Why Americans Hate Data Centers

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One of the things I try to do with my coverage of artificial intelligence is write and record

sentences that everybody can agree with. This is surprisingly difficult to do. Sometimes it seems

almost impossible to do because if there's one thing I found about AI, it's that it's hard to get

a large group of people to agree on the simplest effects. Take something like the following claim.

AI is terrible at writing. You might agree. You probably agree. Much of the time I agree.

For many people I follow nothing is more obvious than the flat, lifeless, robot at a math conference

prose of AI. But according to a previous guest, Georgetown University neuroscientist Adam Green,

many experts in blind tests prefer AI writing to human writing. Even MFA judges in some blind studies

with degrees in creative writing prefer the prose written by computers to that written by people.

But despite the controversy that surrounds basically everything you can say about AI these days,

I want to list three humble facts. Fact number one, artificial intelligence has never been more

important to the economy. Text share of total US investment recently rose to an all-time high.

On August 3rd, the Wall Street Journal reported that quote,

the AI boom is transforming the American economy beyond recognition.

The economist Michael Pierce told the journal that AI is responsible now for one third of the

country's GDP growth. If AI blew up, the entire economy would feel it. Fact number two,

while AI has never been more important for the economy opposing artificial intelligence has

never been more popular. Negative attitudes toward AI are higher today than any previous period of

polling according to a variety of surveys. And fact number three is that those two facts are related.

If AI on popularity keeps rising, it will have a major effect on not just AI, but the entire economy.

Hundreds of groups around the country are coordinating now to block the construction of

data centers. New York and Texas have announced a data center moratorium.

So as I see it, AI is becoming utterly indispensable to GDP growth and market returns at the very

moment that it becomes the single most efficient applause line in American politics.

Those trends are on a collision course. The most striking thing about opposition to AI and

data centers is that the folks building artificial intelligence don't seem to understand that

opposition at all. Most of these people live in and around the Bay Area in California where practically

no data centers are being built, by the way. They don't have an on the ground view of the politics

of AI and data centers in the places where they're trying to break ground.

But today's guest does. Jasmine Sun is a writer who recently went on a reporting trip to the Midwest

to find out what's really behind the AI revolt. What are people actually saying? What are their

motivations? Why is opposition to AI becoming the biggest applause line in politics?

And what happens if the anti-AI forces succeed in stopping data center construction

entirely? I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain English.

Jasmine Sun. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Derek. Great to be here.

You recently went out to Michigan in Wisconsin to report on the opposition to data centers.

I want you to tell me a little bit about what motivated this reporting trip. People are trying to

build data centers all over the place. Why go to Michigan and Wisconsin specifically?

Yeah. So I had been seeing throughout the spring this sense of a data center backlash across the US

bubble up. I had been seeing first stories about the compute build-out, how big it is, how much money

these companies were investing into building data centers. And then simultaneously maps and news

articles showing how people were protesting data centers. How they were introducing local

moratoriums, Bernie and AOC at the national level talking about data center moratoriums. And I was

just really shocked, I think, and surprised at some of the intensity of the opposition and the

polling, for example, like in Michigan and Wisconsin, which are purple states, states where both

Republicans and Democrats are very competitive and also rarely agree on anything. You'll see something

like a 70-30 opposition to data centers, which is much more bipartisan and much more sort of

one-sided than solar farms or nuclear or almost any other issue related to development that you

can find. And so I was really curious about what is driving the data center backlash and what is

sort of building this and motivating this new political coalition that's forming against AI

data centers. And I felt that the only way I could actually learn what was going on was to go on

the ground to a bunch of places where data centers were being proposed where they were being fought,

where they were being built. So I ended up visiting four sites and talking to people, workers,

officials, activists in Michigan and Wisconsin. It was also a good time to be there because they both

have or had these like very interesting primaries going, democratic primaries going on, the Michigan

Senate race, which I've told you all. So I just won the Wisconsin governor's race where a DSA candidate

from Jessica Hong is pulling ahead. And AI and data centers have become an important part of both

races and the story of them. So I was also sort of hoping to understand whether these two states

and these local stories might end up being a bit of a bell weather for the politics of AI at a

national level. You live in San Francisco. You know the people who work on artificial intelligence.

You write about the people who work on artificial intelligence. What do people in the Bay Area think

that data center opposition is all about? And to what extent did you're on the ground reporting

validate or invalidate some of those assumptions?

In San Francisco, I would say that the default assumption or caricature of somebody who hates a

data center is that they're kind of a TikTok-brained idiot. They've watched too many short-form videos

and they've eaten up too many myths about these things, sucking up the oceans, about maybe they're

emitting radioactive waves or something like that. I think the fact that the water meme and the

sense that oh, AI data centers just use way too much water and the primary risk in harmed communities

is how much water they use, which I don't think the research proves out is the primary risk that

data centers pose. The fact that that however has become so mimetic and so prevalent on social media

has I think given a lot of Silicon Valley folks the impression that data center opponents are

just highly misinformed and they are just worried about the wrong things.

And maybe there's some sense that people's opposition to data centers is also about their

fear of AI, whether that's AI job loss or other ways of not wanting AI in their communities,

which I think has something to it. But honestly what I found when I was on the ground was that

the anti data center opposition was so much more about the way that residents lost trust in their

local officials, their local governments and the way that big corporations were coming in

and interacting with them. I actually almost never heard people talk about say open AI, the

customer that the data center was serving. I almost never heard a resident or an activist talk

about specific AI harms like job loss or deep fakes or whatever. What I much more often heard was

how could my mayor sign this NDA and keep this project secret from us? How could my city council

sell out to this gigantic corporation and bring in this huge development with unclear impacts

without any public input? I think Fury at both the lack of transparency, the sense that backroom

deals were being made and that these big sums of money were involved in that and sort of corrupting

people's small d democracy at home was much more the sense that I got when I was on the ground.

I want to recycle something that you said because I think it's so important when I'm on social

media on Twitter following the arguments among people who are building AI. I'll often see them

make this fact check. Well they'll say there's this popular claim about data centers using all of

this water but in fact data centers use much less water than is commonly assumed. But that fact

check is often assumed to do the job of proving that anti data center politics is based on a myth.

And what you're reporting I think does so well is it shows that the actual on the ground opposition to

data centers is so much more complicated than just a single factoid about water use. And we're

going to spend most of this interview I think unpacking the many many layers of local data center

opposition. Before we get to those layers you go to the Midwest you see these data centers up close.

Tell me what's inside a data center for those who don't know and what's outside a data center for

those who haven't seen it. Like what does its function and what does it look like?

Data centers are the most visible physical manifestations of the AI boom. They've existed for a while

like during the original internet boom you started to see smaller data centers used for

literally processing or housing data. But data centers today the primary thing that they do is they

train new AI models or they serve inference i.e. when you send a query or a question to chat

to be to your another chatbot that query has to go somewhere the model has to process it do a million

complex mathematical calculations and then send it back. So inside these gigantic buildings which

often span hundreds of acres live all of these chips and servers that process these queries and train

these models and they have all these interconnects between them that require incredible amounts of

compute and electricity to make sure that the speeds are fast that all of these chips are talking to

each other. There's a big gigantic fans inside. So the AC that requires the water and the cooling

systems comes from the fact that the chips run super hot and that tons of AC is required to keep

these things cool. And so when you drive past a data center it often takes even like a minute and a

half going at 70 miles per hour at freeway speed. These things are gigantic they're kind of like these

gigantic flat warehouses they're window lists they're often grayer beige they're very ugly

frankly they're often surrounded in a web of transmission lines that have been built to hook up

the data center to the grid. And I do think that there is a role that the aesthetic aesthetic

and pleasantness of a data center plays and the reason that people don't like it.

You're right that data center opposition is not just about any one thing it is you know I thought

of reading your piece is like I imagined a delta into which many rivers are flowing and that's

what data center opposition is like. And so I want to talk about at least four of those thematic

rivers. The first is anti AI sentiment. I mean before I read your article I would have thought

that anti data center politics is all about the fact that Americans writ large do not like AI. How

much of the opposition to data centers that you heard about was just exclusively rooted in negative

feelings toward artificial intelligence in the AI companies. Almost none of it. I think that some

people mentioned AI at some point in the conversation is sort of like the cherry on top of this is

and we're building all this for technology that I don't even like that much that I'm not even sure

is good for the world good for my kids good for my community. But for the most part the activists

who are showing up at city council meetings the other folks who are residents in the community who

were like why is the gigantic building here why is it being built they weren't focused on the

risks that AI posed. In fact we almost just never heard people even say the words chatchy-b-t

or open AI or inthropic in these hours long conversations. To be clear I don't want to make

it seem like people were excited about AI. I think the fact that they didn't like AI very much

made the trade off not seem worth it. People are more open to new development when they are at least

seeing some of the societal benefits that maybe a solar farm or a car plant might bring

and AI seems less useful than say either of those things to a lot of people. But with the exception

of some more maybe like ideologically motivated a state or national level activists who had gotten

involved. I would say that more most people are much more concerned with material impacts with

government process and transparency or with this sort of general distrust of corporations coming

into their communities rather than the specific technicals of AI and what was being built inside

these things. So if narrow antipathy toward AI played a surprisingly small role in anti-datacenter

politics. Some of them played a surprisingly large role is just broad distrust of companies

and of government. Let's start with distrust of corporations. Tell me a little bit about

mount pleasant experience with Foxconn and how this serves a little bit like a microcosm to help

us understand how these small towns relationship with corporations in the last few years

shapes their relationship with data centers going forward.

Yeah. So honestly this was one of the most fascinating things to me was that so much of the

antipathy towards data centers had been primed by very bad experiences that these folks had

getting screwed over by corporations often working hand in hand with their local officials

over the last couple decades. And so it's even hard for me to separate out like people don't

like corporations and people don't like government. The story I heard was much closer to an

oligarchy or a dark money in politics or a sort of people were getting bribed and sold out

type story where the idea was that my local officials are colluding with or having the

wool pulled over their eyes by big corporations to screw us over. So to go to mount pleasant,

this was one of the sites that I visited. Microsoft has built two hyper scale data centers,

the fair water sites in this town of mount pleasant. I think that was 26,000, 28,000 people in it.

So it's not super big. It's a little bit outside of Milwaukee. And mount pleasant is interesting

because the site that the data center now exists on used to be land that was industrially

zone for big fox complex in 2017. Right after Trump's first election, he was making these big

plans about bringing back high tech manufacturing to the American heartland. Yeah, all those jobs,

all those factories went to China, but I don't know Trump and gonna bring it back. And one of his

flagship plans was to bring in fox con the Taiwanese tech manufacturing giant into places like mount

pleasant was constant to build factories. Foxconn started a huge bidding process. Kind of a lot of

folks might remember Amazon HQ two where they started shopping around to a bunch of local communities

including mount pleasant. Hey, like we're thinking of building this factory here. We're going to

bring in 13,000 jobs, good paying jobs, making flat screen TVs. What kind of tax breaks are you

going to give us? What kind of subsidies are you going to give us? Also, make sure you sign all

these NDAs so you don't know what anyone else is giving. And so all these towns which are trying to

figure out how to rebuild industry after the decline of American manufacturing start getting

very anxious about like, oh shoot, like we need these jobs really bad. We need this tax investment

really bad. How like let's promise the world to these companies. The mount pleasant did promise

the world. They ended up taking out over a hundred million dollars in loans to build out infrastructure.

They set up a TIFF which is a sort of tax subsidy district that is for fox con to exist in. They

eminent domained a bunch of land that was very controversial. And after all of this that the small

town did in order to invite fox con in, they finally win the bid. And not only are local residents

furious at the fact that this was NDA and their city council was keeping mum for so many months and

being very shady about what was going to happen. They knew something big was going to happen but not

what. But then it turns out that the contract was in the deal was never as firm as it had originally

seen over the next couple of years. Fox con keeps pulling back their plans saying 13,000 jobs actually

maybe just let's start with 1000 jobs. Foss screen TVs let's start with like some smaller screens.

And basically the size of the investment that fox con ends up making is much much much smaller,

a tiny tiny fraction of what was originally promised. And so all this land had been cleared. All

these loans had been taken out to build out roads and grids and whatever for a economic project.

The literally never showed up. And a large lesson that people learned was not only

um Foxconn screwed us over by telling us they were going to do this and not but how come my local

officials, how come my mayor, my city council was so naive and so uneducated as to offer this

company, all of this from our community without a reassurance that they were actually going to show up.

And so so much of the frustration in Mount Pleasanton in Wisconsin, we heard this story from so

many people was not just about the corporations but also about the asymmetry and sort of the

lack of negotiating power that small towns had against corporations, which means that when

a data center developer shows up and they too are like, hey, we're going to make a $2 billion

investment in your small town. Why don't you set up a tax district for us? Please send this

NDA. Let's not talk about it. It sounds just like the Foxconn story all over again.

I'm sure many listeners hearing along just like I reading along sort of bumped at the idea

of NDAs, non disclosure agreements between corporations and local governments.

How does that work? Why are NDAs being used at all and how is that spooking people?

It's really strange. I mean, so these non disclosure agreements are, we're very common. I would

say that data center developers would have local government signed during the negotiations phase.

And you know, I think part of this is that AI companies are used to doing a lot of stuff under

NDA with their own employees with any partners they work with. They're pretty paranoid and it's

kind of a normal thing in Silicon Valley. But further, I think that there's also a reason

where NDAs allow, allow you to, for example, play communities against each other because no one

knows the terms of the deal. And like one thing that I heard from multiple local officials I talked

to was, you know, if we didn't offer them this tax break, maybe they were going to go to Shaboyak

and up the road. Maybe they were going to go to Caledonia over there. And so it creates this sort of

again, information asymmetry where because no one's able to talk, no one knows what the

terms of the deal are and this allows data center developers to extract more from local communities.

It also sort of keeps land prices stable, right? Because like as soon as people know that data

center developers have a lot of money, as soon as you know that it's a data center that's coming to

town, when they start buying out, say, farmland in the area, the prices are going to go way up.

And so the NDAs also a way for them to protect their side of the deal there. But again, NDAs

in government are really unusual like solar farms don't show up within an NDA in hand. And

one thing that I heard repeatedly from even the most pro-built pro-datacenter people who I talk to

was they all regret the NDAs. Every single person I talked to thought the NDAs were a terrible idea,

no government ever should have signed them. Because as soon as you do that, the whole thing looks

much shadier, much scarier than it is. One story that I heard from local officials like Caledonia

trustee, Holly MacMannis was signing the NDA and the existence of these NDAs meant that local

governments couldn't get ahead of social media. This was something I heard of a lot was that

because you can't actually really keep a secret in these places. As soon as a contractor knows,

as soon as some worker knows, as soon as one city counselor knows, rumors are going to spread.

People start to get the sense that, hey, who's that showing up at my farm and asking me to buy

the property for millions of dollars? And if your government has signed an NDA, people start asking

questions and you can't answer them. Not only do you look very shady as a local official,

but also rumors are going to start spreading and it's going to get distorted. The NDAs have been

a big mistake that a lot of folks regret. You even see now that same Microsoft has promised to stop

doing NDAs writ large with local governments. I've heard from other data center developers

that they are also considering pulling back on NDAs because it's really just made the backlash

situation much worse. You described very beautifully the way that the relationship between

citizens and government and big corporations plays into this narrative of power asymmetries.

There are powers that be that are trying to shove some deal down our throats and we don't want it

partially or in some cases because we just had this experience with a GM plant or a Fox

concland a few years ago and that didn't work out very well for the town. There's one other

element here that I want to make sure that we touch on which is that if local citizens are

absolutely sure that artificial intelligence is the next big thing is the next automobile.

And they might say, okay, yeah, put a data center here. This thing could live here for the next

century. But if there's any doubt that AI might be above all, then you're going to have more fears

that this data center construction project is going to be a stranded asset that not only doesn't

create jobs, but also blights the landscape for many years. Did you talk to people who were worried

about this stranded asset risk? Oh, absolutely. And this was also, I would say, a surprise from

for me coming from more of a San Francisco and Silicon Valley atmosphere is in San Francisco.

No one thinks that AI is a bubble. People are like, there's not enough compute. If there's any

problem, it's that like we have way too much demand for AI relative to how much compute

capacity we have to serve as requests. And so the idea of AI being a bubble is not even really

considered here. Whereas, you know, I go out and I talk to people whether again, like whether it's

activists, whether it's even workers working on the data centers, people don't really understand

the technology. They are not really seeing these tremendous transformative benefits in their own

lives. For a lot of folks, chat GBT is like an email writing widget or like it helps you make memes.

It's better Google. And so it's not exactly that it's useless, but that their experience

of the technology does not really fit these trillion dollar evaluations, right? And so people kind

of have this sense that something about the story economically is maybe not adding up. Maybe they're

not sure it's a bubble, but they don't know if it's a bubble. They're seeing news headlines that

it's a bubble. They're feeling like this thing is kind of useful, but it's not going to replace

the entire economy as these people say, if that's the case, if there's even a 20% risk that the AI

bubble pops, what's going to happen to us? Are we going to get left holding the bag? Was sort of

one of the phrases that I heard over and over, like in Wisconsin with these tax incentive districts,

sometimes yeah, these data centers are paying, you know, tens of millions of property taxes a year,

that's great, but oftentimes they don't hit the city general fund until 10 years in when sort of

all of the local improvements around the data center have already been completed. If you think that

you're not even going to get the property taxes until 10 years, 20 years in, and what if the

project ends up being smaller than expected? What if the AI company that is serving that data center

goes out of business because this is a really fierce race and who even knows who's going to win the race?

Then is that going to become a stranded asset? So many people wondered about this and again, we're

sort of in a, the deindustrialized Midwest where people are intimately familiar with what it looks like

for a factory to die and leave town when I was in Jane's Hill, Wisconsin. The exact site of the

data center is this brown field where there's a 100 year old GM factory that was sort of a corner

zone of the community for the entire time when they went bankrupt during the financial crisis.

They never finished the cleanup. There's 30 million dollars of hazardous waste and contamination

and forever chemicals in the land. It means there's just this 250 acre law in the middle of town

that is so contaminated that they have not been able to sell the land to any new commercial

development because nobody wants to clean it up. And so when you have these blighted areas,

when people see what happens when a company shows up and then leaves without cleaning it up and they see

this high risk, high tech industry coming in and making these promises again. It's going to take

four years to build the data center 10 years before the taxes hit. People really start to wonder,

are we even going to see any of that? So the first theme is anti-AI sediment, which you said probably

plays a smaller role than most people think. And the second theme is the fear of distrust of

big business and government working together in a way that's going to screw over local populations

in the long term. The third factor that I want to introduce here, the third theme, is media.

Data center opposition occurs on the ground. People are gathering in the physical world at

a political rally or an anti-data center rally. But a lot of it happens on local Facebook groups.

Yes. And those local Facebook groups are talking to each other and they're on Facebook,

which means that in the middle of chatting with someone from your local anti-data center Facebook

group, you're also seeing memes that tend to be national memes. And when we think about like what

are the national political memes of the moment, they are anti-Ola Garkey memes. They are memes about

asymmetries of power, politicians enriching themselves, billionaires becoming trillionaires while

the working class struggles with affordability. Can you talk a little bit about the way you think

media, even social media, might play a role in fomenting or thickening data center opposition?

Yeah. I've been working through and I'm still kind of working through what role I think media

plays, right? Because on one hand, because of the conversation we had at the beginning about these

AI water use things, like sort of causing Silicon Valley to not take the opposition seriously,

I worry about thinking, oh yeah, everybody's just reading fake news and that's why they

oppose this thing. It seems clear to me that it is not all fake news concerns. There are real

reasons to be worried about things like electricity rates going up in your area. At the same time,

it is so clear, as you said, that the internet is a huge part of this. So in Wisconsin, the

comedian Charlie Barons, who has I think like 1.6 million Instagram followers, he's like a very

successful Midwestern comedian. He started getting really into data center activism. He started

hosting events with organizers in communities across Wisconsin, speaking to the local news,

becoming one of the most vocal advocates. And so one thing that say the Mayor of Port Washington

was really frustrated by was he was like, you know, we would hold these council meetings and they're

flooded by outsiders, people who don't live in Port who have seen a viral Instagram video

from Charlie Barons talking about this. And that's why they're here, but this isn't even their

community. Another thing that was really interesting was hearing from the village about Pleasant,

where they mentioned that in part because of the Foxconn Fiasco, they did not send an NDA with

Microsoft for the data center. And they held, they said upwards of 60 public meetings, discussing

this project until it from when it was starting 2023 to date in 2026. And the vast majority of

these meetings went empty. Everyone was fine with the project. Again, all of the land and the

tax subsidies had already been cleared. It was only when, according to them, the data center backlash

went national when it became kind of a big political issue in the last six to 12 months. That was when

local started seeing that stuff on Facebook, on social media and saying, wait, should I actually be

worried about this thing? I wasn't worried about it before, but now that I'm connecting the

status center in my community to whether it's these big issues about AI, about the oligarchy, or

whether it's just reading stuff about the environmental impacts, that was when people really started

to get upset. And so what I saw in these communities was both in certain ways the data center

fights were hyper local. And yet they were being amplified by national narratives that were sort of

giving folks a way to connect their local grievances, like this thing is noisy and construction is

annoying, to a big narrative about, and in addition, maybe AI's a bubble, maybe AI's going to take

all of our jobs, maybe these companies are bad, why are they doing it in my backyard? And so you

have this like extremely interesting interplay going on. The fourth category I want to talk about

is environmental concerns. Like in national media, you have this raging debate between folks who claim,

like I said, that data centers are drinking the ocean versus those that say no data centers are

actually considerably more water efficient than say a golf course. To what extent do you see

the environmental concerns that seem quite loud at the national level actually moving people

at the local level? I think the environmental concerns are very powerful. I think that there

is something about the impacts of a data center being extremely tangible and material,

which is that you have this beautiful verdant landscape, you have these lakes and trails and

forests that you love so much. And now somebody is going to replace all that with this giant ugly

box, right? And so I think the environmental concerns is not even about like, oh yeah, it's global

warming or something, it's heating the planet, which it's much more like I have a vision of my

community as this like gorgeous rural place, we live by the Great Lakes, and is this thing going

to threaten some of that? And so I actually did hear environmental concerns as being almost more of

a local concern about quality of life and the landscape rather than this sort of like meta-narrative,

macro-narrative about global warming a lot of the time or sort of climate change at a very

big level. It's interesting because it's hard to make, know what to make of it because data centers

environmental impacts really vary project by project, right? So for a long time, there was a ton of

water that was required to build data centers because the water would evaporate for cooling and then

they would have to like keep piping in new water, whereas now most of the new data centers are closed

looped like AC, they recirculate the water so that it isn't actually using more than say like the

Gulf Course next door. There are environmental concerns that I think are pretty legitimate

concerned with the power that's required for these things. I mean, the Stargate Center in

Selene, Michigan will require 1.4 gigawatts of energy. This is I think like an additional 25%

on top of DT's normal load. That's going to require new power plants to be built out, right?

And there's a question of how much of that's going to be renewable, how much of that is going to

be natural gas. Some data centers are building out their own gas turbines like Colossus and Memphis.

And that is, that has very serious impacts air pollution-wise, emissions-wise on the community.

It really depends sort of project by project. And one area that I do think that say good policy

or regulation can play a role is in setting sort of the environmental standards for what kinds of

data centers are acceptable to build, to keep these two a minimum. Because I do think that something

that people are really concerned about. So we talked about AI, distrust of corporations and

government, the ability of media and social media to nationalize local crises so that maybe a

data center opponent in Texas can say, well, I heard what Foxconn did in Wisconsin. And this is

just what corporations do to local communities. And then you have this environmental piece.

Before I move on, is there is there something that I missed? Is there a major ingredient to

anti-data center politics that I missed before we talk about some of the ways that the AI

community can potentially react to this? Maybe I would add one small one, which is linked to some

of these other ones. But I would say affordability is a really big one, particularly in the context

of electricity costs. And so both I this was really clear in Michigan where the monopoly utility

providers like DT and consumers energy are both very expensive, very unreliable and spend a lot of

money on state legislative and governor's races. And so folks had been primed there by just DT

as raised my rates for out of the past five years. Sure, open AI saying they're going to cover any

rate hikes caused by the data center. But why would I believe them when I'm working with this

electricity provider that's literally made electricity more expensive and less reliable every year?

And then similarly, I was talking to Kathy Hockel, governor of New York about her own data center

listening tour she was doing in the state. And her team sent over some of the YouTube videos of

the listening sessions that they did with local officials with residents across New York.

And more than anything, people were worried about electricity prices because these things are

putting such immense strain on the grid and when affordability is sort of the name of the word of

the day in democratic circles, I do think that people's worries about electricity rates in particular

may be deserve almost like their own sort of category.

So let's say someone from the AI community jumps into this interview and says,

hello, can we talk about how data centers are actually good in some ways? Data centers create jobs

for electricians, for crane operators, for earth movers. They bring in tax revenue. Their

environmental impact is often overstated by an order of magnitude. You spoke to Terry McGowan

an operating engineer who offered this quote that I love your reaction to. When I was a young man,

noise was money Terry told us. Milwaukee just revered these huge, massive industrial factories

because this engine is paying our bills sending our kids to school feeding us, housing us.

A lot of those foundries had furnaces, the emissions that would come out, the slag that would come out,

the oil in the machine shops, it was all pollution. But now data centers are like public

enemy number one to many of these people and it's clean technology. So he's essentially saying,

look, I remember an age, you know, 30, 40 years ago, potentially, when big thing comes into town,

equals tax revenue, let's get the big thing into town because big thing in town equals we get

nicer schools. To what extent do you think the politics of data centers is so negative? In part

because like there is no positive coalition organized at the local level. It's like where are the

Facebook groups for earth movers? Yeah, internally. What do you make of this lacuna, this gap in a local

argument or in a local case for these data centers, despite the fact that certainly in the short

run, they clearly are job creators. Yeah, I mean, Terry was one of my favorite characters,

one of my favorite people I met because his perspective was it was surprising to me. It was unusual.

I knew that people working in the building trades would be relatively pro data center, but he was

thinking about data centers within the context of this broader economic history, right? And so

I also love that noise as money quote. I think that a lot of the stories that he told us

he were about the way that people's attitudes towards the economy and economic

growth and industry had really changed throughout his lifetime. Of course, there's the fact that

again, these are areas whose economies were built on heavy manufacturing. This stuff is very

polluting. Like that GM plant, the contamination that left in the ground from like all the fuel run

off and whatever, like a data center would not produce that level of contamination, right? And

people were not nearly a skeptical of it. Another thing that Terry was telling us was, you know,

these days people were really worried about buying out farmland for data centers. And he said,

when I was a kid, people hailed those farmers as brilliant businessmen for managing to sell their

family farms from multi millions of dollars. People would say, oh my god, you're so smart. And now,

people are saying, oh no, but the farmers, but those farmers are laughing all the way to the bank

is what he told me. And so he seemed kind of perplexed in general by the way that what had been

seen as a boon for communities, which is economic growth, i.e. jobs, i.e. tax revenue, i.e. everything

else was now perceived with suspicion in a way that when he was growing up, it was not. And so

I found that incredibly interesting. He also told me to your point about where's the, you know,

local pro data center faction that he had been trying to get some of his workers to speak up in

the city council meetings, right? Because the current thing that happens in most of the city council

meetings is the local officials say, yes, let's do this tax revenue. It's good. They're trying to

saying like this will prevent us from having to say raise property taxes on residents. That's a big

promise that's often made. The companies will give these sort of marketing slideshow that people

really hate about like, look, we're like so good for the environment and like, look at these like

beautiful like AI mockups of like what this thing is going to look like. And then you have like 100

community members who are worried about all of the things that we've talked about. And so Terry was

telling his workers, hey, you guys are like, you know, more sympathetic members of the community.

Why don't you guys like go to these city council meetings and talk about what this is doing for you

and your ability to provide for your kids or whatever. They're making like six figure salaries.

You're getting a hundred dollar cash per day. And it's an amazing job. And apparently people

are just too scared. They're like, I'm going to get death threats from my neighbors. Like, I don't

want to do that. I mean, I talked to this guy Adam Schultz also who's a commercial real estate

broker in Jamesville. I mean, his family's from Rock County. He's been there for a long time in

the community. And he was willing to speak up at city council in favor of the data center project,

mainly for tax revenue reasons. And the fact that he was like, I've tried to sell this lot. Like,

no one else is going to buy if it's not the data center. And he said he got flak with his from his

next door neighbor about this project. Right. Like these towns are small. And when 70% of people

are against the thing, you don't really want to be the one speaking up. And so because it has become

such a polarized issue, I've heard repeatedly from people in different communities that folks who are,

you know, relatively pro data center, whether because of jobs or taxes, have actually been scared

to speak up in public about these concerns. And I think it's because it's very hard to make a case

for something as abstract and in some way speculative as taxes that will arrive in 10 years or

jobs that are amazing now, but only for 500 people and the jobs also won't be here in 10 years.

I also think that and tell me if you disagree. There's something about what a data center is.

It's just different than a factory or a home. Yeah.

You know, sometimes the opposition to data centers is lumped under this concept of nimbism.

And you know, it's the co-author abundance. I'm certainly a nimb, rather than a nimb when it comes

to houses, but houses are houses for people. And data centers are basically houses for computer

chips. Yeah. For which people serve as assistance in helping the computer chips do their job,

which is help me answer a question that I've given to Claude. And so I do think that

while there is an economic history to tell here, that is very interesting. Of the growth machine

of America between let's say 1920 to 1950 and 1960, being replaced by an anti-growth machine

of more zoning laws and longer permitting and more aversion to building that has characterized

America in the last 50 years. I mean, this is what the beginning of our book was about.

There is also this material distinction between building a house, building a factory with people

operating the machines and building that which a community understands to be a buzzing house

for silicon that will not create the same kind of long-term employment benefits as, say,

a car factory. Is that a fair summary? Or do you think people that you spoke to might disagree

with aspects of that? I think you're right. I don't think it was something that folks talked about

explicitly, but I spent a lot of time trying to puzzle through this question of, is it just

nimbism? Is this different from opposition to say solar farms, which use very similar tactics,

you have, say, farmers and rural communities organizing on Facebook, packing city council, whatever.

When I thought about it, I do think that's the reason that data centers are so much more

unpopular than solar farms or car factories or even chip factories or things like that.

Is that it doesn't feel the outputs of a data center don't feel real, intangible, and useful to people.

It's not even that they're evil. It's just that they're useless, right? Everyone knows we need

housing and everyone knows we need energy and everyone knows we need cars. Maybe they don't

want it in their backyard. That's normal an bism. But there's a sense that somewhere in your state,

somewhere in your region, there should be a wind farm or there should be a power plant somewhere.

As for AI, people are like, I don't want to say why we need it at all. That was a sentiment that

we sometimes heard. No, that's a huge difference between, I'm a huge fan of housing. It just

doesn't belong there because of the care to the neighborhood. No, I'm against that data center,

but I'm also against all the data centers. Yes, which is why you have these like, they want more

work. That's a different argument. If you look at the polling, I was talking to say Charles

Franklin, who to Brunsmer, Ketlop holes, and he said that one of the most interesting results is

that a couple things. One is whether there's a data center proposal or site in your zip code has

nothing to do with your opposition to data centers. People are just as anti data center when it is

totally far away versus when it is in their community. That feels like not nimbism. It's not about

their backyard, right? And then the other thing that he mentioned was a poll of Wisconsinites where

it's like, okay, of the negative impacts of data centers, which ones are the most important to you?

Or like, what are you the most worried about? Number one was water use. Number two was, I don't

think we should build AI, right? Which is really interesting. It was just like, why are we even doing

this thing at all? And again, I'm not saying that people think that chat GPT is fake or evil.

They're just like, it's a widget. It's not that useful. The folks I know in San Francisco, maybe they

feel like they can do five times as much work as they as they used to because of cloud code. People

think that this is going to transform military advantage and cyber security. I don't think that

story is very clear to people in a lot of communities and a lot of jobs in America that the stuff

actually does something. And so when you don't think that these giant boxes are producing something

that is tangibly useful to your community or yourself, it is very hard to make the positive case.

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I want to talk a little bit about the national scene here. You spoke to Kathy Hocal,

Governor of New York, who is very interesting on this. Yeah. Is for AI,

uses AI, has bragged about using AI, has bragged about welcoming chip makers to the state.

But is also announced to more Torium on data center construction.

I think it's an interesting combination of policies. Texas, which many people think of as

synonymous with just build the damn thing, just to now and stay different kind of data center pause.

Opposition to data centers is rising in Virginia, which is the mecca of data center construction.

Builds more data centers than any state by far.

What happens if America just stops building data centers?

Yeah, I found some of these news pretty surprising. I do not think of Greg Abbott or Kathy Hocal as

anti-business, anti-growth politicians. Sure, like a DSA from Cheska Hange, she might be running

on a moratorium, but it's very surprising to me to see that policy pass in New York.

And so I think that there is something serious and something shifting about the backlash.

I'll first say, when I asked folks in the AI industry, are you worried that the public

backlash is going to halt or pause the AI build out? In general, I actually don't hear a lot of

concern. It's somewhat surprising to me, but people tend to say, yeah, I think that there is a lot

of local backlash and it's very annoying, but some states are going to welcome it just like fracking.

So it's just going to go somewhere else. Maybe the decodas will be really happy to have data centers.

Maybe, again, Texas has temporarily now paused things, but until very recently, we'll just put

all the data centers in Texas. We'll put in Louisiana. They love the data centers. They're throwing

out subsidies, right? And so there's the sense that eventually the data centers would just go to the

places that people want to put them. But I think that if we continue to see these pauses or

moratoriums in some of the biggest states, like in Texas or Virginia, introduce to something similar,

we're going to have to shift more of the build out overseas. That's already happening to be clear.

I think Australia is one place that folks are looking at to build data centers in some countries

in Europe are thinking, oh, maybe actually if we offered to build some data centers for the US,

we can manage a compute deal where we get access to frontier cybersecurity models in return for

building out AI infrastructure. Some of the things that people are more worried about is whether

the build out goes to places like the UAE because again, if these things are so critical to the supply

chain for American AI, you don't necessarily want to give that infrastructure supply chain chokepoint

to an authoritarian state, right? That's pretty worrying. And so some of the concerns with the data

center build out are if they're not going to, if we don't have enough land or we don't have enough states

or communities in the US that are okay with these things, we are going to go overseas, sure, Canada,

Australia, wherever at first, France, Germany, we'll see. Each of those countries is going to have

their own negotiations with their residents about whether they want data centers in their neighborhoods

and a lot of people are going to be pretty skeptical of that. But you don't want to keep going down

stack because the data center builder of last resort in the UAE is not something that is

advantageous to the US geopolitically from a national security perspective, right? And so

the other case that happens is maybe we just don't have enough compute, I would say.

The other thing that is already happening is that we have this macro trend of the closing of the AI

frontier. I think this is really underrated because for the most hurt people are using free

Chatchee BT, AI seems abundant. But actually right now we're already seeing that the very best

models, whether it's like Claude Mythos, for example, or even just like the more expensive Chatchee

BT plans that can do more work at higher complexity levels, they're being a pay world, like you got

to pay 200 bucks a month or whatever and we know how much money tech companies are spending on this,

or restricted for national security reasons and doled out to a handpick set of say 50 companies

and the US government that have been specially approved, right? And part of this is a safety decision,

it's people saying we don't want to give a model that can produce bio weapons to a bad actor or

to a terrorist, and that's fair. But part of the reason the frontier is closing is also costs.

It's that we don't have enough compute right now to serve all of the AI queries that everybody wants.

This is actually really scarce and in that world let's ration it out so that's really expensive

and only goes to a few people. So if the compute buildout doesn't continue, maybe that'll actually make

AI access much more unequal. It's going to be reserved to only those with the existing capital

and ability to pay or the relationship with AI companies to say, hey, like I'm like a big US company,

you can give it to me, but like screw up a screw, the start up, screw all the people around the world

who are not going to get access. So that's that you talked to someone from Anthropic, OpenAI,

Trump say, I team, and you say, look, these are the ingredients to the opposition data centers on

the ground. They think corporations lie, they think their governments are crooked, they look at

their recent history of companies coming in and promising 10,000 jobs and only creating 50.

And these folks say, what should we do? Like, what can we offer or what can we say that will change

material material reality on the ground in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin? Is there anything they can do?

What do you say? I've had some of these conversations because after I published the piece,

of course, people working on the buildout average show and they're like, I'm dealing with this

right now, like everyone hates us. Like, what do we do? Like, should we just make the bribes bigger?

Like, you know, like, do you just need to give people more money? One of the other ways they

call it the bribes. I know. I think that's exactly how they communicated to the theirs too.

Should we make the bribes bigger? And by the way, let's record this and send it to the local newspaper.

I'm sure it works super well. But yeah, I mean, honestly, the fact that people's attitude is even

can we make the bribes bigger tells you a lot about some of the misperceptions of what's really going

wrong, what's really going wrong with the data center backlash. But yeah, I mean, I think that

one thing is that there's just kind of this misunderstanding again of like why people don't like

these things and telling them actually it's like a few thousand gallons of water and not 100,000

gallons of water. It doesn't really persuade people to say trust their government or again,

saying like DTE is going to cover the rate hikes with OpenAI. It doesn't work if people have not

trusted DTE for the last 10 years or something like that. And so one is, I think that there is just

more understanding of what's actually going on. I'm not exactly sure what to do, but

some things that are interesting are I do think that I've become more sympathetic to the state level

moratoriums over this reporting. I think that if you ask me a month ago, what do I think about

data center moratoriums? I would say that doesn't seem like a very effective way to regulate the AI

industry. I think that there are more direct ways to do that. I think that we need to continue

the build out in some form. It seems like a very blunt, undirected tool. But when I talked to say

Cathy Hogan, one thing that I became convinced of was actually because so much of the problems with

these deals is about the asymmetry between these small towns, often like 3,000 people like part-time

mayors negotiating with these gigantic corporate actors. And there are armies of lawyers. One thing

that states can do is set sort of a floor for deals or streamline the standards and the terms

by which a data center developer can show up in a community. You can set at the state level

regulations like it's got to be closed loop cooling. You need to use x percentage union jobs. You

need to use x percent renewable energy. We're going to do rate payer protection at the state level.

And making sure that there is not this gigantic asymmetry between a small town

alderman and these big corporations who are trying to play communities against each other and

extract as much as possible. I think that actually moving up to the state or even potentially the

federal level, what does it look like to do a fair data center deal is going to be necessary.

So at the level of what are the terms for these things, I would say go to the state level and figure

out what the fairest mistransparent way to do this is that maximizes community benefits, etc.

But I do think that a lot of this is also just it's now bigger than just like an individual town

because of the sort of nationalization of the backlash because of the way that data centers have

become woven into much bigger stories about AI billionaires coming into your town, paying your

mayor off to shut up and not tell you what's going on, arranging a backdoor deal and then transforming

the little physical landscape of your community to serve some tech billionaires ego race or whatever.

Like that meme is big enough now that I don't know if it's ever going to be easy again.

I think there's a lot that data center developers can do to do more public engagement to do

better town halls to figure out what community benefits people actually want to explain sort of the

job story, the tax story, whatever to stop with NDAs and all of this. But fundamentally, I think

that the data center backlash now that has become an avatar for people's broader frustrations with

the economy, with tech billionaires, with oligarchy, it's going to be a lot harder to stop.

So Jasmine, last few questions I want to turn the table a little bit. I think if your work is

fitting into this genre of cultural translation, you translate America for people who live in the

Bay Area and build AI, but you also translate or interpret the culture of the people who are building

AI for readers in the rest of America. And I wonder what are the one or two ways that you think Americans

would be most surprised by the philosophy of or the personality of the people who are building

this technology? I'll say two things. The first one is that I think that many people building AI

from the researchers, the executives, the CEOs of these labs are in fact deeply unsure about whether

the thing they are building is going to be good for the world. I think that their concerns about

cyber attack risks, about job loss, about even concentration of power and capital and their

own companies. I don't think that these are a marketing hype. I think that these folks genuinely

believe them. They're worried about them and they feel caught in a race, a capitalistic race,

geopolitical race with China that feels bigger than themselves and that they have no idea how to

stop. They're all racing forward because there's this sense that somebody is going to build super

intelligence. Maybe I can build it the least bad way and also get rich, but I can't stop it. And so

when they say things like we wish the government would regulate us more, I actually think that's true.

I think that a lot of folks are scared by the lack of agency they feel and being able to stop

their own creation. And so things like this slowdown letter that has been signed by all these

executives and at these big companies saying we need to figure out a way that if we wanted we could

pause the development of AI, I think we should take those desires pretty seriously. And then of

course it's the government and policymakers jobs to actually figure out the regulation. And that's

going to be its own battle. But the extent to which people in the AI industry often feel very

conflicted about their own project, I think is worth taking seriously. The second thing that is

important to understand about AI that follows from that is the number one question I get from

folks outside SF outside AI is if they feel that way, why are they building that? If I was worried

that the thing I was building had a 10% risk of blowing up the world or taking everybody's job,

I just wouldn't do it. That feels like way too high risk for me. And there I think there's

something more important to understand about Silicon Valley's attitude towards risk, which is

really unusual. It's a community that prides itself on being risk takers, on I'm going to invest

in 10 startups and it's okay if nine of them fail. It's okay if I bankrupt myself on the way to

trying to achieve glory and immortality and whatever else. It's okay if I inject these Chinese

peptides that might be full of substances I don't understand but might also make me Tanner and

Hatter and healthier. And this is a community where people are willing to take these high expected

value bets where there's a famous quote from Sam Bankman-Freeze on a Tyler Cullen podcast where he

says, if there's a 51-49 coin flip, 51% odds I could double the amount of human welfare in the

universe, 49% odds everyone dies. Sam Bankman-Freeze says he would flip the coin. I think that's

insane. I think that's ridiculous. And at the same time, while that example is very unsympathetic,

I think that for a lot of folks building super intelligence, maybe it's not a 51-49 set of odds,

but it's something like 90-10 and they are still willing to flip the coin in that world, right?

And so the way that folks attitude towards risk and towards I am willing to take the gamble at

immortality and superabundance and AI that loves us and benefits us all is something that I think

is very different from the type of gamble that a lot of folks elsewhere in communities being

materially impacted by AI are willing to make. I'm so glad that we ended there because you sparked

something that I had never really thought about before. We've used this term power asymmetry again

and again in this show. I think appropriately because of the power asymmetry that people in Wisconsin

and Michigan feel about these large companies, trillion dollar valuations, billion dollar CEOs,

making deals with cutting bribes with their democratically elected leaders in order to put this

enormous disgusting, ugly building situated in what is otherwise an Eden. There's a power asymmetry

there, but what you're describing is suddenly different, but also really important. It's not a

power asymmetry. It's a risk asymmetry, right? You're talking about a Silicon Valley culture that

prides itself on risk that says, you know what? Quadruple leverage yourself on Korean stocks and

wipe out your entire fund. It's okay. You'll raise money again next week. Invest in 10 companies,

fail in all of them. That's fine. Spend your entire life building a technology that has a double

digit percent chance of wiping out the human race. Well, there's a 90 percent chance we get to

super abundant. So go ahead and do it. You have this extraordinary appetite for risk, which is

attached to money in Silicon Valley. And you juxtapose that with what I'm thinking back across our

conversation as a very different attitude toward risk among these people who live where data centers

are being situated, they're thinking, if there's a 30 percent chance that this is another Foxconn

situation, then hell no. If there's a 20 percent chance that this data center or AI breaks down the

same way that the GM factory and America's auto industry broke down, then hell no. If there's even

a small chance that they might be lying about some of these numbers, then hell no. That if there's

any risk, then the answer is no. And that's a real interesting juxtapose. It speaks to,

I want you to have the less word here, but I'm just thinking it's just, it's just really

interesting because it speaks to not only this economic imbalance between American Silicon Valley,

but also this like characterological or psychological gap between the people building this technology and

the people living around the data centers, they're plotting across the country. Jasmine, last word here,

please. Yeah, I just want to emphasize that I both think that there is this deep values and

dispositional difference that comes with building your career in a high risk industry like startups and

VC and AI. And I think that a lot of Americans correctly understand that when you are playing these

high risk games, who gets left holding the bag is not an equal endeavor. The distribution of risk

is not an equal endeavor. Leopold Oshenbrunner can blow up his fund and he will be able to raise

billions of dollars again. Whether when that GM plant goes away and 70,000 workers are laid off

overnight and they can't retrain and they can't move, that is a very different distribution of risk.

And I think that a lot of folks kind of correctly suspect that if this is a bubble, if the AI

thing does blow up, these AI people are going to be fine. They've got enough money over there.

They've got the next tech project to work on. But the people in these small towns with a giant

data center in the community that the tax base has become dependent on now, they are not going

to be able to recover as easily from that. Fantastic point. Jasmine Sun, thank you so much.

Thanks so much for having me.

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