Bryce Gustafson has been knocking on doors in Indiana for more than a decade. The lead organizer with Citizens Action Coalition (CAC), a consumer and environmental organization, he usually encounters a mix of reactions when he’s out canvassing; whatever issue he’s talking about, there’s always at least a few people on the other side. But at a recent festival in the rural town of Monrovia, Indiana, he was struck by an unusual spirit of unity.
He was there about a proposed datacenter, a 550-acre (222-hectare) Google project in this small town of 1,600 people. And at least a half a dozen people came up to me to say, ‘Hey, I voted for Trump. What the heck’s he doing, supporting these things?’” Gustafson said he’s had similar conversations all across the state.
If there’s one thing he sees uniting Hoosiers of all stripes – from rural areas such as Morgan county to suburbs such as Franklin Township to the historically African American neighborhood of Martindale-Brightwood in Indianapolis – it’s fury over these water-guzzling, air-polluting behemoths and the tech oligarchs imposing them. These dynamics are playing out across the US. Over the last year, intensifying waves of local opposition to big tech’s datacenter buildout have surged into a nationwide tsunami of resistance.
Elites on both coasts, from leaders of the AI industry in Silicon Valley to leaders of the political establishment in Washington DC, have struggled to make sense of the backlash. First they tried to write it off as business-as-usual nimbyism: just a few local bans passed here and there, maybe some unknown city councilors losing re-election after signing datacenter deals – not such a big deal. Then senator Bernie Sanders and congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez began calling for a national moratorium.
Pretty soon Utah’s senate president got tossed out of office for supporting hyperscale proposals. And the movement continues to grow. Today, three-quarters of Americans oppose local datacenter development, a swing of more than 30 points in just a year.
More than 500 counties and municipalities have passed datacenter bans or moratoria, while dozens of proposed projects have been killed outright. And the issue has come to define some of the highest-profile political races in the country. In the battle for US Senate in Ohio, populist Democrat Sherrod Brown has made Republican senator Jon Husted’s support of datacenters the centerpiece of his campaign, prompting warnings from the National Republican senatorial committee that “datacenters are the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck”.
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