The left and right agree on one thing: no data centers | TheBriefWire
The left and right agree on one thing: no data centers
Published 6 August 2026 ¡ politics
Today, Iâm talking with Gaby Del Valle, a policy reporter here at The Verge, about the growing backlash against AI data centers. Gaby recently reported
Today, Iâm talking with Gaby Del Valle, a policy reporter here at The Verge, about the growing backlash against AI data centers. Gaby recently reported a fantastic piece about Hernando County, Florida, where last month the county commission unanimously approved a yearlong moratorium on data center construction. She attended a protest there organized by a group called Humans First, a conservative grassroots movement focused on combating AI data center build-outs. Verge subscribers, donât forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here. Youâll hear Gaby explain that it was part of a bigger, broader, and bipartisan opposition to data centers. Not only as physical buildings, but as infrastructure that powers an AI boom that takes local jobs and fills feeds with slop. Data center construction has become a proxy for the publicâs feelings about AI: something physical they can aim their fear and frustration at â and even create enough pressure to stop through community organizing and protests. So I wanted Gaby to talk me through what these protests look like on the ground, from voters whose party affiliations have typically aligned them with big business. Youâll hear Gaby say data centers are scrambling party lines, turning diehard Trump voters into protesters who care about left-coded issues like groundwater contamination and forever chemicals. Itâs a confusing time, and data centers are going to play a major role in electoral politics going forward. So I suspect this wonât be the last we hear from Gaby on movements like Humans First. Okay Verge policy reporter Gaby Del Valle on the bipartisan data center backlash. Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Gaby Del Valle, youâre a policy reporter here at The Verge. Welcome back to Decoder. Thank you. Happy to be here. Iâm excited to talk to you. You were on previously with our friend Alex Heath, but this is the first time Iâve gotten to talk to you in Decoder. 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. What I found was people are really, really, really, really mad. And the reasons why theyâre mad are different depending on the community, but theyâre also all the same, if that makes sense. They have localized concerns. They were telling me Floridaâs really humid. It doesnât 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 Iâve also talked to people in Arizona who have the opposite concern. Arizona is not very humid. Arizonaâs very dry. And theyâre also like, âIt doesnât make sense to build a data center in the desert.â So whatever your community is, youâre like, âIt doesnât make sense to build a data center here because of X reason,â basically. The thing that really strikes me in reading your piece and hearing about the other reporting youâre 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 Iâm curious about your view on that. Why canât Elon Musk just command his army of followers to be pro-data centers? This is so interesting to me. So this is a little bit of backstory thatâs going to answer your question. The woman who organized Humans First, which was bipartisan and now is focusing only on organizing conservatives, was an early founder or organizer with the Tea Party way back when. And this has a similar vibe to me. Itâs not a left-right thing. Itâs a populous technocrat divide. Youâre seeing that on the right and the left. So for example, at the Abundance Conference last year, it was center-right to center-left-ish. And everybody was pro-nuclear, pro-AI. And we were hearing that, âThese things are here to stay. We have to figure out how to do it smartly.â At the same time, the populist left and the populist right are both skeptical of tech development, to put it lightly. That skepticism plays out across a number of dimensions. I couldnât help but be struck as I read your story by how many strains of conspiracy thinking there are about data centers. Iâm curious if theyâre just visible. Theyâre so big, and they require so much development and so much build-out that you can just glue any concerns you have onto them. âThis big thing is happening, and I donât feel any control. And Iâm also worried about 5G, Chinese government interference, and X, Y, Z. And I can just point it all at this very big thing by which thereâs a process to say no. I can go to my local town board meeting and literally say no.â I mean, I think thatâs part of it. Itâs interesting because I think thereâs a spectrum of conspiratorial thinking to, I guess, misinformed thinking on the water use question. We now know that they donât use as much water as we previously thought, et cetera, et cetera. 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. I tried to track that down. I was like, âWhere did this come from?â And it was one farmer in Texas who claims he had one stillborn calf on his cattle farm. So that got spun out via the internet rumor, social media mill. I think thatâs part of it. Thereâs this issue of social collapse that comes out once you talk to people a little bit. One of the women I talked to said, âI had this friend. ChatGPT told her she couldnât be friends with me anymore.â You have all of these stories of people harming themselves, going off their medication, or whatever because theyâve been talking to a chatbot and it goes awry. I think this gives people a feeling of control. Where I can go to my community board meeting or my council membersâ meeting, and I can say, âI donât want this big building that houses the scary thing that is fracturing my community here.â So itâs not just the actual building. I think itâs a broader backlash to generative AI and to LLMs specifically. One of my ideas that Iâve 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, thatâs where the slop is coming from, and itâs why the jobs are going to go away. Itâs also where Mark Zuckerberg is just going to get even wealthier. Is there a dynamic of that â that people just donât like the thing that the data centers make? Yes, absolutely. They donât like a lot of the things that the data centers make. Itâs not just AI. I think AI is a big part of it, but this is a little preview of a different story Iâm working on⌠In Tucson, thereâs a data center project thatâs getting built out. The people I talked to there said, âYeah, this might be an Amazon Web Services facility, and Amazon works with ICE.â So this technology is fueling mass deportations through, not directly, but creating the non-sexy infrastructure that surveillance is built on. There are two things to it. Part of it is a NIMBY, âI donât want this thing in my backyard, literally. I donât want my town to get polluted. I donât want this. I donât want that. I donât want to see it. I donât want the noise pollution.â And then the other part is, âI do not like what this big building represents and what it has wrought on society.â Does that cut across bipartisan lines? Or is that more culture war coded? Itâs both. It cuts across culture war lines in that people have different concerns about what LLMs do.
The left and right agree on one thing: no data centers
Published: August 6, 2026 ⢠7:30 PM IST ¡ Updated: August 6, 2026 ⢠7:36 PM ISTBy TheBriefWire Editorial Team
Key points
Today, Iâm talking with Gaby Del Valle, a policy reporter here at The Verge, about the growing backlash against AI data centers.
Gaby recently reported a fantastic piece about Hernando County, Florida, where last month the county commission unanimously approved a yearlong moratorium on data center construction.
She attended a protest there organized by a group called Humans First, a conservative grassroots movement focused on combating AI data center build-outs.
Youâll hear Gaby explain that it was part of a bigger, broader, and bipartisan opposition to data centers.
Not only as physical buildings, but as infrastructure that powers an AI boom that takes local jobs and fills feeds with slop.
So one woman I spoke to was talking about the fracturing of social bonds. On the construction front, she was like, âWeâre a rural-ish community. We donât want this big blight on our nice rolling hills.â So thatâs a right-coded thing. And there was a lot of anti-development stuff that is neither right nor left. On the left, I would say thereâs similar culture war concerns, but itâs⌠I donât know if this is necessarily a culture war concern, but fueling deportations. Both sides, I think, are concerned about the job losses because of AI. And both sides have caught on to the fact that these facilities donât really have a lot of long-term job prospects. Thereâs the big construction boom. Thereâs an HVAC situation. But to actually maintain these facilities, it doesnât require that many people. I think people have caught onto that. The promises of the AI data job, or that the AI boom will lead to jobs related to data centers, are not actually true. Yeah. At most, itâs 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? The Kevin OâLeary data center in Utah is a national story. Maybe itâs just because heâs a cartoon character. And then thereâs a new project in Georgia where there might be a huge OpenAI facility that seems to go under the radar. There are all of the projects in Florida that you are reporting on, but donât seem to be explosive in the way that some of the other ones are. Yeah, I think thatâs a good question. There was one in Florida that was explosive, and it was just because it was near Mar-a-Lago. I think that one pretty obviously made the national news because itâs related to the president. I honestly think a cartoon character at the center of it is the deciding factor a lot of the time on whether itâll become a national story or not. And then also the numbers. The Utah one, I donât remember off the top of my head how big itâs supposed to be, but itâs supposed to be huge. So then that becomes a proxy for all data center development. Theyâre being planned everywhere. And I think whatâs so interesting is that the backlash exists everywhere too. I relied a lot on, for example, the Tampa Bay Times to figure out the background for this story. Theyâre on top of it. Theyâre going to these meetings and watching people get yelled at and asked, âDid you sign an NDA? Yes or no?â Do you think the local governments are being responsive? Youâve now gone to some of these protests; youâve talked to people on the ground in various counties across the country. 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. Weâre seeing thereâs a wall going up in some of these cases where the local governments are saying, âNo, we have to do this development. This is the only economic development available.â And the people are saying, âNo, weâre going to throw you out.â 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 are a lot of counties in Florida where moratoriums have passed. But in Tucson, again, the city government is responsive to what the people want and the county government isnât, and theyâre at odds with each other. There are all these videos of people yelling at their representatives about NDAs again. And then them being like, âWe cannot say whether we signed an NDA,â which is an answer, but whatever. 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 getting voted out, I think, is another big one. In Florida, the Republican primary for governor, I think, might be affected by this issue. The primary is in a few weeks and the front-runner, 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, as proud Trump voters, said things like, âI donât understand why Trump would endorse him. Iâm not going to vote for him.â One woman I talked to who told me she was opposed to everything Democrat said she would vote for a Democrat or an independent if Donalds won the primary. And Donalds has also changed⌠not his stance on data center development, but the way that he talks about it in response to a lot of this backlash. How has he changed the stance? How is he talking about it now? He says his vision is to make Florida the financial capital of the world. And to a lot of people, that would sound great, but these people are really upset by this, both because they⌠I mean, there are a lot of other things at play here. Housing costs in Florida have gone up exponentially. Not only in big cities like Miami, but in the suburbs of Tampa, for example. Housing prices have shot up to levels that I, as somebody who grew up there, just donât understand. I literally canât wrap my head around it. So I think a lot of the backlash to development and to data centers is also related to peopleâs cost of living going up and to these, in their words, outside developers coming in and changing a community thatâs already changing. He has since said that we need data center development, but we need to do it responsibly. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is another great example of this. He supported a bill that would require data centers to pay their own utilities and also let counties require them to use reclaimed water, which would address the water issue. But the Tampa Bay Times reported that he also supported legislation that gives massive tax breaks to data centers. And that he pushed to amend that law, which I think was signed in 2017, to only apply to hyperscale data centers, which are the ones that people have problems with. The people I talk to, they know that there are currently data centers in Florida, and theyâre smaller. There are no hyperscale data centers, but there are around one hundred smaller ones for Netflix or whatever. And theyâre okay with that. One woman I talked to works in IT. She said, âI understand that data centers are a boogeyman, and we need them for stuff. But I donât want this massive facility using all of our power, emitting these frequencies, et cetera, et cetera.â Another thing that I think is really interesting Wait, can you just explain what âemitting these frequenciesâ means? [Laughs] Just the noise. I talked to these guys at the Border Security Expo who work for a data center company, and they all live in Virginia. Even they were like, âYeah, it sucks.â They said, âI hate walking around my neighborhood because I just hear it all the time.â And they work in data centers. I donât think she meant 5G. Itâs a real element of this, right next to China being a villain of whatever persuasion you need China to be a villain for. Again, thereâs just a piece of all this where itâs a big thing that you can stop. The power of NIMBYism can stop this. Maybe we canât stop everything else. We canât stop Facebook from doing targeted that feels like itâs listening to you. No one knows how to stop this. Itâs bad. We donât like it, but no one knows how to stop it. âI can stop this building from being builtâ seems like it not only scrambles our culture war lines, but itâs scrambling politics, too. Byron Donalds saying he wants Florida to be the financial capital of the world. One, itâs very funny in that he has to contend with the existence of New York, London, Beijing, and Amsterdam. Go down the line. There are a lot of places that can compete for that title where Miami might not be in the running.
But doing it via building data centers is not the path to that result. Itâs just a bunch of economic development that might result in some short-term gains. It feels like people have clocked it, and theyâve clocked that itâs a thing you can stop. Iâm curious if thereâs anything else. Youâve spent a lot of time covering the right, and I wonder if thereâs anything else that scrambles the lines like that. Because in almost every other case, âletâs build stuff, letâs tear down the White House and build a ballroomâ is fine. Building things is better, and it is coded in one side of the culture war. Yeah. I mean, this is, again, so Florida specific, but it really surprised me how much of the politics around this were scrambled. One of the women was talking about this ballot initiative thatâs going to pass. Itâs going to give more tax exemptions to homeowners, which I feel is a standard Republican thing â lower taxes for homeowners. People would like that. She said, âThis is terrible. Itâs going to deprive county governments of funds that they would otherwise get from homeowners, which will then entice the counties even further to have data centers come into our communities.â So she was thinking of the second- and third-order effects of this, even though thatâs a pretty populist initiative. But yeah, itâs all so scrambled. How do you see the scramble inside of the right and then carrying over to the populist left? The idea that a bunch of billionaires threw all of their weight behind Donald Trump in 2024, and that led to, I donât know, a bunch of podcast bros throwing their weight behind Donald Trump in 2024. There was a cultural wave of Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, and the All-In podcast about building and tech and the future. It feels like that has come to one kind of end. I donât think that that wave is driving the culture anymore because of the backlash to AI. We can all see the college students booing at graduation. If the backlash is there against the data centers, against AI taking the jobs, against billionaires in general, what does that turn into on the right? Because that was the animating force of the right for so long. I think that is still an open question. I think the question is whether this backlash is strong enough to shake peopleâs other partisan concerns. If youâve got a Democrat candidate who is anti-data center development, but also not super gung-ho about deputizing all Florida police officers to do ICE arrests, where does that leave someone who supports Trumpâs immigration policies but doesnât want a data center in their neighborhood? I donât know. I think thatâs what the party is struggling with right now. I mean, I think Trump is this perfect avatar for people because he somehow stands for anti-elite sentiment, but also for hard work and capitalism. Heâs just this perfect blend of, I donât even know how to describe it. He contains multitudes, I guess. And nobody else can contain multitudes like him. They donât have the juice. They just donât have it. Can I make the argument? Yeah. I think I can make the argument. I grew up in Wisconsin, which has many similar dynamics to maybe Florida, in that people in Wisconsin remember a time when there were big factories. In the town I grew up in, Racine, there used to be a Case factory that made tractors. There was a Chrysler factory in Kenosha that made Jeep Wranglers. This is a real thing that occurred, and all those things are gone. So Trump would promise all of this huge economic development that basically looked like manufacturing. I think what his version of this, even with tariffs, was, âWe will bring manufacturing back to all of these places. And that manufacturing will require a lot of hard work, but there will be dignity in that hard work.â At the end of it, youâre going to get to point to a Modine air conditioner and be like, âI made that thing. My community made that thing.â I think that is very seductive. I mean, Trump spent years promising that we would build iPhones in America, and thatâs Wisconsin and Foxconn and all this stuff. Maybe none of those things were ever going to come true because thatâs not how anything gets made anymore. And thatâs not even the kind of work people actually want to do in America anymore. But you take all of that energy, and youâre like, âActually, what weâre going to make is data centers.â And no one can see at the end of that, âI made a Jeep Wrangler.â They get to see that Elon Musk got richer; they just lost their jobs, their children feel like they have no future, and their feeds are full of slop. And I feel like something gets disconnected in the multitudes where you can tell everyone, âYeah, the best I can do for you is make you the worldâs richest factory foreman.â So people are like, âThat sounds awesome. Thatâs better than whatever nonsense Iâm doing online.â But you canât be like, âIâm going to make Sam Altman richer,â because that doesnât mean anything to anyone. All of this construction doesnât do anything for anyone. I look at the backlash, and all I see is that a lot of people across the political spectrum have come to that realization. You can tear down our communities to build bridges and factories, and you can pollute the skies with smokestacks as long as we all get jobs. But if youâre going to do all that and all I get is more AI-generated movie posters on Amazon Prime whose price keeps going up every month, screw you. And Iâm wondering if that connection is⌠Thatâs my guess. Iâm wondering if you see any hints of that connection in your reporting as you talk to all these people. I think so. I think the Florida version of making a Jeep Wrangler is like, there were orange groves and cattle ranches, and now there are not. I used to drive past an orange grove when I was a kid. That orange grove is gone. Itâs a Publix now. There was an old cow field. Now thatâs a mall. On the one hand, thatâs what people want. People want consumption, but they also, at least in Florida, liked thinking that they lived near an orange grove. Like, âOh, maybe the guyâs using tons of pesticides. Maybe the orange grove is worse for your health than the data center.â I donât know. I donât have the stats on this. But you could see the tangible effects of what your economy was producing. Now itâs just like, âThereâs a building that none of us can go in. It makes a horrible noise. And I think itâs drinking all my water?â And then itâs also making your kids dumb and alienated, and making everybody lose their jobs. People donât like that. Again, these arenât Luddites. The woman I talked to said, âI found out about the Humans First organizing [efforts] via Facebook. I know thereâs an irony in that. I know thereâs an irony in me working in IT and opposing this data center.â Theyâre not dumb. They understand that all of these things that weâve built our lives around require something to power them. They just donât want that something to be within driving distance of their house. They want it somewhere else. And itâs unclear where that somewhere else should be apart from space. Apart from space. That is a very different episode of Decoder. But thatâs one answer the industry has: âThese people, their stupid concerns are too annoying. Weâll just put the data centers in space,â and maybe theyâll solve that problem. Who knows? The other answer is, âWeâll just horsepower over their concerns. This is too important. Weâre going to do it anyway. And maybe weâll just subsidize a bunch of education in some community. Maybe weâll just pay a bunch of extra money. Maybe weâll pay for everyoneâs electricity.â I donât know if those have gotten any traction. Is there anything that the tech companies or the neoclouds could do in these communities to overcome the objections? Could they just pay for healthcare? Or is that just a non-starter? I donât know about paying for healthcare, but something that I didnât include in the piece, because it was extremely dry and very technical, was that the small protest ended with about an hour and a half long presentation from a land use expert on how to write local zoning ordinances to prevent hyperscale data centers from being built.
It was really specific stuff, like âYou could have them on multiple small parcels of land.â It was really dry. âYou could require them to use this amount of reclaimed water, et cetera, et cetera.â I think what people want more than the data centers not being there is a degree of community input on how theyâre built â if theyâre going to be built. I think if they got that, they would maybe not be pacified, but they would at least not feel like thereâs a big external force coming in and steamrolling their community, especially when they already feel like that in every other aspect of their life. This is the thing that Iâm most curious about. So much of our politics and our culture has been nationalized. Everything happens at the national level. The fact that the mayor of New York is a national political figure is at once very silly and also just the funniest thing that has happened in a long time. Data centers are very local. Theyâre happening to people in their backyards, and a data center being built in Florida, Georgia, or Tucson has nothing to do with me in New York. Itâs far away enough. Maybe what youâre hearing from everybody is just, âSomewhere else, and as we get to somewhere else, I wonât care.â But it is very local. And then it is very in person. People are going to the meetings; theyâre encountering one another. There have been stories of bridges across party lines from people who would never like each other normally because they both hate the data centers. Is there an element of a return to actual local politics and actual community building here that could be catalyzed by opposition to data centers? I really think so. Again, Iâm talking to organizers in multiple states who are going to these community, town council, or county council meetings and yelling at their representatives. And sometimes itâs hundreds of people. I think this is maybe a weird analogy, but it reminds me of the local backlash to right-wing organizing and local education policy, which is where a lot of the anti-trans backlash started. Youâd go into the school board, and youâd be like, âI donât want this gender stuff being taught to my child. I donât want my kids to know that slavery was bad.â Iâm not comparing them in terms of value judgment. I just think itâs at a level of local engagement that is at the same time a national issue. Itâs these really, really, really localized policies that may end up driving, if not national policy change and national policy discussions, but at least national political vibes. Whoever wins the Democratic and Republican primaries and runs for president in 2028, what are they going to be saying about data centers? I donât know, but I know itâs going to be informed by what happens this year and next year. Iâm actually very curious how Trump handles it. As you said, he contains multitudes. Heâs very good at reading his own base. It feels like the Trump base is very much polarized around data centers. There are a lot of people who love Donald Trump but hate data centers. And then thereâs his money, which loves the AI build-out and loves data centers. That is a fracture as deep as anything. A lot of those folks will say, âAI just has a marketing problem. If only we could convince people of the benefits of this build-out and the super intelligence to come, they would be on board.â The best marketer they could have for that would be Donald Trump. But he doesnât seem to be willing to make those claims at the level that they might need. And certainly he is very attuned to his base hating AI. How do you think heâs going to play it? And how do you think the MAGA coalition will respond to it? Okay, so do you remember when Trump was talking about H-1B visas? Or not even when he was talking about it, but just the whole swirl around what weâre going to do about these? Yeah. Trump said, âI think we should stamp an H-1B visa to every foreign studentâs college graduation diploma.â And I thought, âWhat are you talking about? Your administration is charging $100,000 for these visas.â He kept saying things like, âThese kids are really smart. We need them in America building chips.â I think heâs just going to do it like that. The thing about Trump is that he can say literally whatever, and he can do literally whatever, and the people who like him will continue to like him. Sometimes theyâll be like, âOh, well, I donât like this particular policy of his. I donât know why he endorsed this candidate,â but theyâre still going to back the guy. But enough to split the difference on this issue? In every other issue, he could polarize the electorate, and he would get there, but, âIâm going to put a data center in the backyard, and itâs going to make that noise.â Maybe not enough. But the thing is that they donât see it as coming from Trump. Theyâre thinking, âThese companies are coming into our community.â And if you connect the dots, itâs like, âWho supports those companies? The president. Who is giving the president a lot of money? All these different companies.â Thatâs not how people see it. They see it as these tech oligarchs who are just disconnected from politics and disconnected from anything because of all their money. They donât see that as having a connection to the president. Instead, they see that as having a connection to the governor, to the board of commissioners, or whatever. But Trump is floating above it all. I donât know why. Well, Iâm curious, and maybe we should end it here. The Florida gubernatorial primaries are coming up. If Donalds loses, even with that Trump endorsement over the data center issue, do you think that will be a signal or a predictor of what will happen in the midterms? I think it would be a massive signal, if only because Donalds is polling so much further ahead than everybody else. Heâs the clear frontrunner, and the lieutenant governor whoâs polling second is also pro-data centers. If any of the anti-data center candidates win the Republican primary, that is going to be huge and completely unexpected by everybody in the state. But it could happen. Crazier things have happened. Weâre going to be doing a lot of coverage of this in the months to come, especially ahead of the midterms, because this scrambling of party lines, this scrambling of the culture war, seems very important. The politics weâve had for so long, they donât seem like they can hold up to everyone hating the same thing. Maybe thatâs all America needs. It does seem like every American hating these big buildings that make loud noises might be the thing that unifies us, which is good or bad. You can make your own decisions, but I canât think of anything else. Thereâs nothing else thatâs cutting across party lines this way. Can you? Literally nothing. Nothing at all. And itâs cutting across party lines, I think, not just in that people hate it, but I had these deeply conservative women talking to me about local environmental and ecological issues. They were talking about pesticides and forever chemicals in their water, which you wouldnât expect looking at Republican politics five to 10 years ago, that this is where we have ended up. Weâre still doing climate change hoaxes at the national level, and on the ground weâre talking about pesticides. Thereâs something there. Gaby, weâre going to have to have you back as the story develops and certainly as we go into all these elections. Thank you so much for being at Decoder. Yeah, thanks for having me. This was fun. Questions or comments? Hit us up at decoder@theverge.com. We really do read every email!
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