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5 min readA road trip through the data center debate
Reporter Jasmine Sun spent ten days driving through Michigan and Wisconsin, talking to voters, activists, union leaders, and politicians about data centers—the physical infrastructure powering the AI boom. She went in expecting to find a simple story: people who oppose data centers because they're misinformed about environmental impacts or afraid of AI. What she found was more complicated. The opposition she encountered wasn't primarily about NIMBYism or technophobia. It was about broken trust, asymmetric power, and communities that have been burned before.
The Janesville story: a concrete slab and a decade of frustration
Sun's first stop was Janesville, Wisconsin, where a GM plant that had been the town's economic backbone closed in 2008, sending unemployment to 13%. The site sat empty for fifteen years—a 100-acre concrete slab contaminated with hazardous waste that GM never cleaned up. No commercial buyer would touch it. Adam Schultz, a local who spent five years trying to sell the brownfield, told Sun he couldn't find a single interested party. Then a data center developer showed up, offering to spend $30 million cleaning up the waste. From Schultz's perspective, the choice was simple: "It's gonna be a data center or it's gonna be a concrete slab."
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What you'll learn
- 1 (02:35) **The Midterm Jacuzzi & Data Centers** - Host PJ Vogt introduces the episode's premise: midterm election politics are heating up, and data centers—the physical infrastructure of the AI boom—have become a flashpoint for voter anger.
- 2 (05:52) **First Assumption Challenged: Janesville, Wisconsin** - Jasmine's first stop challenges her initial theory that data center opposition is just about fear of AI or misinformation.
- 3 (07:42) **The Pro-Data Center Voice: Adam Schultz** - Jasmine meets Adam Schultz, a rare vocal supporter who spent years trying to sell the contaminated GM site.
- 4 (10:53) **The Informed Opposition: Local Activists** - Jasmine meets activists who are well-organized and angry, but not for the reasons she expected.
- 5 (14:07) **The Secrecy Problem: NDAs and Distrust** - A key driver of community distrust is the use of Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) by data center developers.
- 6 (16:30) **The Power Asymmetry: Saline, Michigan** - In Saline, a town of 3,000 people, the democratic process was overruled by corporate legal power.
- 7 (19:51) **The Core Grievance: Tangible Harms vs. Abstract Benefits** - Jasmine identifies the fundamental imbalance that fuels opposition: the costs are real and local, while the benefits are diffuse and distant.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
The midterms are approaching, and as the discourse heats up, one of big new villains is: a kind of building. Data centers. Reporter Jasmine Sun took a road trip through two swing states to meet the people living at the center of these debates, and to understand where this all might be headed.
no data centers in my backyard by Jasmine Sun
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