What's really behind the data center backlash?

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Okay, I finally found something Republicans and Democrats agree on. They all hate data centers. An issue almost nobody had heard of a year or two ago is now blowing up in small towns across the country. And the opposition is winning. Billions of dollars in projects have been blocked. Local leaders have been ejected from office. Heck, people's houses are getting shot up over these things. And a recent Gallup poll shows that more people are opposed to having a data center in their own town than a nuclear power plant. This one didn't start with an elephant in a room. It started with a question mark. What's going on? Because going in, I just didn't understand why these things were so controversial. I mean, we're not talking about an oil refinery or a pig farm. We're talking about warehouses full of computers. I'm Ken LaCourte, and here's what I learned. We'll first start with data center basics. What these buildings actually do and why we actually need so many of them. Then we'll take a look at the trade-offs, the pros and cons. After that, we'll ask whether the opposition is grassroots or astroturfed. And finally, we'll dig into what I believe is underlying it all. The deeper reasons this fight has gotten so personal so fast. Okay, so before we get to the pitchforks, let's cover the data center basics. These are just buildings full of computers. Rows of servers and processors stacked in racks, humming in a climate-controlled warehouse, wired to the internet, and kept alive by a lot of electricity. When you stream a movie, back up your photos, send an email, or ask a chatbot a dumb question at 2 a.m., that request goes to one of these buildings. It gets handled by a machine on a rack, and it comes back to you in a few milliseconds. The cloud everyone talked about a few years ago, it's probably a warehouse in Virginia, or Texas, or 40 minutes outside of some town you've never heard of. These aren't specifically AI buildings. We've all relied on data centers for years. It's just that their spread went largely unnoticed. And then AI came along, and it's very hungry. Training and running these models requires a massive amount of computing power, and computing power means electricity and more servers. Here's an important number that matters in this debate. A typical AI-focused data center can use as much power as 100,000 homes. And the biggest ones going up right now? About 20 times that for just one building. The International Energy Agency says the electricity these things burn worldwide is on track to roughly double by 2030, and the AI-focused slice set to triple. In the United States, data centers already use around 4% of all the electricity in the country, and by 2030 that could climb towards 9%, maybe higher. The strain is global. In Ireland, data centers already use about a fifth of the entire country's electricity. Dublin got nervous enough to freeze new grid hookups. Amsterdam and Singapore did the same. New York State? They just put a complete pause on large ones. And the money involved? It's almost hard to comprehend. In 2025, the industry poured somewhere north of $400 billion into creating this stuff. The buildings, the chips, the guts. A Harvard economist said that if you strip out the data center and tech investment boom going on right now, U.S. economic growth was basically flat, like 0.1% early last year. For a good chunk of 2025, the AI buildout was adding more to America's growth than all consumer spending combined. And that's close to 70% of the economy. So that's the why. Now let's look at the where. For most of data center history, this stuff clustered in a handful of spots, especially North Virginia. So many servers landed in Loudoun County, just west of Washington, D.C., that they nicknamed one stretch of it Data Center Alley. Then places like Phoenix and the Pacific Northwest joined the party. There are already more than 4,000 data centers running in the United States, nearly half of them in just five regional clusters. AI broke the pattern. I mean, when you need this much land and this much power this fast, the old hubs, they just run out of room and they ran out of juice. So developers went hunting. And as fate would have it, the dream site turns out to be a rural county with cheap land, a big power line running through it, and a local government willing to hand out a tax break or two. Which is exactly why these projects keep landing in small towns and red states, rural Ohio, downstate Illinois, Georgia, Wyoming, Louisiana. The last part, the tax deals, that's where the fight really starts. Because the people who want to put up those buildings are asking these towns and counties and states for hefty discounts on their sales taxes and some property taxes. And local governments, they're often willing and eager. Many of these communities have been chasing economic development for decades of industrial decline. So on paper, it looks like a win. A billion-dollar facility that brings construction jobs, integration into the digital economy, and even with some discounts, the center will still pay something in taxes. But the reality on the ground is a little bit more complicated, which I'll get into in just a minute. But first, let's take a look at today's sponsor, something I use pretty much every day, Ground News. It's incredibly hard to get a straight answer on stories like this, and that's thanks to a lot of problems with the modern media. Ground News is designed to help fix that. News bubbles, biased sources, ignoring information, I mean, you name it. That's why Ground News pulls in and compares coverage from over 50,000 sources and show you who's reporting what, how they're framing it, and who's staying quiet on what issues. Bias ratings, ownership, funding, it's all there. One great feature is Blindspot. It shows you which stories are getting buried by one side of the media while the other runs wall-to-wall with it. Case in point, this story on the HHS ending COVID emergency declarations, where 92% of coverage came from right-leaning outlets and none from the left. Flip it around, and this story about California banning sell-by food labels to avoid waste, it got 52% of coverage from the left with only 5% from the right. So separating fact from rumor starts with knowing whose version you're getting, and Ground News helps you see past that. I'm on the Vantage plan, and I check it daily. Get 40% off at ground.news slash elephants. The link's in the description, or you can scan the QR code. Okay, so data centers. Every one of the fights over these facilities involves pretty much the same trade-offs. Promises on one side and concerns on the other. I'll run through both lists and then get into why this stuff gets so personal for some people. Start with employment, because the pitch is often, we're bringing jobs. And during construction, that's true. Meta's monster site in rural Louisiana, it expects more than 5,000 workers on site at the peak of the build. So that's electricians and pipe fitters, concrete crews. Everybody in the building trades wins. For a year or two, a data center is a real boom. And then it opens up, and the boom evaporates. Because running a giant warehouse of machines that mostly babysit themselves, that just doesn't take a lot of people. A Harvard researcher put the permanent staffing at something like 20 to 50 people, depending on the facility. A few technicians, a handful of engineers, some janitors, and some security guards. So the town that was expecting an economic engine gets a very expensive building with a nearly empty parking lot next to it. Now, the industry's gotten smarter about their pitch recently. They don't just wave around jobs numbers, but talk about multipliers. They say every data center job supports three or four more somewhere else in the local economy. Okay, so let's talk about the money part that politicians really like. Taxes. This is the promise that keeps local officials saying yes. And it can be huge. I mean, the Loudoun County, Virginia, I mentioned earlier, it's the poster child for this. Data centers there, they send the county something like $1.3 billion a year. That money has let the county cut its homeowner tax rate 10 years running. I mean, that's a rare event. Strip the data centers out, and a typical homeowner's property tax bill would nearly double, roughly $5,800 more per year. So yeah, for some communities, it's a golden goose. But there's some nuances worth noting. The tax breaks, they're usually just a sales tax discount on the servers when they're bought. Property taxes often apply in full. So Loudoun County's hauling in that $1.3 billion because it got 25 years and 600 plus data centers piled onto its tax rolls, all taxed at the regular rate. Not because of some old break that finally expired. A brand new town with a first data center just has a smaller pile at the outset, but it's real money. But now that takes us into the bigger problem, electricity. And this is where some of the fears get real. So remember, one of these AI campuses can eat up the power of a small city. In some areas, it's a substantive part of the energy usage for an entire state. Now, in about a quarter of the instances, the data centers are building their own power sources, often because connecting to a local utility grid can take up to five years and they just don't have that kind of time. Some are building natural gas plants. Meta is even cutting deals with companies that run nuclear reactors. In Louisiana, Meta is paying to increase the state's electricity capacity by 30%. So it's a new giant customer paying to upgrade an otherwise creaky old power grid. Although critics say that pledge only covers costs for 15 years and that could create longer term costs for the state. Overall, electricity costs are rising. Now, sometimes that's due to demand, but it's also for reasons like retiring old plants or storms wrecking the grid. And of course, just plain old inflation. That's all baked in. But in a town where one of these facilities just moved in, it's a reason people can actually see with their own eyes for their rising electric bills. Water's the next in line on the list and it's one where I'll actually push back a little on the outrage. The average data center can burn through something like 300,000 gallons of water a day for cooling, which is a lot. But it's also roughly in line with what a single 18-hole golf course uses to keep its grass green. Now, I could get into a lot more specifics of the data here, but with water, the real problem isn't the total. It's usually the where. Water use, it matters a lot more in places like Arizona than it does in Oregon. Then there's the stuff associated with these buildings that you can actually hear and see. So let's start with sound, a complaint that was more common than I realized. In Chandler, Arizona, after a data center was built in 2014, residents started hearing a hum, a low, constant drone that just never stopped. Some sealed their windows, others slept with earplugs every night. It was a decade before the city passed one of the first data center noise ordinances in the country. The same story is playing out in Virginia and in Mississippi where 10,000 residents just filed a federal lawsuit over the noise. Doctors say it's really not about the volume, but the fact that the noise just never stops. But perhaps the sharpest edge of the trade-off is the forced taking of private land. People's property usually doesn't get taken for a data center. It gets taken for the power line that feeds it. Because in the U.S., utility companies hold something that the tech companies don't, the power of eminent domain, the government's power to force you to sell your property. In Georgia, for instance, a power project tied to new AI data centers is slated to cut across more than 330 private properties with a couple dozen homes targeted for removal. Several families in its path, they've gotten a lot of attention for fighting what they described as forced sales under threat of eminent domain. These are fairly rare incidents, but they definitely play into the public relations narrative. And those narratives, they're clearly driven by people with expertise on both sides. One thing I noticed was that in trying to figure out the resources used by one of these facilities, I entered an almost never-ending level of economic pro and con arguments. It's like a nonstop game of economics ping pong. For instance, when I was digging into water usage, I came across studies that say you can't just look at the water used for cooling, but also need to factor in the water used for electrical generation and making those computers. Now, that certainly isn't wrong. It's part of the big picture, but it's also a standard that people don't use when evaluating a car dealership or an office building with people. And if instead of a data center, you build a large office building, now you have a lot more people. And in a community, that creates traffic. It drives up the cost of housing, and they send more kids to the local school. But wait, they'll also shop at local stores and they'll pay the town more money in taxes. So, you get the point. Hey, as always, if I screw up any important facts here, hit it me in the comments and I'll address it in a pinned comment below. My sources and research, they're down in the description. So, who are these people? The opposition fighting all these plans? Whoever they are, they're winning for the most part. So, is it grassroots or something that's astroturfed? The answer? It's a bit messy. As I mentioned up top, though, the opposition has largely united the country. A Pew Research survey of more than 8,500 Americans found majorities of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents all landing in the same place, opposed. Ask people if data centers are good or bad for the environment, and it isn't even close. 39% say bad, only 4% say good. Same story on your power bill. 38% say worse, just 6% say better. Now, the intensity isn't identical. Half of Democrats call these things bad for the environment versus 31% of Republicans. Democrats just run hotter on that. But that's a gap in degree, not direction. And age, race, income, or city, none of it changes the basic verdict that data centers are bad news. And the more people learn about them, the more they dislike them. Usually, it's the opposite. Usually, learning about a thing makes you calmer about it. But not here. Here, the education is the radicalization. That animosity is turning into real political muscle. Since OneTracker started counting back in 2023, opponents have hit at least $64 billion worth of data center projects with real roadblocks. Only about a third of those projects were killed outright. The rest were delayed, but ultimately survived. And the number of active opposition groups nationwide more than doubled just in the first quarter of 2026. Whatever you call it, something is changing and changing fast. And it's moving beyond petitions and Facebook groups. When the politicians don't listen on this topic, sometimes the voters fire them. In Warrington, Virginia, the town council in 2023 approved an Amazon data center over the objection of hundreds of residents. The council approved it anyway, four to three, and every council member who backed it is now gone. In Cascade Locks, Oregon, residents didn't even wait for an election. They recalled two officials and the new board killed a data center project days later. In a few places, it's turned genuinely dark. In April of 2026, an Indianapolis city councilman who'd backed a data center woke up just before one in the morning to find 13 bullet holes across the front of his house. And a note on the door read, no data centers. He and his eight-year-old son were home, but nobody was hurt. So is all of this organic or someone or something behind it? Is somebody paying for it? And look, I know sometimes you guys get mad when I split the difference, but this is one that kind of annoys both sides. I mean, first, the grassroots anger is absolutely, undeniably real. You can't fake 70% opposition. This is happening in deep red ranch counties like Wyoming and in Utah, places where a Sierra Club fundraising email carries zero weight. Regular people are showing up to zoning meetings because their bill jumped and a stranger wants their land. I mean, that part's not manufactured. But it's also true that a professional machine moved in to organize that anger. In October 25, a national group called Food and Water Watch became the first to demand a total nationwide freeze on new data centers. Two months later, a letter to Congress backing that freeze had over 230 organizations on it. And about 100 days after that, opponents in Congress and Senate sponsored an actual data center moratorium bill. Now, neighbors with yard signs don't move that fast. That's professional campaign infrastructure. And the money behind those national groups traces to some familiar places. One Swiss billionaire has given nearly $14 million to four groups that signed that moratorium letter. So, yes, that's a money machine there stirring up some of the opposition, but we don't even know the size on the other side. I mean, as I mentioned, the industry side has billions of dollars at stake and it's absolutely spending loads on lobbying and advertising themselves. Now, to be clear, I'm just offering clarity here. I'm not implying that any of this is wrong. This is how democracy works. And what I've noticed, it always works better when there are adversarial sides, not when one secretive side gets its way unopposed. And that wasn't always the case with data centers because the opposition has exploded not really because people became hyper-attuned to water usage or the electrical grid. It's more fundamental than that. So let's try to see what's really underlying it all. What I saw was that the most common theme across the country is that people feel like they've lost control of their own backyard to powers they can't see and that they sometimes can't even reach. And it's more than just a feeling. Tech executives in Washington insist that the build-out isn't optional, no matter how loud the local opposition gets. They frame it as a national security imperative, not a corporate cash grab. Build the data steel mills of the AI age or China will. The Trump administration made that case explicit with a July 2025 executive order fast-tracking data center permitting nationwide built on the idea that America is in a race with adversaries for supremacy. For an example, let's look at what's happening at Lake Tahoe. For decades, the 50,000 people in the Tahoe Basin got their electricity through one utility. Then, in 2026, that utility announced it was pulling its power supply out of the region to free up capacity for data centers being built for Google, Apple, and Microsoft in Nevada. A whole community is now suddenly hunting for its own power supply so computer servers can keep going somewhere else. And there's nobody for the people in that community to appeal to. California sets the rules. Nevada owns the wires. The feds regulate the market, so no single person is in charge of protecting the citizens. One advocate summed it up, it's like we don't exist. That's the real emotion in this fight. It's not about electrical power, but about feeling politically powerless. Then stack secrecy on top of that, and you get more problems. And a lot of these deals got cooked up in the dark. Across the country, tech companies routinely ask local officials to sign nondisclosure agreements before they'll even discuss a project. NBC News reviewed more than 30 of these deals across 14 states and found that in most, officials had signed NDAs while dealing with shell companies with fake names. Meta ran a Wisconsin project through something called Dagus LLC. Amazon hit a $3.6 billion Arizona campus project under the codename Project Blue. In one Minnesota town, officials sat on a data center plan for two years before residents found out. And in another town there, residents were six months into the process before they even learned the mystery project was a data center. Tech firms say the secrecy is standard business practice. It protects site selection and land deals from a bidding war. And that's undoubtedly the case. But a city councilman knowing exactly what's coming and being legally barred from telling the people who elected them, that doesn't sit right. And that secrecy feeds something older, distrust of big tech altogether. Most people can't do a thing about Silicon Valley's influence on our daily lives. Nobody can picket an algorithm. But a hundred acre building on the edge of town, that people can fight. The data center is the first time big tech's power shows up as a physical object that a person can actually stand in front of and complain about. Underneath it all sits AI. A data center, it's like the smokestack of the artificial intelligence age. Most people have an unease about AI. The jobs it might destroy, the fake stuff it spits out, a sense that it's moving too fast with nobody's permission. And there's no ballot line for AI. But there is a zoning hearing. And the data center has quietly become the ballot box for technology that nobody got a say in. The surface complaints are real, but underneath them are something bigger. Who controls a town? Who's telling the truth? And whether anybody bothered to ask before the future landed in a particular zip code. So Republicans and Democrats, they didn't organize this together. They just showed up at the same protest, sometimes for their own separate reasons. One side's worried more about property rights and utility bills. The other's more worried about the climate and the oligarchs of big tech. Worries that converged at a massive building without windows on the edge of town. Me, I'm not really bothered by this political fight. I don't consider it a bug in our system. It's how our democratic republic works. And if you want to feel better about our system, you might be interested in this video. It's about how North Korea got so absolutely crazy. Spend a little bit of time looking at that and a little wine coming from that building. That's going to seem like a pretty minor problem. I'm Ken LaCourt. Thanks for watching. I'll be interested to see how this fight progresses. So until next time.