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You do not, let us be clear, have to hand it to Greg Abbott.
After years of promoting his state as a terrific location for the tech industry to site its data centers, the Texas governor recently did an about-face of sorts, announcing a pause on permitting of new data centers until state regulators can conduct an audit to determine how they will affect the state’s electric grid, water supply, and local communities.
Abbott is nothing if not a shrewd politician, and he’s not the only one who has changed his position on data centers — and the tech industry in general — in response to a growing public backlash.
While the tech backlash isn’t the single most important issue in the midterm elections — the economy and affordability are still at the top of the agenda — it’s not far behind. States are already restricting the ability of the industry to place its facilities, and municipalities are facing a growing revolt against the license plate reading network built by Flock, which has been linked to a variety of abuses.
This may seem jarring to the oligarchs in Silicon Valley. They are probably asking themselves: Why aren’t people more appreciative of the glorious future their benevolent tech overlords are creating? Why are politicians pandering to all these ill-mannered luddites? Is all this unpleasantness going to produce real limitations on the ability of the tech industry to do whatever it wants as it pulls us toward an inevitable AI utopia?
The truth is that the tech industry never understood politics, but now it’s getting an education. As it finds itself under siege, it has no one to blame but itself.
The backlash is growing
Abbott is just one of the politicians who has changed their tune on data centers as anger among the population has begun to boil over.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who had previously hailed the siting of data centers in his state, just issued a similar executive order holding back on permits and tax exemptions; he attacked “predatory developers” he said were steamrolling over local officials in the rush to build their facilities.
In Wisconsin, Republican Tom Tiffany calls his gubernatorial opponent David Crowley “data center David,” while Crowley counters that “Congressman Tiffany loves data centers.” In Ohio, Democrat Sherrod Brown has been hammering incumbent Republican Sen. Jon Husted relentlessly on the issue:
In a memo recently obtained by news organizations, the National Republican Senatorial Committee wrote to AI companies begging them to “fix how Ohioans see” data centers.
“More than any other thing in this race, data centers are the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck,” the committee wrote. “If he loses and data centers get the blame, politicians across the country will take notice — and they will not go near the next one.”
That future is already here. In races all over the country, candidates are bashing their opponents as insufficiently antagonistic toward data centers, effectively competing to see who can be the most anti-tech-industry candidate.
It isn’t just a few NIMBY activists driving this development; the politicians are responding to a genuine groundswell.
As polling from the climate news site Heatmap shows, opposition to data centers has absolutely exploded. Just one year ago, 43 percent of people said they’d support a data center being built near where they live, while 42 percent were opposed. Today, 75 percent say they’d oppose it against just 15 percent support. Opposition runs across all demographic and political groups: “Data centers are 43 points underwater with Republicans, 65 points underwater with independents, and 75 points underwater with Democrats.”
There is one politician, however, who continues to insist that data centers are terrific and every community should want one: Donald Trump.
A series of terrible mistakes
A hundred years from now, students of history will still be shown photos of Trump’s second inauguration, at which he was accompanied by a phalanx of Silicon Valley’s top leaders: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Tim Cook, and more.
In the ensuing months, Trump hosted dinners and press conferences at which those executives and others showered him with praise, and he in turn expressed his administration’s commitment to ensuring that nothing will stand in the way of the fastest possible development of artificial intelligence, unfettered by pesky regulation and government oversight.
For the executives, it was both a business decision and a matter of personal preference. Cozying up to the president would surely be good for the bottom line, and just as important, many of them had taken dramatic ideological turns in the previous few years. Silicon Valley may never have been the liberal place many believed it to be, but it was impossible to ignore the seemingly sincere transformations of figures like Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Marc Andreessen, who became not just more conservative but visible, vocal advocates for MAGA-inflected ideology.
For no one is that more true than Musk, who has become an increasingly toxic presence in politics and culture around the world.
Not only did Musk unleash vast destruction on the federal government with his DOGE catastrophe, he turned X into a sewer of hate and non-consensual porn, and has become by almost any measure the world’s most influential white supremacist. Much as Republicans need Musk’s money, his unpopularity is an ongoing drag on their political fortunes.
As for the rest of the tech elite, even if their rightward turn was an expression of their true selves (and in a tale as old as taxes themselves, these ultra-rich oligarchs believe that having to pay taxes is the most brutal oppression imaginable), in the long run it was a strategic mistake. Yes, the industry gained itself a powerful ally both at home and abroad, where the administration has tried to bully other countries out of tech regulation. But they also failed to realize that becoming so closely aligned with one party and one president posed a serious danger — especially if the public was bound to resist what they’re selling.
What is the tech industry giving us?
Data centers bring some particular problems, only some of which are solvable.
They use huge amounts of energy, which can tax the local grid and raise energy prices, so developers are trying to reduce resistance by promising that they will produce their own power (often with fossil fuels, which creates another set of problems). The vast amounts of water needed to cool the chips can likewise strain local systems. Then there’s the incessant, maddening hum many residents report that emanates from all the equipment.
All of which could create a simple NIMBY-type opposition, one that says the data centers are fine, so long as they’re placed far away from where I live. But the opposition to data centers runs deeper, because they have become a stand-in for broader anger at the tech companies and unease about the future.
Even before the eruption in data center construction of the last few years, disquiet about the tech industry and its billionaire leaders was already growing. This collection of weirdos was amassing wealth on a scale unprecedented in human history by tracking our movements, selling our data, and using all their smarts and skill to keep us and our kids addicted to apps that feed us an endless supply of rage-bait and set us at each other’s throats. At a minimum, a gap opened up between the industry’s rhetoric about the wonders of innovation and the sour, exploitative world they seemed determined to create.
Then came AI.
Many industry leaders seemed to believe that the way to promote the technology (and keep the investments coming) was to play up its dangers, that it could threaten all our livelihoods (Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that it could eliminate half of all white-collar jobs), or worse. The regular news releases in which companies like OpenAI announce that their systems did something terrifying and unexpected may serve the hype cycle, but they don’t exactly make people optimistic about the technology’s future.
That gets to the core of what people are feeling about AI: The industry keeps telling us how transformative the technology will be, but we haven’t gotten anything positive from it yet. It’s pillaging our cultural heritage, drowning us in slop, making things less human, turning students into generations of cheaters who can’t write a coherent paragraph on their own, and oh by the way, it might take your job. If a tech leader says “But one day it will cure cancer!”, the natural response is: You keep saying that, but it hasn’t happened.
As Garrett Graff puts it, “AI has arrived in American life and communities across the country as a giant turd mountain. No one wants it; it makes everything worse when it arrives; and it’s been pushed and backed and cheerled by the absolute worst people in modern American life.”
In the face of what seems like an impossibly powerful industry with almost infinite wealth and political power at its disposal, fighting a data center coming to your town is a way for people to reassert their efficacy, to not just say “No” but actually do something about it. And if you aren’t going to organize with your neighbors, or if there doesn’t happen to be a data center planned for your town, at the very least you can vote against the candidates that are in alliance with the tech industry.
This has put Republicans in an awkward position. Not only is their default stance that business should be unfettered, their party has become linked to the tech industry through Donald Trump. They know they won’t get the benefit of the doubt from voters when data centers become an issue. So one after another, they’re racing to match their Democratic counterparts and present themselves as firm opponents of data center proliferation. The Washington Post analyzed politicians’ social media posts and found that “in the past six months, Republicans’ public statements about data centers have turned sharply negative.”
Greg Abbott is a perfect case study: When he was on a glide path to reelection, data centers were just one of the many kinds of development he was happy to encourage in Texas. But he has seen the backlash building, and a recent Fox News poll showed him ahead of his Democratic challenger Gina Hinojosa by just one point. So now, Abbott is leading the charge to slow the data center boom.
Appearing last Sunday on ABC’s This Week, Abbott argued that the facilities were proliferating too quickly and with too little oversight (not that he could have done anything about that; he’s just the governor).
“They basically dug their own grave,” he said, “and that’s why they got the backlash they deserve.”
To repeat, you don’t have to hand it to Abbott. But he certainly knows which way the wind is blowing.
That’s it for today
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Science fiction, underneath the technology, modern special effects, and sometimes stories that at first glance seem unlikely, are platforms that provide insights into the human condition. Technology often is displayed counter to humanity. The movie “Terminator II” released in 1991 (35 years ago!), had this exchange between the roles played by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Edward Furlong:
The Terminator: In three years, Cyberdyne will become the largest supplier of military computer systems. All stealth bombers are upgraded with Cyberdyne computers, becoming fully unmanned. Afterwards, they fly with a perfect operational record. The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes online August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
Sarah Connor: Skynet fights back.
Movie irony: there is not a person in the trump administration that is self aware.
Which demographic (if any) is leading the way on opposing flock cameras and data centers?