AI Summary
5 min readIn the summer of 2024, journalist Jasmine Sun piled into a car with friends and research assistants and drove to Michigan and Wisconsin to talk to people about data centers. She didn't go to Virginia, the data center capital of the United States, or to Texas, where Governor Greg Abbott had just announced curbs on the industry. She went to the upper Midwest because it sounded pleasant by the Great Lakes in July, but also because she wanted to understand how the AI build-out was colliding with the history of deindustrialization. What she found was a backlash that surprised her — not because it was loud, but because it was so widely shared, and because it was driven by something the AI industry had largely failed to anticipate.
The Physical Manifestation of an Unloved Technology
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What you'll learn
- 1 (03:20) **The Physical Reality of AI** - Tracy and Joe introduce the paradox of AI as both an ephemeral digital service and a massive physical infrastructure project requiring huge amounts of power, water, and land.
- 2 (06:08) **A Bipartisan Backlash Emerges** - Data centers have become a rare bipartisan issue, with both Democratic and Republican governors (Kathy Hochul, Greg Abbott) imposing curbs, driven by local opposition.
- 3 (08:12) **Introducing Jasmine Sun's Data Center Road Trip** - Guest Jasmine Sun joins to discuss her reporting trip through Michigan and Wisconsin to understand the grassroots opposition to AI data centers.
- 4 (10:02) **Why Michigan and Wisconsin?** - Jasmine explains the specific appeal of these states for data center development, despite ranking in the middle of the pack nationally.
- 5 (12:49) **Are Data Centers a Winning Political Issue?** - Jasmine analyzes whether data center opposition can be a decisive electoral issue, noting that primary candidates like Francesca Hong ran on moratoriums.
- 6 (16:54) **The Trust Gap, Not an Information Gap** - Jasmine found that active activists were surprisingly well-informed, knowing the difference between cooling systems and AI vs. old data centers, but the key variable was trust.
- 7 (19:37) **The Pitch: Property Taxes Over Jobs** - The primary economic argument for a data center is the massive boost to the local property tax base, as seen in Loudon County, Virginia, where they fund over 50% of the tax base.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
Within the AI industry, even the builders of it have been very anxious about the technology. They've talked for years about its potential to create destabilizing job losses. They even spend a lot of time thinking about rogue AI that could lead to human extinction. But for all their anxiety, they missed the thing that's become the most publicly salient: how upset people would be about building data centers. Part of this was understandable. Data center construction has been happening for a long time in America, and it used to be relatively uncontroversial. In fact, cities and states would often design their tax code to incentivize data center construction. Now there's this complete 180. On this episode, we speak with independent writer and Substacker Jasmine Sun, who recently traveled to Wisconsin and Michigan for some on-the-ground reporting about the communities and activists trying to stop data center development. She explains what the pushback is really all about, what it represents, and what future developers will have to do in order to be welcomed in.
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