The left and right agree on one thing: no data centers
AI News Desk
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The Verge
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26 min read
Today, I’m talking with Gaby Del Valle, a policy reporter here at The Verge , about the growing backlash against AI 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.
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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 .
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 want this. I don’t want that. I don’t want to see it. I don’t want the noise pollution.” And then the other part is, “I do not like what this big building represents and what it has wrought on society.”
Does that cut across bipartisan lines? Or is that more culture war coded?
It’s both. It cuts across culture war lines in that people have different concerns about what LLMs do. So one woman I spoke to was talking about the fracturing of social bonds. On the construction front, she was like, “We’re a rural-ish community. We don’t want this big blight on our nice rolling hills.” So that’s a right-coded thing. And there was a lot of anti-development stuff that is neither right nor left.
On the left, I would say there’s similar culture war concerns, but it’s… I don’t know if this is necessarily a culture war concern, but fueling deportations. Both sides, I think, are concerned about the job losses because of AI. And both sides have caught on to the fact that these facilities don’t really have a lot of long-term job prospects. There’s the big construction boom. There’s an HVAC situation. But to actually maintain these facilities, it doesn’t require that many people.
I think people have caught onto that. The promises of the AI data job, or that the AI boom will lead to jobs related to data centers, are not actually true.
Yeah. At most, it’s a few hundred jobs for each of these facilities, at least in the data centers we have now. Why do you think some of the protests make national news? The Kevin O’Leary data center in Utah is a national story. Maybe it’s just because he’s a cartoon character.
And then there’s a new project in Georgia where there might be a huge OpenAI facility that seems to go under the radar. There are all of the projects in Florida that you are reporting on, but don’t seem to be explosive in the way that some of the other ones are.
Yeah, I think that’s a good question. There was one in Florida that was explosive, and it was just because it was near Mar-a-Lago . I think that one pretty obviously made the national news because it’s related to the president. I honestly think a cartoon character at the center of it is the deciding factor a lot of the time on whether it’ll become a national story or not. And then also the numbers. The Utah one, I don’t remember off the top of my head how big it’s supposed to be, but it’s supposed to be huge. So then that becomes a proxy for all data center development.
They’re being planned everywhere. And I think what’s so interesting is that the backlash exists everywhere too. I relied a lot on, for example, the Tampa Bay Times to figure out the background for this story. They’re on top of it. They’re going to these meetings and watching people get yelled at and asked, “Did you sign an NDA? Yes or no?”
Do you think the local governments are being responsive? You’ve now gone to some of these protests; you’ve talked to people on the ground in various counties across the country. The basic unit of democracy is supposed to be your local government because you know those people and you can yell at them in the grocery store and the town board meeting.
We’re seeing there’s a wall going up in some of these cases where the local governments are saying, “No, we have to do this development. This is the only economic development available.” And the people are saying, “No, we’re going to throw you out.” Do you think local governments on the whole are being responsive or not responsive at all?
I think it really depends. In Hernando County, they did pass a moratorium. There are a lot of counties in Florida where moratoriums have passed. But in Tucson, again, the city government is responsive to what the people want and the county government isn’t, and they’re at odds with each other. There are all these videos of people yelling at their representatives about NDAs again. And then them being like, “We cannot say whether we signed an NDA,” which is an answer, but whatever.
I think it really depends on a lot of things. How small the communities are, for one. How vulnerable the people in office feel to getting voted out, I think, is another big one. In Florida, the Republican primary for governor, I think, might be affected by this issue. The primary is in a few weeks and the front-runner, Byron Donalds, has taken a lot of money from the AI industry and data center development groups. And people are mad. People are really mad.
He was endorsed by Trump, and everyone I spoke to, as proud Trump voters, said things like, “I don’t understand why Trump would endorse him. I’m not going to vote for him.” One woman I talked to who told me she was opposed to everything Democrat said she would vote for a Democrat or an independent if Donalds won the primary. And Donalds has also changed… not his stance on data center development, but the way that he talks about it in response to a lot of this backlash.
How has he changed the stance? How is he talking about it now?
He says his vision is to make Florida the financial capital of the world. And to a lot of people, that would sound great, but these people are really upset by this, both because they… I mean, there are a lot of other things at play here. Housing costs in Florida have gone up exponentially. Not only in big cities like Miami, but in the suburbs of Tampa, for example. Housing prices have shot up to levels that I, as somebody who grew up there, just don’t understand. I literally can’t wrap my head around it.
So I think a lot of the backlash to development and to data centers is also related to people’s cost of living going up and to these, in their words, outside developers coming in and changing a community that’s already changing. He has since said that we need data center development, but we need to do it responsibly.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is another great example of this. He supported a bill that would require data centers to pay their own utilities and also let counties require them to use reclaimed water, which would address the water issue. But the Tampa Bay Times reported that he also supported legislation that gives massive tax breaks to data centers. And that he pushed to amend that law, which I think was signed in 2017, to only apply to hyperscale data centers, which are the ones that people have problems with.
The people I talk to, they know that there are currently data centers in Florida, and they’re smaller. There are no hyperscale data centers, but there are around one hundred smaller ones for Netflix or whatever. And they’re okay with that. One woman I talked to works in IT. She said, “I understand that data centers are a boogeyman, and we need them for stuff. But I don’t want this massive facility using all of our power, emitting these frequencies, et cetera, et cetera.” Another thing that I think is really interesting-
Wait, can you just explain what “emitting these frequencies” means?
[Laughs] Just the noise. I talked to these guys at the Border Security Expo who work for a data center company, and they all live in Virginia. Even they were like, “Yeah, it sucks.” They said, “I hate walking around my neighborhood because I just hear it all the time.” And they work in data centers. I don’t think she meant 5G.
It’s a real element of this, right next to China being a villain of whatever persuasion you need China to be a villain for. Again, there’s just a piece of all this where it’s a big thing that you can stop. The power of NIMBYism can stop this. Maybe we can’t stop everything else. We can’t stop Facebook from doing targeted advertising that feels like it’s listening to you. No one knows how to stop this. It’s bad. We don’t like it, but no one knows how to stop it.
“I can stop this building from being built” seems like it not only scrambles our culture war lines, but it’s scrambling politics, too. Byron Donalds saying he wants Florida to be the financial capital of the world. One, it’s very funny in that he has to contend with the existence of New York, London, Beijing, and Amsterdam. Go down the line.
There are a lot of places that can compete for that title where Miami might not be in the running. But doing it via building data centers is not the path to that result. It’s just a bunch of economic development that might result in some short-term gains.
It feels like people have clocked it, and they’ve clocked that it’s a thing you can stop. I’m curious if there’s anything else. You’ve spent a lot of time covering the right, and I wonder if there’s anything else that scrambles the lines like that. Because in almost every other case, “let’s build stuff, let’s tear down the White House and build a ballroom” is fine. Building things is better, and it is coded in one side of the culture war.
Yeah. I mean, this is, again, so Florida specific, but it really surprised me how much of the politics around this were scrambled. One of the women was talking about this ballot initiative that’s going to pass. It’s going to give more tax exemptions to homeowners, which I feel is a standard Republican thing — lower taxes for homeowners. People would like that.
She said, “This is terrible. It’s going to deprive county governments of funds that they would otherwise get from homeowners, which will then entice the counties even further to have data centers come into our communities.” So she was thinking of the second- and third-order effects of this, even though that’s a pretty populist initiative. But yeah, it’s all so scrambled.
How do you see the scramble inside of the right and then carrying over to the populist left? The idea that a bunch of billionaires threw all of their weight behind Donald Trump in 2024, and that led to, I don’t know, a bunch of podcast bros throwing their weight behind Donald Trump in 2024. There was a cultural wave of Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, and the All-In podcast about building and tech and the future. It feels like that has come to one kind of end.
I don’t think that that wave is driving the culture anymore because of the backlash to AI. We can all see the college students booing at graduation. If the backlash is there against the data centers, against AI taking the jobs, against billionaires in general, what does that turn into on the right? Because that was the animating force of the right for so long.
I think that is still an open question. I think the question is whether this backlash is strong enough to shake people’s other partisan concerns.
If you’ve got a Democrat candidate who is anti-data center development, but also not super gung-ho about deputizing all Florida police officers to do ICE arrests, where does that leave someone who supports Trump’s immigration policies but doesn’t want a data center in their neighborhood? I don’t know. I think that’s what the party is struggling with right now.
I mean, I think Trump is this perfect avatar for people because he somehow stands for anti-elite sentiment, but also for hard work and capitalism. He’s just this perfect blend of, I don’t even know how to describe it. He contains multitudes, I guess. And nobody else can contain multitudes like him. They don’t have the juice. They just don’t have it.
I think I can make the argument. I grew up in Wisconsin, which has many similar dynamics to maybe Florida, in that people in Wisconsin remember a time when there were big factories. In the town I grew up in, Racine, there used to be a Case factory that made tractors. There was a Chrysler factory in Kenosha that made Jeep Wranglers. This is a real thing that occurred, and all those things are gone.
So Trump would promise all of this huge economic development that basically looked like manufacturing. I think what his version of this, even with tariffs, was, “We will bring manufacturing back to all of these places. And that manufacturing will require a lot of hard work, but there will be dignity in that hard work.”
At the end of it, you’re going to get to point to a Modine air conditioner and be like, “I made that thing. My community made that thing.” I think that is very seductive. I mean, Trump spent years promising that we would build iPhones in America, and that’s Wisconsin and Foxconn and all this stuff .
Maybe none of those things were ever going to come true because that’s not how anything gets made anymore. And that’s not even the kind of work people actually want to do in America anymore. But you take all of that energy, and you’re like, “Actually, what we’re going to make is data centers.” And no one can see at the end of that, “I made a Jeep Wrangler.” They get to see that Elon Musk got richer; they just lost their jobs, their children feel like they have no future, and their feeds are full of slop.
And I feel like something gets disconnected in the multitudes where you can tell everyone, “Yeah, the best I can do for you is make you the world’s richest factory foreman.” So people are like, “That sounds awesome. That’s better than whatever nonsense I’m doing online.” But you can’t be like, “I’m going to make Sam Altman richer,” because that doesn’t mean anything to anyone. All of this construction doesn’t do anything for anyone.
I look at the backlash, and all I see is that a lot of people across the political spectrum have come to that realization. You can tear down our communities to build bridges and factories, and you can pollute the skies with smokestacks as long as we all get jobs. But if you’re going to do all that and all I get is more AI-generated movie posters on Amazon Prime whose price keeps going up every month, screw you. And I’m wondering if that connection is… That’s my guess. I’m wondering if you see any hints of that connection in your reporting as you talk to all these people.
I think so. I think the Florida version of making a Jeep Wrangler is like, there were orange groves and cattle ranches, and now there are not. I used to drive past an orange grove when I was a kid. That orange grove is gone. It’s a Publix now. There was an old cow field. Now that’s a mall.
On the one hand, that’s what people want. People want consumption, but they also, at least in Florida, liked thinking that they lived near an orange grove. Like, “Oh, maybe the guy’s using tons of pesticides. Maybe the orange grove is worse for your health than the data center.” I don’t know. I don’t have the stats on this. But you could see the tangible effects of what your economy was producing.
Now it’s just like, “There’s a building that none of us can go in. It makes a horrible noise. And I think it’s drinking all my water?” And then it’s also making your kids dumb and alienated, and making everybody lose their jobs. People don’t like that.
Again, these aren’t Luddites. The woman I talked to said, “I found out about the Humans First organizing [efforts] via Facebook. I know there’s an irony in that. I know there’s an irony in me working in IT and opposing this data center.” They’re not dumb. They understand that all of these things that we’ve built our lives around require something to power them. They just don’t want that something to be within driving distance of their house. They want it somewhere else.
And it’s unclear where that somewhere else should be apart from space.
That is a very different episode of Decoder . But that’s one answer the industry has: “These people, their stupid concerns are too annoying. We’ll just put the data centers in space,” and maybe they’ll solve that problem. Who knows?
The other answer is, “We’ll just horsepower over their concerns. This is too important. We’re going to do it anyway. And maybe we’ll just subsidize a bunch of education in some community. Maybe we’ll just pay a bunch of extra money. Maybe we’ll pay for everyone’s electricity.”
I don’t know if those have gotten any traction. Is there anything that the tech companies or the neoclouds could do in these communities to overcome the objections? Could they just pay for healthcare? Or is that just a non-starter?
I don’t know about paying for healthcare, but something that I didn’t include in the piece, because it was extremely dry and very technical, was that the small protest ended with about an hour and a half long presentation from a land use expert on how to write local zoning ordinances to prevent hyperscale data centers from being built. It was really specific stuff, like “You could have them on multiple small parcels of land.” It was really dry. “You could require them to use this amount of reclaimed water, et cetera, et cetera.”
I think what people want more than the data centers not being there is a degree of community input on how they’re built — if they’re going to be built. I think if they got that, they would maybe not be pacified, but they would at least not feel like there’s a big external force coming in and steamrolling their community, especially when they already feel like that in every other aspect of their life.
This is the thing that I’m most curious about. So much of our politics and our culture has been nationalized. Everything happens at the national level. The fact that the mayor of New York is a national political figure is at once very silly and also just the funniest thing that has happened in a long time.
Data centers are very local. They’re happening to people in their backyards, and a data center being built in Florida, Georgia, or Tucson has nothing to do with me in New York. It’s far away enough.
Maybe what you’re hearing from everybody is just, “Somewhere else, and as we get to somewhere else, I won’t care.” But it is very local. And then it is very in person. People are going to the meetings; they’re encountering one another. There have been stories of bridges across party lines from people who would never like each other normally because they both hate the data centers.
Is there an element of a return to actual local politics and actual community building here that could be catalyzed by opposition to data centers?
I really think so. Again, I’m talking to organizers in multiple states who are going to these community, town council, or county council meetings and yelling at their representatives. And sometimes it’s hundreds of people. I think this is maybe a weird analogy, but it reminds me of the local backlash to right-wing organizing and local education policy, which is where a lot of the anti-trans backlash started. You’d go into the school board, and you’d be like, “I don’t want this gender stuff being taught to my child. I don’t want my kids to know that slavery was bad.”
I’m not comparing them in terms of value judgment. I just think it’s at a level of local engagement that is at the same time a national issue. It’s these really, really, really localized policies that may end up driving, if not national policy change and national policy discussions, but at least national political vibes. Whoever wins the Democratic and Republican primaries and runs for president in 2028, what are they going to be saying about data centers? I don’t know, but I know it’s going to be informed by what happens this year and next year.
I’m actually very curious how Trump handles it. As you said, he contains multitudes. He’s very good at reading his own base. It feels like the Trump base is very much polarized around data centers. There are a lot of people who love Donald Trump but hate data centers. And then there’s his money, which loves the AI build-out and loves data centers. That is a fracture as deep as anything.
A lot of those folks will say, “AI just has a marketing problem. If only we could convince people of the benefits of this build-out and the super intelligence to come, they would be on board.”
The best marketer they could have for that would be Donald Trump. But he doesn’t seem to be willing to make those claims at the level that they might need. And certainly he is very attuned to his base hating AI. How do you think he’s going to play it? And how do you think the MAGA coalition will respond to it?
Okay, so do you remember when Trump was talking about H-1B visas? Or not even when he was talking about it, but just the whole swirl around what we’re going to do about these?
Trump said, “I think we should stamp an H-1B visa to every foreign student’s college graduation diploma.” And I thought, “What are you talking about? Your administration is charging $100,000 for these visas.” He kept saying things like, “These kids are really smart. We need them in America building chips.”
I think he’s just going to do it like that. The thing about Trump is that he can say literally whatever, and he can do literally whatever, and the people who like him will continue to like him. Sometimes they’ll be like, “Oh, well, I don’t like this particular policy of his. I don’t know why he endorsed this candidate,” but they’re still going to back the guy.
But enough to split the difference on this issue? In every other issue, he could polarize the electorate, and he would get there, but, “I’m going to put a data center in the backyard, and it’s going to make that noise.” Maybe not enough.
But the thing is that they don’t see it as coming from Trump. They’re thinking, “These companies are coming into our community.” And if you connect the dots, it’s like, “Who supports those companies? The president. Who is giving the president a lot of money? All these different companies.”
That’s not how people see it. They see it as these tech oligarchs who are just disconnected from politics and disconnected from anything because of all their money. They don’t see that as having a connection to the president. Instead, they see that as having a connection to the governor, to the board of commissioners, or whatever. But Trump is floating above it all. I don’t know why.
Well, I’m curious, and maybe we should end it here. The Florida gubernatorial primaries are coming up. If Donalds loses, even with that Trump endorsement over the data center issue, do you think that will be a signal or a predictor of what will happen in the midterms?
I think it would be a massive signal, if only because Donalds is polling so much further ahead than everybody else. He’s the clear frontrunner, and the lieutenant governor who’s polling second is also pro-data centers. If any of the anti-data center candidates win the Republican primary, that is going to be huge and completely unexpected by everybody in the state. But it could happen. Crazier things have happened.
We’re going to be doing a lot of coverage of this in the months to come, especially ahead of the midterms, because this scrambling of party lines, this scrambling of the culture war, seems very important. The politics we’ve had for so long, they don’t seem like they can hold up to everyone hating the same thing.
Maybe that’s all America needs. It does seem like every American hating these big buildings that make loud noises might be the thing that unifies us, which is good or bad. You can make your own decisions, but I can’t think of anything else. There’s nothing else that’s cutting across party lines this way. Can you?
Literally nothing. Nothing at all. And it’s cutting across party lines, I think, not just in that people hate it, but I had these deeply conservative women talking to me about local environmental and ecological issues. They were talking about pesticides and forever chemicals in their water, which you wouldn’t expect looking at Republican politics five to 10 years ago, that this is where we have ended up.
We’re still doing climate change hoaxes at the national level, and on the ground we’re talking about pesticides. There’s something there.
Gaby, we’re going to have to have you back as the story develops and certainly as we go into all these elections. Thank you so much for being at Decoder .
Yeah, thanks for having me. This was fun.
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