The left and right agree on one thing: no data centers

Today, I’m talking with Gaby Del Valle, a policy reporter here at The Verge , about the growing backlash against AI data centers.  Gaby recently reported a fantastic piece about Hernando County, Florida, where last month the county commission unanimously approved a yearlong moratorium on data center construction. She attended a protest there organized by a group called Humans First , a conservative grassroots movement focused on combating AI data center build-outs. Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here . Not a subscriber? You can sign up here . You’ll hear Gaby explain that it was part of a bigger, broader, and bipartisan opposition to data centers. Not only as physical buildings, but as infrastructure that powers an AI boom that takes local jobs and fills feeds with slop. Data center construction has become a proxy for the public’s feelings about AI: something physical they can aim their fear and frustration at — and even create enough pressure to stop through community organizing and protests. So I wanted Gaby to talk me through what these protests look like on the ground, from voters whose party affiliations have typically aligned them with big business. You’ll hear Gaby say data centers are scrambling party lines, turning diehard Trump voters into protesters who care about left-coded issues like groundwater contamination and forever chemicals.  It’s a confusing time, and data centers are going to play a major role in electoral politics going forward. So I suspect this won’t be the last we hear from Gaby on movements like Humans First. Okay: Verge policy reporter Gaby Del Valle on the bipartisan data center backlash. Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.  Gaby Del Valle, you’re a policy reporter here at The Verge . Welcome back to Decoder . Thank you. Happy to be here. I’m excited to talk to you. You were on previously with our friend Alex Heath, but this is the first time I’ve gotten to talk to you in Decoder . I think the story you just wrote about data centers and conservative backlash in Florida is just a real preview of what tech policy going into the midterm elections is going to be like. You were just there. You talked to a bunch of people who are protesting data centers. It is a real alignment scramble in terms of our politics. Tell us what you found. What I found was people are really, really, really, really mad. And the reasons why they’re mad are different depending on the community, but they’re also all the same, if that makes sense. They have localized concerns. They were telling me Florida’s really humid. It doesn’t make sense to build a data center that needs to be kept very cool and dry in such a humid place. A lot of them were concerned about their groundwater. They were concerned about PFAS getting dumped into the water. But I’ve also talked to people in Arizona who have the opposite concern. Arizona is not very humid. Arizona’s very dry. And they’re also like, “It doesn’t make sense to build a data center in the desert.” So whatever your community is, you’re like, “It doesn’t make sense to build a data center here because of X reason,” basically. The thing that really strikes me in reading your piece and hearing about the other reporting you’re doing for pieces to come is that data center build-outs and data center protests do not neatly map to the usual right-left culture war alignment that we have seen play out for so long. And I’m curious about your view on that. Why can’t Elon Musk just command his army of followers to be pro-data centers? This is so interesting to me. So this is a little bit of backstory that’s going to answer your question. The woman who organized Humans First, which was bipartisan and now is focusing only on organizing conservatives, was an early founder or organizer with the Tea Party way back when. And this has a similar vibe to me. It’s not a left-right thing. It’s a populous technocrat divide. You’re seeing that on the right and the left. So for example, at the Abundance Conference last year, it was center-right to center-left-ish. And everybody was pro-nuclear, pro-AI. And we were hearing that, “These things are here to stay. We have to figure out how to do it smartly.” At the same time, the populist left and the populist right are both skeptical of tech development, to put it lightly. That skepticism plays out across a number of dimensions. I couldn’t help but be struck as I read your story by how many strains of conspiracy thinking there are about data centers. I’m curious if they’re just visible. They’re so big, and they require so much development and so much build-out that you can just glue any concerns you have onto them. “This big thing is happening, and I don’t feel any control. And I’m also worried about 5G, Chinese government interference, and X, Y, Z. And I can just point it all at this very big thing by which there’s a process to say no. I can go to my local town board meeting and literally say no.” I mean, I think that’s part of it. It’s interesting because I think there’s a spectrum of conspiratorial thinking to, I guess, misinformed thinking on the water use question. We now know that they don’t use as much water as we previously thought , et cetera, et cetera. But on the far end of the spectrum, one of the people I talked to told me that cattle born near data centers are all stillborn. I tried to track that down. I was like, “Where did this come from?” And it was one farmer in Texas who claims he had one stillborn calf on his cattle farm. So that got spun out via the internet rumor, social media mill. I think that’s part of it. There’s this issue of social collapse that comes out once you talk to people a little bit. One of the women I talked to said, “I had this friend. ChatGPT told her she couldn’t be friends with me anymore.” You have all of these stories of people harming themselves, going off their medication, or whatever because they’ve been talking to a chatbot and it goes awry. I think this gives people a feeling of control. Where I can go to my community board meeting or my council members’ meeting, and I can say, “I don’t want this big building that houses the scary thing that is fracturing my community here.” So it’s not just the actual building. I think it’s a broader backlash to generative AI and to LLMs specifically. One of my ideas that I’ve been pushing on lately is that the AI products are not winning over hearts and minds in the market. So if the data centers just said Netflix on them, maybe people would like them more. But instead, that’s where the slop is coming from, and it’s why the jobs are going to go away. It’s also where Mark Zuckerberg is just going to get even wealthier. Is there a dynamic of that — that people just don’t like the thing that the data centers make? Yes, absolutely. They don’t like a lot of the things that the data centers make. It’s not just AI. I think AI is a big part of it, but this is a little preview of a different story I’m working on… In Tucson, there’s a data center project that’s getting built out. The people I talked to there said, “Yeah, this might be an Amazon Web Services facility, and Amazon works with ICE.” So this technology is fueling mass deportations through, not directly, but creating the non-sexy infrastructure that surveillance is built on. There are two things to it. Part of it is a NIMBY, “I don’t want this thing in my backyard, literally. I don’t want my town to get polluted. I don’t w