The Ezra Klein Show: The A.I. Revolt Is Here

In August 2024, a heat map news poll found that about four in ten voters would oppose a data center being built where they live. By May of 2025, opposition had grown to seven in ten. That rapid shift is the subject of this conversation between Ezra Klein and reporter Jasmine Sun, who spent the summer traveling through Wisconsin and Michigan talking to the people organizing against the AI industry's physical infrastructure. The backlash, she argues, is not just about noise or water or ugly buildings. It is about something deeper: a growing conviction that AI is an elite political project being imposed on communities without their consent.

The Three Layers of Backlash

Sun identifies three converging layers of opposition. The first is process. In many towns, data center developers required local officials to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) before revealing what they were planning. Council members could not tell their constituents whether the project was a data center, who the customer was (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.), or how much electricity it would consume. Rumors filled the vacuum, and officials lost the ability to get ahead of the social media narrative. "The only way to keep a secret between three people is to kill two of them," one construction union VP told Sun. Microsoft has since stopped using NDAs, and other labs are considering the same move. "All of the pr