The Fight Over Data Centers: When Technology Meets the Neighborhood

There’s a strange new anthem playing in the background of American life, a lo-fi rap track called “Data Center” by the self-described comedy rapper Hovey Benjamin. With deadpan irony, Benjamin sings about wanting a data center in his neighborhood so his rent might finally go down, about not minding the noise or the hearing damage, about his biggest fear being losing ChatGPT rather than losing clean water. The song, which has become one of Benjamin’s most streamed tracks on Spotify alongside decidedly unserious titles like “send bobs” and “Bruh,” captures something genuine about the American mood. What was once a niche technical concern has blossomed into a full-blown cultural moment, and the joke in Benjamin’s song lands precisely because so many Americans now share the underlying anxiety. The mania around data centers has become so widespread, so deeply woven into the public consciousness, that American law enforcement agencies have reportedly begun referring to anti-data center sentiment as “anti-tech violent extremist activity,” according to unpublished files seen by Wired. It’s a remarkable turn for infrastructure that most people couldn’t have located on a map just a few years ago.

The data center issue has taken on national dimensions because of what these facilities represent and demand. They consume enormous amounts of shared resources like water and electricity, yet the technology they support grows, learns, and thinks in ways that aren’t tied to any physical location. That technology is artificial intelligence, the most celebrated technological development of the century, and it requires a buildout so massive that data centers are now cropping up in places they have never been before. But what truly catapulted this issue into public visibility was the media attention it received, from the memes and comedy raps to the serious investigative long-form pieces published by nearly every major American outlet. The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine — all have run features about communities fighting back against these developments. Progressives’ media organization More Perfect Union has produced dozens of videos documenting the human toll, from families living with contaminated water in Mansfield, Georgia, who were impacted by Meta’s nearby facility, to footage of local town meetings where residents visibly rage at officials trying to push data centers through. The images have become inseparable from the story: murky drinking water held up to cameras, angry citizens shouting at zoning boards, and the sense that ordinary people are being sacrificed for Silicon Valley’s ambitions.

As the issue gained traction, politicians on both sides of the aisle rushed to claim it for themselves, fitting the opposition into their broader political projects. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced a bill calling for a nationwide moratorium on data center development, with Sanders describing AI as the most sweeping technological revolution in human history and insisting that Congress is far behind where it should be in understanding its impacts. Ocasio-Cortez went viral when she brandished two jars of murky water from the Morrises’ home in Mansfield, Georgia, during a hearing with an EPA official, and videos of her finding common ground with Republican voters affected by data centers spread quickly online, framing the issue as one of class and oligarchy that transcends party lines. Congressman Ro Khanna introduced a “Data Center Bill of Rights” that would prohibit data centers near homes and schools, mandate clean energy use, require impact reports, and limit tax perks. The issue even catalyzed an uneasy alliance between the progressive left and the Trumpist right. Josh Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri, wrote an op-ed declaring that families are watching construction trucks roll in and asking whether their electric bills will double and their wells will run dry, insisting that tech oligarchs cannot simply reign supreme while everyone else absorbs their externalities. “We are not raw material in the hands of Silicon Valley,” Hawley wrote. “We are citizens.” In Florida, Republican gubernatorial candidate James Fishback has vowed to ban data centers outright in all 67 counties, describing them as turning farmland into a dystopian wasteland. Even President Trump, who once promised to slash electricity prices by half, has advanced a non-binding Ratepayer Protection Pledge, with more than 200 utilities and developers signing on to fund the infrastructure their projects require.

The opposition can be understood by sorting the concerns into two categories. Some are concrete, grounded in physical things that can be touched or measured — the quality of water flowing from a tap, the number on an electricity bill, the state of the land itself. Others are abstract, rooted in anxieties about surveillance, control, and the future of human freedom. Often the two intertwine. Worries about water, for instance, draw on visual images of polluted taps and deep fears about resource scarcity to spawn theories about what tech companies are truly doing beneath the surface. On Instagram, a post with 143,000 likes asks why data centers need millions of gallons of fresh water every day, calling it a cover-up and a resource heist, claiming that data centers are tapping directly into clean drinking water supplies and routing it to underground bunkers. Commenters compare it to the 2008 James Bond film Quantum of Solace, in which a villain damns a country’s water supply to become its sole provider. Concerns about the environment, meanwhile, get wrapped up in a pastoral, analog nostalgia. Videos of beautiful American landscapes carry subtitles saying, “This is what nature looked like before we traded it for AI data centers.” Farmers like Ida Huddleston in Kentucky, who rejected a $26 million offer from a data center developer to buy his land, have gained national attention for their refusal to sell out, speaking of poisoning and disappearing land in a voice that seems to come from another era of American life.

Into this atmosphere stepped Polaroid, the analog camera company that has built its identity around accepting obsolescence and framing it as honesty. In June, the company paid for a billboard in Coney Island, New York City, featuring a Polaroid picture of two people jumping toward a body of water and the handwritten copy: “Go jump in some water before the data centers drink it all up.” The company’s Instagram post elaborated: “There’ll come a day when the things we took for granted can never be taken again. Obviously, we’re being a bit cheeky with our line here, but still. Go take a swim. Go take a stroll. Go embrace the beautiful, simple, wild, analog stuff.” The campaign tapped directly into the broader worries about surveillance and control that have come to define the era. In the vast 84,000-strong public Facebook group “Say NO to Data Centers,” members trade increasingly dark theories about what the centers are actually storing — personal data, they say, calling them surveillance centers, totalitarianism, even the Antichrist. One post describes a piecemeal plot to build a control grid for years, with data centers as the brain connecting everything into one operating octopus. “When they are finished, our freedom is gone,” it reads. At the most extreme end are theorists whose concerns have detached entirely from earthly matters, becoming eschatological. Jiang Xueqin, a high school teacher whose YouTube channel gained fame after he supposedly predicted President Trump’s attack on Iran, believes data centers exist to provide infrastructure for an AI hell-bent on killing everyone, with the Knights Templar pulling the strings behind the scenes. He draws connections between the Stargate data center project and a 1994 science fiction film, a discontinued CIA remote viewing program, and a New Yorker article quoting a former OpenAI executive who described building “portals from which we’re genuinely summoning aliens.” For Jiang, it’s not a science project but an occult one, designed to control human consciousness and bring demons into the world. These videos have amassed almost 2 million views combined, a testament to how resonant such theories have become.

These conspiracy theories flourish partly because data center companies have historically pursued disengaged public relations strategies, relying on their assumed invisibility, and because the planning process contains anti-democratic and technocratic elements that frustrate citizens. But they also reflect a broader, deeper loss of trust in tech companies, who find themselves painted in a dishonest and withholding light no matter what they say. Whether a concern is concrete or abstract doesn’t necessarily determine its relationship to the truth. A Rolling Stone investigation linked an AWS data center in Oregon to a water crisis that may have caused cancer and miscarriages through nitrate contamination of aquifers. And yet, heterodox takes exist: data center water use as a percentage of total national consumption remains negligible, muddy tap water in one Georgia town may not generalize to all builds, and data centers are not solely responsible for rising electricity prices. But nuance has been drowned out by the chorus of opposition. For the moment, popular consensus in the United States is firmly set against data centers, and just how powerful that consensus has become as a political force will be revealed when voters head to the polls for the midterm elections. What began as a local zoning dispute has become a national reckoning about who owns the future, who benefits from technological progress, and whether ordinary Americans will have any say in the transformation of their communities. The answer, for now, seems to be emerging from the grassroots, one angry town meeting, one jar of murky water, and one cheeky billboard at a time.