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, that's where the jobs are going to go away into, and that's where Mark Zuckerberg is just going to get even wealthier.
Part of it is like a kind of NIMBY — I don't want this thing in my backyard, literally. I don't want my town to get polluted. I don't want to see it. I don't want the noise pollution. And then the other thing is, I do not like what this big building represents.
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 as long as we all get jobs. But if you're 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 — like, screw you.
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 DeVia, 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. 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. Okay, Verge reporter Gabby DeVia on the bipartisan data center backlash. Here we go. Gabby DeVia, you're a 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 on 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. Tell — 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 they're mad kind of are different depending on the community, but they're also all kind of the same. They have localized concerns. Like they were telling me, you know, Florida's 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. Arizona 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.
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 if founder or organizer or what the right word is — with the Tea Party. And 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-leftish. 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 do it smartly. Whereas like 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 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 XYZ, and I can just point it all at this very big thing by which there's a process to say no. 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 like 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 like 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. So like that got spun out via, you know, the internet rumor social media mill. I think like that's part of it. And I also think like there's this issue of social collapse that I think once you talk to people a little bit comes out. Like one of the women I talked to was like, you know, I had this friend who ChatGPT told her she couldn't be friends with me anymore. You have all of these stories of people harming themselves or going off their medication or whatever because they've been talking to a chatbot and it goes awry. And I think this gives people a feeling of control. They're like, I can go to my community board meeting or my council members' meeting or whatever, and I can say, I don't want this big building that houses the scary thing that is fracturing my community here. So it's not just the actual building. I think it's a broader backlash to generative AI and to LLMs specifically.
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, 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 where 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. And the people I talked to there were like, yeah, this might be like an Amazon Web Services facility, and Amazon works with ICE. So this technology is fueling mass deportations — not directly, but creating the kind of non-sexy infrastructure that surveillance is built on. Like there's two things to it. Part of it is like a kind of 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, I do not like what this big building represents and what it has wrought on society.
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, like the woman I spoke to was talking about the fracturing of social bonds. On the construction front, she was like, we're like a kind of rural-ish community. We don't want this big blight on our nice rolling hills. So that's kind of a right-coded thing. And there was a lot of anti-development stuff that is kind of neither right nor left. Both sides, I think, are concerned about the job losses because of AI. And both sides have kind of caught on to the fact that these facilities don't really have a lot of long-term job prospects. Like, you know, there's the big construction boom. There's like an HVAC situation. But to actually maintain these facilities, it doesn't require that many people. And I think people have just caught on to that. Like, the promises of the AI boom will lead to jobs related to data centers is not actually true.
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 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-air 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, but it was just because it was near Mar-a-Lago. I think that one pretty obviously made the national news because it's kind of 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 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 huge. So then 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. And I think local publications — like I relied a lot on, for example, the Tampa Bay Times to figure out the background for this story. They're on top of it. They're going to these meetings and watching people get yelled at and asked, did you sign an NDA? Yes or no?
Do you think the local governments are being responsive? Right, you've now gone to some of these protests. You've talked to the 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. 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 people yelling at their representatives about 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 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 frontrunner, Byron Donalds, has taken a lot of money from AI industry and data center development groups. And people are mad. People are really mad. Like 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 was opposed to everything Democrat is nonetheless — she said she would vote for a Democrat or an independent if Donalds won the primary. And Donalds 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.
How has he changed the stance? How is he talking about it now?
He previously said — he got a lot of flak 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, 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 exponentially. Not only in big cities like Miami, but in the suburbs of Tampa, for example. Like housing prices have shot up to levels that I, as somebody who grew up there, just don't understand — I literally can't wrap my head around it. So I think a lot of the backlash to development and to data centers is also to people's cost of living going up and to these outside developers coming in and changing a community that's already changing. So he has since said that, you know, 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. And I mean, Ron DeSantis, the current governor of Florida, is another really good example of this. He supported a bill that would require data centers to pay their utilities and also would 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 also that he pushed to 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 talked to, they know that there are currently data centers in Florida. They're smaller. There are no hyperscale data centers, but there's like around 100 smaller ones for, you know, Netflix or whatever. And they're okay with that. One woman I talked to, she works in IT. She's like, I understand that data centers is like a boogeyman, but we need them for stuff, but I don't want this massive facility using all of our power, emitting these frequencies, etc., etc.
Wait, can you just explain what emitting these frequencies means?
Just like 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. 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 — 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. Right? 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 scramble our culture war lines, it's scrambling politics, right? Byron Donalds saying he wants Florida to be the financial capital of the world — one, it's very funny in that he has to contend with the existence of New York and London and Beijing and Amsterdam and go down the line. Like there's 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, 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 spend 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 tear down the White House and build a ballroom is fine, right? Like building things is better and it is coded in one side of the culture war.
