A road trip through the data center debate
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Why are data centers becoming a new political flashpoint in the upcoming midterms?
I follow the news closely, but I'm not an election junkie. I know who's running. I keep an eye on the big and medium races, but I just Luck. There are people who enjoy elections the way they enjoy sports. And I don't enjoy elections. Actually, the way I also don't enjoy sports. Not for me. And because of that, sometimes I will notice that the midterms are approaching in a backwards way. They'll sneak up on me. I will just become aware, as an otherwise pretty active news and internet consumer, that the vast national jacuzzi that is our discourse has been getting hotter and more bubbly. Leftists and liberals howling into each other's respective voids at a shriller timbre. The sudden arrival of random new politicians dunking or being dunked on.
Haley Stevens, an unusual talker, here today, gone tomorrow. Abdul El Sayed, sounds like Obama, but says different things. This is my level of tracking. It's blurry. But what I noticed sharply is how all the political tension changes conversations I actually do care about. Она бин технологія і how it affects us. And technology is very much in the jahozy this year. Really, data centers. The internet infrastructure powering the AI boom, which we've covered on our show, they are now a part of this year's midterms, with politicians on both sides understanding there's a lot of popular sentiment, some of it quite negative, directed at all this. And voters might be looking at these buildings as the brakes they can slam on the AI push.
Reporter Jasmine Sun got curious about how voters and politicians in two swing states were thinking about data centers, what the backlash looks like, what's causing it, and where it all might be about to go. So she set out on a road trip through the American jacuzzi.
I spent about 10 days in Michigan and in Wisconsin driving around between cities, small towns, data center sites to just talk to a ton of people and figure out do people actually hate these data centers and if so, why?
Jasmine Sun is one of my favorite reporters covering the San Francisco tech scene, an anthropologist of a town where nearly everybody she knows is all in on AI. She spends a lot of her time writing about, talking to the people we normally hear from in the AI race, the people building that future. This summer, she wanted to talk to everybody else, the voters deciding what they think of all this, whether they actually want these supposed gifts they're being offered. Before you set out on this trip, how would you have explained data center opposition? Like what was your view?
I had two concurrent views, I suppose. I was definitely confused. I didn't really get it. I thought that, you know, Data centers have existed to power the internet for a very long time. Northern Virginia is full of them. And so I was like, maybe it's about AI, was what I thought. It might just be that people are scared of AI, that they hate AI, and their polarization of AI is just coming out as anger at data centers, which are sort of the physical proxy for hating AI in general, which is otherwise a quite difficult thing to shape or to fight. But I also definitely thought that a lot of people People were just misinformed about what data centers were and their environmental impacts and yeah, I wasn't really sure.
So you hit the road?
Yes.
What was the first sort of place in your road trip where you found one of your assumptions just being challenged, where you found yourself surprised?
So the first data center site or proposed data center site that we visited was Janesville, Wisconsin. I had heard of Janesville when I was actually doing research on AI and potential labor impacts because I had been interested in deindustrialization and what happens when a bunch of jobs disappear.
Once the economic cornerstone of Janesville, the giant GM plant in its heyday employing seven thousand people.
Even I was dispersed. And Janesville is most famous recently nationally because they had like a hundred-year-old GM plant that closed in two thousand and eight during the financial crisis, and this decimated the community.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why are data centers becoming a new political flashpoint in the upcoming midterms?
0:25–6:03
2
How did the Janesville, Wisconsin case illustrate the clash between abandoned industrial sites and new data‑center proposals?
6:03–10:16
3
What role do NDAs play in data‑center deals and why are activists demanding more transparency?
10:16–15:20
4
Why do residents across swing states show uniformly high opposition to data centers, even when they don’t live nearby?
15:20–20:05
5
How are skilled‑trade unions reacting to the data‑center boom and what benefits do they see?
20:05–25:51
6
What policy demands did Senator Abdul El Sayed put forward to regulate AI and data‑center development?
25:51–31:25
7
How could state‑level standards and moratoriums reshape data‑center negotiations and protect small communities?
31:25–37:55
8
What are the key takeaways from Jasmine Sun’s road trip about voter concerns, corporate power, and the future of AI infrastructure?
37:55–43:16