On its surface, the national revolt against data centers seems simple: They are a nuisance, and people do not want them in their proverbial backyards. But I haven’t been able to let go of the idea that there must be something much deeper driving the backlash against them, and few other subjects have confounded me more than trying to figure out what to think about it.
These facilities — the massive suburban and exurban warehouses that power AI, along with much of what we do on the modern internet — spew noise, have been accused of guzzling electricity and water, and have a halo of general ugliness around them. And over the past year-and-a-half or so, many Americans have gone from barely knowing what a data center is to having fiercely held opinions about them. Seventy percent of Americans, according to a recent Gallup poll, now say they would oppose one being built in their area. The environment tops their list of concerns. They’re also disquieted by the idea of high-tech facilities buying up land from America’s farmers and ranchers. Anti-data center campaigns have swept communities across the country, producing dozens of local moratoria on their construction.
- Data centers have rapidly become a flashpoint in communities across the US, with many Americans opposing their construction over concerns about noise, water use, energy use, and other nuisances.
- But the backlash is probably about much more than data centers themselves — they’ve become a proxy for the public’s dread of AI and an uncertain future.
- Instead of fighting data centers one by one, the US needs a broader debate and policy agenda on how AI should be regulated and how to ensure it expands rather than diminishes human agency.
These objections sound public-spirited enough. But as Vox’s Eric Levitz and many others have written, many of the rationales for stopping the buildout of data centers, particularly the environmental case against them, have been overstated (more on that in a moment).
Yet grassroots anti-data center activists are hardly wrong to be worried about artificial intelligence — it is one of the most formidable policy problems we face today. AI’s ultra-wealthy makers promise a world of unprecedented progress and prosperity, but also say they might also eliminate everyone’s job and possibly annihilate humanity in the process.
If you are terrified that AI is ushering in a future that will be miserable to live in, I fully share in that feeling (and would personally prefer to go back to a world before ChatGPT). And I think this sentiment, rather than any ecological anxiety, explains much of why Americans are suddenly fighting to ban the physical infrastructure on which AI and tech more generally depends, why they’re so pessimistic about AI in general, and why college seniors graduating this spring have been booing the mere mention of AI off the commencement stage.
But it’s a problem that stopping a data center locally feels like the only policy lever that an ordinary person can pull right now to try to slow down AI, because it’s a blunt instrument that can’t give us the outcomes we really want. Canceling data center projects town by town is unlikely to meaningfully slow AI adoption, and it certainly doesn’t regulate AI use or protect us from its worst possible outcomes.
Instead, this approach traps us in a debate about relative trivialities rather than about one of our society’s most important questions: how we will manage a technological and economic transformation that’s already happening. And that dysfunction in turn prevents us from seeing any upside to AI and thinking about how we might broadly share it. It is, at bottom, a symptom of the same obstructionism that blocks us from addressing many of the biggest problems of our time, from green energy to housing and so much else, under similarly confused pretexts.
Could that ever change?
Where the data center revolt is coming from
The great US data center buildout is colliding with a national economic mood that appears to be historically, singularly bad. Americans are angry about the cost of living, afraid for their futures, increasingly mistrustful of each other, and don’t trust our institutions to solve the problems we face. They despise (it probably goes without saying) Big Tech. Majorities of the public say that AI will do more harm than good in daily life, that it will take away their economic opportunities, that government is not doing enough to regulate it. Young people are particularly fixated on the impacts of AI, and they seem positively miserable about it.
It’s little surprise Americans feel such a dread of AI; Congress has introduced dozens of bills to govern the technology but has failed to pass any comprehensive legislation. With no federal regulation apparently forthcoming that would, say, provide a measure of economic security to the tens of millions of workers who could be replaced by AI in the coming years, it’s perhaps no wonder that there’s been such vigorous backlash against the physical manifestations of the tech.
Surely, then, at least some of the reasons that data centers are being pigeonholed as an ecological issue is that people are searching for legitimate-feeling reasons to try to stop this runaway train. The tendency to fall back on reasons that can be metabolized by the policymaking processes that ordinary Americans can actually influence, like environmental review, has been inherited from the environmental protection laws embraced across the country beginning in the 1970s, when pollution had become a visible public crisis. But just as when environmentalism is weaponized to block new housing or high-speed rail or in support of whatever other garden-variety NIMBY cause, the ecological argument for shutting down AI mostly withers under scrutiny.
Like all economically important industries, data centers and AI certainly have real environmental impacts. These facilities use a lot of electricity, and much of it comes from fossil fuels because most US electricity is still derived from fossil fuels. Their electricity use will grow quickly as demand for AI tools increases.
But years of covering one of the world’s most underrated environmental menaces — agriculture, especially animal agriculture — have taught me to be skeptical of contextless claims about how much water or energy any particular industry uses. The planetary harms of data centers aren’t radically out of proportion to what we would expect from an industry that is increasingly important to daily life and the economy; computing is far less intensive in energy and physical resources than many other things we do and many of the activities it stands to replace, AI researcher Andy Masley has pointed out repeatedly. Data centers’ water use, meanwhile, amounts to a tiny fraction of all US water use, and there is not much evidence that they’re going to cause water scarcity issues even in arid parts of the country. In cases where a data center replaces, say, farmland growing water-intensive cattle feed crops in dry regions of the US, it might even benefit the environment.
I never want to sound glib about the future of our planet, nor do I want to take too far a detour into the political philosophy of how we decide whether an industry’s resource use is “worth it.” But I think it’s fair to say that campaigning against data centers on ecological objections is a dead end, if we are serious about finding a policy response to this technology that addresses the true concerns around it. An environmental frame may even be a gift to the AI industry, because the industry can defend itself on that ground pretty straightforwardly. Even data centers’ dependence on fossil fuels, one could argue not entirely unreasonably, is a problem for policymakers to solve by accelerating the buildout of renewable energy.
The AI debate we’re not having
So what, then, are we to with AI concerns if not taking them, converted into gigawatts and gallons, to the local planning commission meeting?
I wrestled with that question as I read Techno-Negative: A Long History of Refusing the Machine, Thomas Dekeyser’s recent book on the long human lineage of attempting to destroy the technologies that reshape the way we live, from the ancient Greeks, who, much like contemporary dread of AI, worried that machines could eclipse human agency, to computer arsonists in the 1980s. Dekeyser, who is a lecturer on human geography at the University of Southampton, writes that technological progress has always been a “political battlefield” where the purpose of human life is contested.
How can technology be used to make our society freer and more equal, and to augment human agency, rather than diminish it?
The fight to choke off data centers represents the latest expression of that struggle to define what it means to be human in the face of technological change, of what Dekeyser calls the “tenacious, fierce urge to negate life’s technologization.” What is AI, the technology that promises to replace the human mind itself, if not the apotheosis of our fears of being made obsolete? To the median American, data centers might feel like a manifestation of the forces that want to take all their power and relevance away from them.
Yet widespread cynicism about AI, I think, doesn’t stem from any inherent property of the technology itself, but rather from our politics. The public has not been offered any credible political vision of a future where AI could be deployed to support human flourishing, nothing that can offer a satisfying answer to the most important questions about our relationship with technology. As Dekeyser writes: “Do they constitute and expand, or undermine, human subjectivity?”
In this way, political possibilities shape the way we feel about technology: Imagine if, for example, instead of the prospect of widespread economic disenfranchisement, the productivity gains from AI could be harnessed to pass a four-day (or, hell, even three-day) work week, or to finance a generous universal paid leave policy. The US, as the richest country in the world and an undisputed leader in AI, certainly has the leverage to enact such policies. We could also give workers power over how AI is deployed in their workplaces, or incentivize AI development in a direction that expands, rather than replaces, human creativity. Or, as Sen. Bernie Sanders proposed this week, give the public a direct ownership stake in the technology itself, created by a tax on AI companies.
Whatever you think of these ideas, we’d be better off debating their merits and thinking through the particulars of how they might be implemented than fixating on individual data centers. But because an ambitious national AI policy feels unimaginable right now, and so of course people see AI as all downside and no upside. But simply channeling popular sentiment into local bans on physical infrastructure forecloses debate over the most important aspects of AI before we can even have them, as Holly Buck, an associate professor of environment and sustainability at the University of Buffalo, recently argued.
The politics of local veto has produced many of America’s other major governing failures, too: We can’t decarbonize the economy, solve a structural housing shortage, or absorb a technology as big as AI when local zoning hearings are the only places where the fight is happening and actionable decisions are being made. The essential difference with AI, though, is that on housing or climate change, we already mostly know the policy solutions we need. On AI, that terrain is still much less certain. We don’t yet know what we want from a potentially existentially transformative technology. That calls for real national confrontations with the most important questions: How can technology be used to make our society freer and more equal, and to augment human agency rather than diminish it?
Maybe that future still requires more data centers, many more of them (or maybe we should build fewer of them). Whichever outcome we choose, it should be downstream of a rational and deliberative policy process, rather than a poor simulacrum of the debate we all deserve.
