Why People Hate Data Centers

By Abe Greenwald

It’s hard to know for sure if the growing concerns about data-center construction are reasonable, hysterical, or merely impressionistic. Perhaps some fears are more sensible than others, but I’ve yet to be convinced by any of them. And we don’t know to what extent the general panic has been concocted or amplified by Chinese interests looking to slow U.S. progress. 

But even if people’s fears are unreasonable, they can’t be dismissed. You can’t force a free people to accept something they abhor. This is especially so in the wake of the pandemic and the institutional deceptions that grew ever larger until they collapsed. At the moment, Americans don’t trust people in positions of power whether they’re counseling “an abundance of caution” or hyping the next breakthrough. If we had been this suspicious at the birth of the U.S. automobile boom, we’d only now be glimpsing the first Ford Mustang. And fear of AI infrastructure is the kind of populist issue that finds purchase across the political spectrum, from left-wing environmentalists to MAHA Republicans fretting about food contamination.

While I’m not persuaded by the technical arguments against data-center construction, I don’t entirely discredit the sentiment behind the cause. As I wrote on X a few days ago, I think people mostly see data centers as mammoth symbols of omnipotent tech gods, unemployment, and—perhaps most crucially—one’s own relative insignificance. 

This last point was captured particularly well by David Marcus in a recent piece he wrote for Fox News about reluctance to data centers among West Virginians. Marta Beck, a candidate for the state’s House of Delegates, told him, "They [the state] have taken away local control from the municipalities,” and Marcus adds, “That word, ‘control,’ really lies at the heart of this debate, not just in West Virginia, but everywhere I travel in the country.” That seems right. 

Whether it’s the state, Big Tech, the public-health juggernaut, academia, or some other distantly floating body of “consensus,” there’s an array of massive institutions or networks whose very scale can obliterate the idea of localness and degrade one’s sense of individual control. In West Virginia, Marcus asked local political volunteers what issue was at the top of most voters’ minds. “The answer,” he writes, “was a telling single word: ‘growth.’” Not as in “too little” but rather, as his interviewees clarified, “too much growth.”

When it comes to data centers and AI more generally, it’s not growth alone that can make us feel powerless. The architects and titans behind it all have risen up as dreamlike figures of global consequence. We hang on their pronouncements as if they were a new, self-elected class of remote lawgivers. There’s also the bewildering speed at which this technology is overtaking so many aspects of our lives. Finally, there’s the looming mystery of the technology itself. The more it encroaches on us, the less we understand what it portends.

Whatever arguments are proffered about rising energy prices, water consumption, and sound pollution, I suspect that the deeper objection to AI data centers is that they are hulking concrete monuments to our individual displacement in a world of strange new gods. They may contribute to an unimaginably bright future or something like its opposite. But either way, I understand why people don’t want to look at them every day.  

Abe Greenwald is the executive editor of COMMENTARY.