How Data Center Backlash is Reshaping Politics

SPEAKER_1 (0:03)

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Alexis Madrigal (0:22)

Welcome to Forum, I'm Alexis Madrigal. The headline of our guest, Mollie Taft's story pretty much says it all. How data centers broke American politics. Because after years and years where every issue seemed to immediately separate into left and right, data centers somehow have scrambled everything.

That's true nationally and states from Texas to Pennsylvania, Indiana to California. Is opposing data center something Bernie Sanders would do or something Steve Bannon would do?

Trick question actually, they appeared at the same event, both opposing data centers. But data center politics are creating new coalitions locally, too, where suddenly data center politics, which looked to me like a variation on environmental justice organizing, are suddenly front and center in our industrial suburbs and exurbs. So that's today's show. Here to talk with us, we're joined by Abby Andre, Co-Executive Director at the Impact Project. Welcome.

Abby Andre (1:19)

Thanks so much.

Alexis Madrigal (1:20)

And we've got Molly Taft, Senior Climate Reporter at Wired, who's been covering the rise of data center opposition. Welcome, Molly.

Molly Taft (1:27)

Thanks for having me.

Alexis Madrigal (1:28)

So, Molly, just to set us up, I'm just going to quote back just a couple of sentences of your story. You said, in all my years of reporting on energy and the environment, I've never seen anything like the type of vitriol leveled at data centers or the near religious fury that has built up around their construction, or the way this resistance seems to be uniting people from the complete opposite ends of the political spectrum. When I read that, I was like, that exactly reflects my experience as well in reporting on these things. What happened? So you've got this new article out. This basically just says, what happened?

Molly Taft (2:00)

It's been so wild to watch the kind of growth of this issue. I think I started covering this at Wired when I came to the magazine, more than a year and a half ago. And back then, the political landscape around data centers was limited to mostly local fights. It was limited to mostly local folks showing up at community meetings. And that doesn't normally reach the national political level. You know, the Trump administration came in kind of guns blazing on American AI, and data centers suddenly started cropping up in places where they hadn't traditionally been before. But I don't think politicians on either the left or the right were really prepared for a truly grassroots movement opposing their construction. And I always say you talk to 10 different data center protesters, and you're going to get 10 different reasons why they oppose them, right? They're kind of a hard sell. It's a really big facility that does use a lot of energy, sometimes a lot of water, being built very rapidly, like getting kind of runway to be built in ways that other infrastructure that might be more useful to people like housing or, you know, facilities that create new jobs might not be going up as fast.

And then there's this sort of cult of secrecy that's surrounded a lot of these local projects. A lot of developers have used NDAs to push these through.

So it's a little bit of a hard sell. And then also at the end of the day, there's the conversation about data centers and how they relate to AI and this growing change that we're seeing across our society, across our economy, across kind of like what it means to be human. And so I'm really not surprised that this happened, but it has been really shocking to watch it go from an issue that barely anyone was talking about last spring in the summer to one of the top political conversations as we head towards the midterms, like really reshaping all of this.

Alexis Madrigal (3:59)

It is wild. And like you said, President Trump came in guns blazing on AI, but Josh Shapiro say out in Pennsylvania was wanted to have them develop. Matt Mahan here in San Jose, the mayor was clearing the way for more data center development. So it really was this bipartisan consensus that like, oh yeah, data centers are good, data centers add to property tax revenue, data centers do all these things.

And like you say, the surprise was that it really came from a wide variety of grassroots people who really had no central organization and don't still today really seem to have any central coordination.

Molly Taft (4:40)

No, there's not, you know, I think that you can talk all you want about from the White House, for instance. There's been a very strong line of argument about a lot of this being attributable to China, which by the way, there's scant evidence that that's what's actually driving this conversation, right? This does seem to be really, really grassroots. But it is remarkable. I think it's been a while since we've seen an issue grow so organically out of community opposition, folks organizing on Facebook. Facebook has been ironically one of the ground zeroes for folks in different communities to talk about these issues. People going to community meetings and asking questions about these projects. I've spoken with organizers who heard about a project coming to their town. They started looking into it. At first, it was just them and maybe a couple other people. And now, a year plus later, they're leading Facebook groups of thousands of people in opposition to data centers. They're advising other communities nearby about how to oppose these data centers. It really has grown from nowhere. And I think that there was something that flipped this summer.