3: about people and that's refreshing to hear. How do you wrap your head around addressing this at the national level? [00:11:47] Speaker 4: We need to put people first and we need those protections to be ironclad and guaranteed before we can have a conversation about what does and doesn't get constructed. [00:11:57] Speaker 3: Do you think that this is an issue that could maybe pull our country together? [00:12:02] Speaker 11: I don't know if it's going to pull our government all together. It's pulling the people together. [00:12:08] Speaker 6: If there's a chance that anything can be done, I feel like she is going to be the one to do it. [00:12:16] Speaker 3: Days later, AOC showed Beverly's water samples to an EPA water official, testifying before her committee. [00:12:24] Speaker 4: I have a jar right here. The only difference between the clean water and this was that data center. I have another one as well. This is what the drinking water now looks like next to that data center. [00:12:40] Speaker 14: And I think both of us can agree that neither one of these things are drinkable. So as soon as I get back to the office, I will be looking into exactly what you've just talked about because anywhere, whether it is, whatever type of construction it is, it is a priority to ensure that water quality standards established by EPA are being met. [00:13:01] Speaker 3: There are a lot of people with a lot of money who don't want to see this thing slow down. They're like, the train's moving fast. We can't afford to stop. Doesn't matter. We'll figure it out later. [00:13:11] Speaker 4: I've been in a lot of political fights that have seemed insurmountable before that we've [00:13:19] Speaker 10: gone. One, two, three. [00:13:21] Speaker 4: No data center. No data center. I just don't believe in impossible. I just think that, you know, if you think something's impossible, it's just that's that's an imagination problem. [00:13:32] Speaker 3: We're going to keep following this story. If you have any tips for us, please reach out at stories@perfectunion.us and continue to follow our reporting in the months to come. Before you go, please support our work by liking this video and subscribing to our channel. We're always looking to tell more stories like this one unpacking economic systems that impact all of our daily lives. Are there other issues you want to see us cover? Sound off in the comments. And again, don't forget to like and subscribe. Thank you. [00:13:59] Speaker ?: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.