GoKawiilis a senior reporter for Vox’s Future Perfect section. She covers housing, transportation, and cities, factory farming and animal rights, meta-science, the future of food and agriculture, and more.
On its surface, the national revolt against data centers seems simple: They are a nuisance, and people do not want them in their proverbial backyards. But I haven’t been able to let go of the idea that there must be something much deeper driving the backlash against them, and few other subjects have confounded me more than trying to figure out what to think about it.
These facilities — the massive suburban and exurban warehouses that power AI, along with much of what we do on the modern internet — spew noise, have been accused of guzzling electricity and water, and have a halo of general ugliness around them. And over the past year-and-a-half or so, many Americans have gone from barely knowing what a data center is to having fiercely held opinions about them. Seventy percent of Americans, according to a recent Gallup poll, now say they would oppose one being built in their area. The environment tops their list of concerns. They’re also disquieted by the idea of high-tech facilities buying up land from America’s farmers and ranchers. Anti-data center campaigns have swept communities across the country, producing dozens of local moratoria on their construction.
Inside this story Data centers have rapidly become a flashpoint in communities across the US, with many Americans opposing their construction over concerns about noise, water use, energy use, and other nuisances.
But the backlash is probably about much more than data centers themselves — they’ve become a proxy for the public’s dread of AI and an uncertain future.
Instead of fighting data centers one by one, the US needs a broader debate and policy agenda on how AI should be regulated and how to ensure it expands rather than diminishes human agency.
These objections sound public-spirited enough. But as Vox’s Eric Levitz and many others have written, many of the rationales for stopping the buildout of data centers, particularly the environmental case against them, have been overstated (more on that in a moment).
Yet grassroots anti-data center activists are hardly wrong to be worried about artificial intelligence — it is one of the most formidable policy problems we face today. AI’s ultra-wealthy makers promise a world of unprecedented progress and prosperity, but also say they might eliminate everyone’s job and possibly annihilate humanity in the process.
If you are terrified that AI is ushering in a future that will be miserable to live in, I fully share in that feeling (and would personally prefer to go back to a world before ChatGPT). And I think this sentiment, rather than any ecological anxiety, explains much of why Americans are suddenly fighting to ban the physical infrastructure on which AI and tech more generally depends, why they’re so pessimistic about AI in general, and why college seniors graduating this spring have been booing the mere mention of AI off the commencement stage.
But it’s a problem that stopping a data center locally feels like the only policy lever that an ordinary person can pull right now to try to slow down AI, because it’s a blunt instrument that can’t give us the outcomes we really want. Canceling data center projects town by town is unlikely to meaningfully slow AI adoption, and it certainly doesn’t regulate AI use or protect us from its worst possible outcomes.
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