The left and right agree on one thing: no data centers

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1:57Nilay Patel:Hello, and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking with Gabby Delvaye, a policy reporter here at The Verge, about the growing backlash against AI data centers. Gabby recently published a fantastic piece for us about Hernando County, Florida. Gabby attended a protest there organized by a group called Humans First, a conservative grassroots movement focused on combating AI data center build-outs. You'll hear Gabby explain that the protest was part of a bigger, broader, and bipartisan opposition to data centers.

2:28Nilay Patel:Not only the physical buildings, but also the infrastructure that powers an AI boom, taking local jobs, and filling our feeds with slop. So 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. I wanted Gabby 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 Gabby say data centers are scrambling party lines, turning diehard Trump voters into protesters who care about traditionally left-coded issues like groundwater contamination and forever chemicals.

3:05Nilay Patel:It's a time of great political realignment. And my prediction is that data centers and the politics of AI will play a major role in the midterm elections coming later this year. So I suspect this won't be the last time we hear from Gabby on movements like Humans First. Okay, Verge reporter Gabby DeValle on the bipartisan data center backlash. Here we go.

3:35Nilay Patel:Gabby DeValle, your policy reporter here at The Verge. Welcome back to Decoder. Thank you. Happy to be here. 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. And 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.

4:08What I found was people are really, really, really, really mad. And the reasons why they're mad kind of are different depending on the community, but they're also all kind of the same. They have like localized concerns. Like they were telling me, you know, like Florida is 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.

4:43Arizona is very dry. And they're also like, it doesn't make sense to build a data center in the desert. So like, whatever your community is, you're like, it doesn't make sense to build a data center here because of X reason.

4:53Nilay Patel: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 for your view on that. Why can't Elon Musk just command his army of followers to be pro data centers? This is like a little bit of backstory that's going to answer your question. The woman who organized humans first, which was kind of bipartisan and now is focusing only on organizing conservatives, was an early, I don't know, a founder or like organizer, what the right word is, with the Tea Party.

5:34And this kind of has a similar vibe to me. It's not like a left-right thing. It's kind of like a populist technocrat divide. And you're seeing that on the right and the left. So like, for example, at the Abundance Conference last year, it was like center right to center left ish. And everybody was like pro nuclear, pro AI. And it was like, these things are here to stay. We have to figure out how to like do it smartly. Whereas like the populist left and the populist right are both skeptical of tech development, to put it lightly.

6:09Nilay Patel: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. And I'm curious if they're just visible, right? 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. And I'm worried about Chinese government interference. And I'm worried about X, Y, Z. And I can just point it all at this very big thing by which there's a process to say no.

6:46Nilay Patel:Right. I can go to my local town board meeting and literally say no. I mean, I think that's part of it. I think it's interesting because I think there's a spectrum of conspiratorial thinking to, I guess, misinformed thinking. Like on the water use question, we now know that they don't use as much water as we previously thought, etc., etc. 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. And 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.

7:25So like that got spun out like via, you know, the Internet rumor social media mill. um I think like that's part of it and I also think like there's this issue of like social collapse that I think like once you talk to people a little bit comes out like one of the women I talked to is like you know I have I had this friend who chat GPT told her she couldn't be friends with me anymore um you have all of these stories of like people um harming themselves or going off their medication or whatever because like they've been talking to like a chat bot and it goes awry. And I think like this gives people a feeling of control.

8:01They're like, I can go to my community board meeting or my council members meeting or whatever. And like, I can say like, I don't want this big building that houses the scary thing that is like fracturing my community here. So it's not just like the actual building. I think it's like a broader backlash to generative AI and to LLM specifically.

8:21Nilay Patel: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 that's where the jobs are going to go away into. And that's 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? 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. In Arizona, in Tucson, there's a data center project that's getting built out.

8:58And the people I talked to there were like, 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. Like there's two things to it. Like part of it is like a kind of like 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 thing is like, I do not like what this big building represents and what it has wrought on society.

9:41Nilay Patel:Does that cut across bipartisan lines or is that more culture war coded? It cuts across culture war lines in that people have different concerns about what LLMs do. So the woman I spoke to was talking about the fracturing of social bonds. On the construction front, she was like, we're a kind of rural-ish community. We don't want this big blight on our nice rolling hills. um so that's like kind of a right-coded thing and there was a lot of like um anti-development stuff that is kind of neither right nor left both sides i think are concerned about the job losses through because of ai um and both sides have kind of caught on to the fact that these facilities don't really like have a lot of long-term job prospects like you know there's like the big construction boom.

10:32There's like an HVAC situation. But like to actually maintain these facilities, it doesn't require that many people. And I think just people have caught on to that. Like the promises of like the AI boom will lead to jobs related to data centers is like not actually true.

10:48Nilay Patel: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? Like the The Kevin O 'Leary Data Center in Utah is a national story. Maybe it's just because he's a cartoon character. And then, you know, there's a project in Georgia where there might be a huge open AI 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.

11:20I think, like, that one pretty obviously made the national news because it's, like, kind of related to the president. I honestly think like 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 like the numbers, like 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 like huge. So then like that becomes kind of a proxy for all data center development. They're being planned everywhere. And I think what's so interesting is the backlash exists kind of everywhere, too.

11:54And I think local publications, like I relied a lot on, like, for example, the Tampa Bay Times to, like, figure out the background for this story. They're on top of it. They're going to, like, these meetings and watching people get yelled at and asked, did you sign an NDA? Yes or no?

12:10Nilay Patel:We need to pause here for a quick break. We'll be right back.

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15:16Nilay Patel:We're back with Verge reporter Gabby Devay, who reported on the ground from Florida's Hernando County about why local residents really do not like data centers. Do you think the local governments are being responsive, right? You've now gone to some of these protests. You've talked to people on the ground in various counties across the country. You know, 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. And 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.

15:49Nilay Patel: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's a lot of counties in Florida where they've passed moratoria. But in Tucson, the city government is responsive to what the people want and the county government isn't. And they're kind of at odds with each other. there are all these videos you know of like people yelling at their representatives about like NDAs again and then them being like we cannot say whether we signed an NDA yeah 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 like getting voted out I think is another big one in Florida the Republican primary for governor, I think, might be affected by this issue.

16:43The primary is in a few weeks, and the frontrunner, 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, proud Trump voter, was 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's opposed to everything Democrat is nonetheless, like she said, she would vote for a Democrat or an independent if Donald's won the primary. And Donald's has also kind of changed his, not his stance on data center development, but the way that he talks about it in response to a lot of this backlash.

17:25Nilay Patel:How has he changed the stance? How is he talking about it now? He previously said, he got a lot of flack for this from at least the people I talked to, that he wants Florida to be the financial capital of the world. And, you know, like, that to a lot of people would sound great, but these people are really upset by this. I mean, there's a lot of other things at play here. Like, housing costs in Florida have gone up, like, exponentially. Not only in big cities like Miami, but, like, in the suburbs of Tampa, for example. Like, housing prices have shot up to, like, levels that I, as somebody who grew up there, just, like, don't understand.

17:59Like, I literally can't wrap my head around it. So I think, like a lot of the backlash to development and to data centers is also like to people's cost of living going up and like to these like out like in their words outside developers coming in and like changing a community that's already changing um so he has since said that you know like we need data center development but we need to do it responsibly he is championing a bill that would prevent data centers from driving up utility costs now um and i mean ron de santis the current governor of Florida is another really good example of this. He supported a bill that would require data centers to pay their own utilities and also would let counties require them to use reclaimed water, which would address the water issue.

18:41But the Tampa Bay Times reported that he also supported legislation that gives massive tax breaks to data centers and also that he pushed to like amend that law, which I think was signed in 2017, recently pushed to have it changed to only apply to hyperscale data centers, which are the ones that people have problems with. Like 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's like around a hundred, you know, smaller ones for, you know, Netflix or whatever. And they're okay with that. One woman I talk to, she works in IT.

19:13She's like, I understand that like data centers is like a boogeyman, but like we need them for stuff. But I don't want this like massive facility using all of our power, emitting these frequencies, et cetera, et cetera.

19:25Nilay Patel:Wait, can you just explain what emitting these frequencies means? Just like the noise. I talk to these guys at the Border Security Expo who work for a data center company, and they all live in Virginia. And even they were like, yeah, it sucks. They were like, I hate walking around my neighborhood because I just hear it all the time. And they work in data centers. Yeah. So, like, they don't want—yeah, I don't think she meant, like, 5G is going to whatever you— It's a real element of this right next to China being a villain of whatever persuasion you need China to be a villain of. So I was just very curious because, again, there's just a piece of all this where it's a big thing that you can stop.

20:07Right.

20:08Nilay Patel:The power of nimbyism can stop this. And 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 not only does it scrambled our culture war lines, it's scrambling politics, right? Byron Donald saying he wants Florida to be the financial capital of the world. One is very funny in that he has to contend with the existence of New York and London and Beijing and Amsterdam. Like, go down the line.

20:43Nilay Patel:There's a lot of places that can compete for that title when Miami might not be in the running. but doing it via building data centers is not the path to that result right it's just a bunch of economic development that might result in some short-term gains and it feels like people have clocked it and they've clocked that it's a thing you can stop and i'm curious if there's anything else you've spent a lot of time covering the right if there's anything else that scrambles the lines like that because in almost every other case you know let's build stuff let's let's tear down the White House and build a ballroom is fine, right?

21:20Nilay Patel:Like building things is better and it is coded in one side of the culture war. I mean, this is again, like so Florida specific, but it really surprised me how much of the politics around this were scrambled. Like one of the women was talking about this ballot initiative that's going to pass. It's going to like give more like tax exemptions to homeowners, which like, you know, I feel like kind of a standard Republican thing, lower taxes for homeowners, people would like that. And she was like, this is terrible. It's going to deprive county governments of funds that they would otherwise get from homeowners, which will then even entice the counties even further to have data centers come into our communities.