Americans have long been told that data centers are the invisible backbone of modern life—silent, windowless buildings humming in far-off business parks, making our apps and clouds work. But in recent years, that invisibility has shattered. Opposition to data centers has become so widespread and culturally resonant that it has inspired a tongue-in-cheek rap song, a flood of investigative journalism, and even allegations from law enforcement that anti-data-center sentiment qualifies as “anti-tech violent extremist activity.” The satire itself proves the point: Hovey Benjamin’s lo-fi track “Data Center” is one of his most streamed songs, and its lyrics are deadpan absurdist gold. “I don’t care about the noise / I’m out here getting hearing damage with the boys / Maybe I could get lung damage too / Just so you can ask, ‘Grok, is this true?’” He sings about wanting a data center in his neighborhood so his rent might go down, about not needing clean water, and about his biggest fear being losing ChatGPT. The joke only works because the underlying anxieties are real. People understand that data centers demand enormous amounts of electricity and water, that they can raise utility bills and strain infrastructure, and that the benefits of the AI revolution are not necessarily shared by the communities that host its hardware. This is not a fringe issue confined to a few rural counties. It has become a national debate with political, environmental, and existential dimensions, fought in town halls, on social media, and in the halls of Congress.
Major American media outlets have given the issue serious long-form treatment—The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harper’s have all weighed in. Progressive YouTube operation More Perfect Union has built a large audience documenting the human costs: residents in Mansfield, Georgia, whose well water turned murky after Meta built a data center nearby; angry town meetings where locals shout at officials trying to approve projects; workers refusing to build them; families struggling with higher electric bills. The images of the Morrisses holding up jars of brownish water became a viral symbol. But the opposition is not just grassroots. Politicians from both sides of the aisle have rushed to claim the issue. Senator Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced a bill to impose a nationwide moratorium on data center development, with Sanders warning that Congress is dangerously behind on understanding the impact of the AI revolution. AOC herself went viral for questioning an EPA official while holding those same jars of muddy Georgia water, and for finding common ground with Republican voters who fear data centers in their communities. Congressman Ro Khanna proposed a “Data Center Bill of Rights” that would keep data centers away from homes, schools, and hospitals, require clean energy and noise limits, and force developers to assess impacts on utility prices, public health, and housing. Even Republican Senator Josh Hawley, a staunch Trump ally, has adopted the language of ordinary people against tech oligarchs, asking whether families will see their electric bills double and their wells run dry, and insisting that Americans are not “raw material in the hands of Silicon Valley.” Florida’s gubernatorial candidate James Fishback wants to ban data centers outright across all 67 counties. And President Trump, who promised to halve energy prices, has pushed a voluntary “Ratepayer Protection Pledge” that utilities and developers can sign—though it is largely symbolic.
This strange coalition of left and right reflects two very different kinds of concerns, though they often blend together. On one hand, there are concrete, measurable problems: water contamination, noise, diesel generators, rising electricity bills, land being turned into a “dystopian wasteland,” as Fishback puts it. A farmer in Kentucky named Ida Huddleston rejected a $26 million offer from a data center developer, lamenting that her land, her food, and her water are disappearing. On the other hand, there are more abstract anxieties about control, surveillance, and the direction of civilization. Water fears, for example, often take on a conspiratorial character. One viral Instagram reel with hundreds of thousands of likes claimed data centers are not actually using water for cooling at all, but are secretly “stealing” America’s clean drinking water and routing it into underground bunkers. “It’s not a tech boom. It’s a resource heist,” the creator says, urging viewers to “follow the utility lines.” The comment section references a James Bond villain who dammed Bolivia’s water supply. A similar nostalgia animates analog-minded brands and ordinary people alike. This June, Polaroid put up a billboard in Coney Island showing two people jumping into a body of water, with the tagline: “Go jump in some water before the data centers drink it all up.” The company’s Instagram post encouraged people to embrace “the beautiful, simple, wild, analog stuff” before it disappears. There is a deep cultural anxiety that data centers are not just buildings—they are harbingers of a future in which everything natural, clean, and human is sacrificed for the sake of artificial intelligence.
The more extreme fears are about surveillance and the ultimate purpose of the machines. Members of a Facebook group called “Say NO to Data Centers” trade warnings that these facilities should really be called “surveillance centers,” that they are building a “control grid piecemeal,” and that once the data centers are complete, “our freedom is gone.” One commenter simply says “The Antichrist.” And then there are theories that leave even the surveillance angle behind, venturing into apocalyptic and occult territory. Jiang Xueqin, a high school teacher whose YouTube channel gained fame after he reportedly predicted a Trump attack on Iran, presents data centers as the infrastructure for an AI that wants to kill everyone. In his telling, the real power behind data centers is the Knights Templar, the medieval military order that supposedly staged the American and French Revolutions, created the Bank of England, and orchestrated both World Wars. Now, he claims, they are building a one-world government controlled by an AI based in Jerusalem, with data centers springing up around the world to make it possible. He interprets OpenAI’s “Stargate” infrastructure project by connecting it to a 1994 sci-fi film about dimensional portals and a discontinued CIA program involving telepathy. He quotes a former OpenAI executive telling Ronan Farrow that “we’re building portals from which we’re genuinely summoning aliens,” and takes it literally. For Jiang, these tech executives are not scientists but cultists performing an occult project to bring demons into the world. It is easy to laugh at such ideas, and yet his videos have millions of views. They resonate because they offer a grand narrative for a vast, opaque, and genuinely frightening technological transformation that most people do not understand and never voted for.
Why have so many people become susceptible to such theories? Part of the answer is that data center companies have historically been terrible at communication. For years, they assumed they could build quietly in the background, unnoticed and irrelevant to the public. They did not anticipate that AI would make their facilities the physical embodiment of a controversial new technology, or that rural communities would notice when their roads are filled with construction trucks, their wells start pumping mud, and their utility bills go up. The planning process is often technocratic and anti-democratic, with decisions made by boards and bureaucrats rather than by local residents. That creates fertile ground for suspicion. The broader loss of trust in Big Tech means that even well-funded public relations campaigns are met with skepticism—people assume that if a company is spending money to tell you a data center is safe, there must be something they are hiding. Some concrete fears do have a basis in fact. A Rolling Stone investigation into AWS data centers in Oregon tied the practice of spraying nitrogen-rich wastewater onto farm fields to nitrate contamination in aquifers, and residents in the area have faced elevated rates of cancer and miscarriage. On the other hand, many claims are exaggerated or misapplied. Data center water use is still a small fraction of total national consumption, and a polluted well in one Georgia county may not be representative of every data center build. Electricity price increases are driven by many factors, and in some cases data centers could actually help lower costs by supporting grid investments. But nuance rarely travels as fast as outrage. For most Americans, the simple story is enough: a giant, secretive tech company wants to build a massive, energy-hungry facility in a residential or rural area, and the people who live there will absorb the costs while the profits flow to billionaires.
The data center issue has become a national political force precisely because it fuses all of these impulses—the concrete and the abstract, the rational and the conspiratorial, the progressive demand for accountability and the conservative distrust of corporate power. It speaks to a deeper question about who gets to benefit from new technology and who gets sacrificed for it. The tech industry says data centers are essential for American competitiveness, for the future of AI, for the economy itself. That may be true. But the people who live next door to these projects are saying something else: we want clean water, affordable electricity, and a voice in what happens to our neighborhoods. They are not necessarily anti-technology. Many of them use smartphones and perhaps even ChatGPT. They just do not want to be collateral damage in someone else’s revolution. And they are angry. That anger has taken strange forms—from jokes about dying of hearing damage for the sake of AI, to wild theories about Knights Templar and demon-summoning portals, to a genuine bipartisan push for moratoriums, bans, and bills of rights. Whether that push translates into electoral change is the question of the hour. With midterm elections coming and gubernatorial races across the country, politicians are hurrying to position themselves on the right side of the issue. Some, like Greg Abbott, who once welcomed data centers to Texas, are suddenly demanding audits and halting grid connections. Voters will soon have a chance to decide whether the backlash is a temporary political fad or a fundamental shift in the relationship between tech, power, and community. In the meantime, the anxieties will not disappear. They will keep bubbling up in town halls and comment sections, in protest signs and rap songs. Perhaps the ultimate lesson is a simple one: people do not necessarily object to data centers because they hate technology. They object because they want to be treated as citizens, not as raw material. They want their water to run clean, their rent to be affordable, and their future to feel like something they own. And if the tech industry cannot hear that, no data center, no matter how powerful, will ever be welcome.