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The other day, at my day job — More Perfect Union, I posted a video that got 10 million views or so across the five websites that now make up the internet. It begins with a man at a hearing in what looks like a school gym. He’s shouting at the members of his county council, saying the information they’re giving him and the rest of the assembled crowd is all false. If they’re telling the truth, he says, why won’t they let the people gathered there speak, why won’t they let people respond? As he winds down, and returns to his seat, the crowd begins to chant “SHAME, SHAME, SHAME!!” at the members of the county commission.
This whole scene took place at a data center hearing. If you’re online you’ve probably seen one of the hundreds of similar videos that seem to be uploaded just about every day now. The particular one I posted happened to take place at what might be the current biggest flashpoint in the data center rebellion — Box Elder County Utah. What’s planned for that particular county is the biggest data center campus on Earth, spanning 40,000 acres. It would be about 2.5 times the size of Manhattan if it gets built, and the man behind it is the uniquely unappealing Kevin O’Leary, Canadian multimillionaire of Shark Tank fame.
The numbers are staggering. The US already has by far the most data centers in the world at over 4,000, and another 1,500 are in the works. For comparison, China has fewer than 500 total data centers.While these hubs of storage and computing are the physical infrastructure that enable the internet, the massive surge in their use and construction is particularly tied to the AI boom. Using AI, particularly generative AI, takes vast amounts of computing capacity and power, hence Amazon and Meta and Google and OpenAI pledging to invest $1 trillion over the next several years to build more and more data centers.
These projects have to go somewhere, according to the tech oligarchs. One of the most common AI refrains has become that it’s inevitable, and the leaders of Big Tech who have tied their personal futures and the futures of the biggest companies on Earth to the AI boom do in fact have to act as if it is inevitable. Otherwise they, their corporations, and the global economy will come crashing down.
But ordinary working people don’t seem to feel the same way about all this. In particular, most people don’t feel like putting AI data centers in their backyard is inevitable, quite the opposite in fact. According to a 2026 poll from Gallup, 71% of Americans at least somewhat oppose data centers being built in their area, including (48%) who strongly oppose them. What’s notable about this opposition isn’t just the mass nature of it; it’s also the speed at which this opposition has grown, and is growing.
Five years ago the US already had plenty of data centers. They were significantly smaller than the hyperscale AI data centers that are drawing the most opposition today, and they didn’t register as a political issue. And yet within little more than a year we’ve reached a fever pitch where hundreds of people regularly show up at town halls and county council meetings, even in sparsely populated areas, to loudly and unequivocally fight data center construction. The latest research from the Data Center Opposition Report shows that over 360,000 people across 37 states are in organized opposition to data centers, a staggering number.
People invested in AI or paid by Big Tech have of course, sought to dismiss this massive wave of organizing and public sentiment, a wave that, it should be noted, is still rising. Silicon Valley propagandists and others dismiss concerns about water usage, make dishonest claims about job creation, and call their many opponents Luddites. But the concerns of the masses are becoming irrefutable, and not just because of rising anger and popular sentiment.
Bloomberg, not exactly a bastion of anti-tech and anti-capitalist sentiment, recently ran a piece by John Ainger making brutally clear that data centers are contributing massively to rising energy costs. This is maybe the most direct hit to the lives of nearly every person in the country. Specifically, the biggest grid in the country, serving 13 East Coast and Midwest states and 67 million people, saw prices jump 76% over just the first three months of 2026. That’s not sustainable, and as Ainger makes clear, data centers are the leading contributor to that exponential rise.
Fortune, also a transparently pro-business outlet, just ran an even more shocking piece. A major Nevada energy supplier is diverting the electricity that’s used to power 50,000 homes in the Lake Tahoe area to data centers. The local utility is being forced to look for a new power supplier. The people in those 50,000 houses will most likely not lose power next year, but they’ll also likely be paying more after the electricity that currently powers their home gets diverted.
There is no amount of propaganda that can stand up to rising bills, something that both the Biden and Trump administration never quite seemed to absorb. The AI evangelists don’t seem to be getting wise to it either, instead relying on an ever-growing arsenal of lies to distract us from the reality we’re facing. Propaganda can’t make people forget that these projects create few long-term jobs, give Big Tech massive tax breaks, and transform beautiful landscapes into soulless boxes. It can’t make people forget the threats of eminent domain being waved around to seize land for data center power lines.
It’s ultimately even bigger than any one of the concerns above, and even bigger than the cumulative issues raised by rising costs and environmental degradation and more. The issue of data centers raises such vitriolic opposition because it’s about the sort of life we want to live, the direction we want society to move in, the world we want to inhabit. The massive, hyperscale data centers, like Kevin O’Leary’s proposed 40,000 acre project in Utah, make clear that we’re being asked to sacrifice both this planet and our agency for the dystopian vision of a handful of oligarchs.
What the Sam Altmans and Elon Musk and Jeff Bezoses are demanding from us is bigger than data centers. They want to be masters of the universe, free to shape and control society with the rest of us relegated to expendable serfs. Bezos made this as clear as possible when he announced his intentions to replace more than half a million jobs at Amazon with AI robots. If he’s successful in that mission, that business plan will surely be replicated across other companies and industries. The tech oligarchs haven’t been shy about this — their industry has already seen tens of thousands of layoffs this year as Meta and Google and more replace computer scientists with AI as much as they possibly can. To the billionaires we are more than just expendable, we are costs. Costs they want to reduce.
Data centers are an important piece of the puzzle for this AI-first, human-second world that oligarchs want to create. They are the physical infrastructure that holds AI, that enables this new technology. These massive structures are also the most visible, disruptive, directly addressable manifestations of the system and worldview that so many people, with a wide range of political views, have come to detest. No matter where people are coming from, this vision of a world premised on endless wealth and power for a select few, while the rest of us are left behind has become increasingly repulsive, and increasingly obvious among the elite.
In some places, people are winning. There are now 70+ data center moratoriums across the county. These behemoths have become hubs of resistance, activating people in disparate locations, both those who were previously apolitical and long-time organizers. In bringing together the problems of oligarchy, political corruption, and environmental degradation in one structure, data centers have managed to create the sort of cross-current political mobilizations that have seemed nearly impossible in the U.S. over the past decade. And, by all indicators, the resistance to these projects is just beginning.
It’s up to us to ensure that the wave of organizing we’re seeing is just a start. Not only must the fight against data centers grow in numbers and power, it must also grow in scope. We can’t just stop these buildings from going up, we have to stop the people, corporations, and system behind them. The capitalists, the tech oligarchs, the dystopian vision of domination and expendability that the wealthiest and most powerful people on Earth are pursuing is an attack on all of us. Their AI hubs, to which many of them have hitched their fortunes, is a powerful and necessary place to begin. But we cannot end there. Data centers must just be the beginning of the end of the capitalist tech oligarchy that has proven itself to be the enemy of humanity, democracy, and the future.
Photo: Rachel McDevitt
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