During a meeting with tech leaders at the White House last week, President Donald Trump championed the rapid construction of artificial intelligence data centers across the U.S. as political common sense. “If I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big plant in, an AI plant or a data center, I would absolutely want it, because the jobs are enormous, and the money paid, the taxes paid are just enormous,” he said. “And if you don’t take it, you’re going to be left behind.”
About a year ago, Trump’s comment may have been uncontroversial. But today it’s a gaffe.
The president’s own party is in a panic about a growing national backlash against data centers and has been scrambling to create distance from them. A National Republican Senatorial Committee memo obtained by Axios warned that Democrats were being effective at negatively tying Sen. Jon Husted, R.-Ohio, to data centers, which had “become a sleeper issue for the entire election cycle.” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has paused construction on them in the face of pushback in his state. And in the Wisconsin governor’s race, the Republican candidate, Rep. Tom Tiffany, has tried to paint his Democratic opponent as too pro-data center.
There’s a growing sense that we have no control over an industry that is promising to reshape — and in some ways, devastate — our lives.
Yet there’s a good chance that the GOP’s about-face will be overshadowed by the president, who has exponentially more power to define the party’s reputation. He also has the ability to pressure and criticize other Republicans for diverging from his pro-data center preferences — for example, he called Abbott’s reversal “a mistake.” And when he’s doing photo ops with tech industry leaders who are enriching him as he sits in the Oval Office, he’s a walking symbol of the way Big Tech has allied with the GOP.
This in turn leaves a tremendous opportunity for Democrats to respond and win on the issue of data centers. And their best bet is to coalesce around moratoriums on building them.
Opposition to data centers is now a mainstream position. A Gallup poll conducted in March found that more than 70% of Americans opposed constructing data centers for AI in their area. A lot of that sentiment is deeply held: 48% said they are strongly opposed. Meanwhile just 7% of Americans strongly favor them.
A Fox News poll conducted in July also found 70% opposed to AI data centers being built near them. Notably, the survey showed that opposition spanned the political spectrum, with decisive majorities of Democrats and Republicans against building the AI infrastructure in their area.
Opposition to data centers is also an issue that concerns rural Americans in particular. A Politico poll conducted in July found that rural Americans are significantly more opposed to data center development than urban residents; while they oppose infrastructure projects across the board, they oppose data centers at higher rates than they oppose power plants, warehouses and airports. That’s partially why Abbott has been on the defensive in Texas.
It’s not hard to see why the opposition is so widespread. Data centers cause serious pollution, are noisy and suck up huge amounts of electricity. They’re springing up all over the country shielded by shady nondisclosure agreements and tax subsidies that never received a popular mandate. Moreover, data centers are the most concrete symbol of the astonishing growth of AI in our economy and in our lives, a phenomenon that’s making the public become increasingly distrustful and anxious about the technology. The rapid expansion has outpaced the ability of our government to regulate or even understand its nature and implications. There’s a growing sense that we have no control over an industry that is promising to reshape — and in some ways, devastate — our lives.
This has created fertile soil for what the tech writer Jasmine Sun has called “AI populism,” which she defines as “a worldview in which AI is viewed not only as a normal technology but as an elite political project to be resisted.” Who will come forward and demand that the public have a seat at the table?
Democratic politicians are split on how to respond, with some welcoming the rapid and often secretive construction in their states and municipalities, and others pushing for consumer protections from them or voluntary pledges from companies to limit their impact on the environment.
But the most promising camp is calling for moratoriums. Those pause construction for a period of time to give communities the chance to learn more about data centers and potentially devise regulations that will ensure the center has popular support and is actually beneficial to residents. At the federal level, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., have called for a moratorium that would pause development “until legislation is enacted that safeguards the public from the dangers of artificial intelligence.” Some of the concerns the bill lists include job displacement, environmental damage and energy costs.
This space isn’t monopolized by the left — some Republicans have called for different kinds of moratoriums and attempted to tap into AI populism. It would be a huge mistake by Democrats to allow Republicans to claim the mantle on this issue. While Republicans are stepping back from data center promotion out of expediency, progressives are in a position to make a normative case for moratoriums based on the idea that the economy should serve working people.
The good thing about moratoriums is that they are not grounded in an opposition to developing AI per se, nor are they entirely impractical about the need for technological development. What they do is ask for AI development to be subjected to the democratic process — and not imposed on the public and the world by purely profit-seeking businesses keen on eluding accountability.
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