If you’ve heard anything at all about the midterm elections, you’ve heard at least two things: it’s going to be a ‘blue wave’ in which Democrats are poised for major electoral gains, and everyone involved hates data centers.
We’re all used to hearing about that data center hate now, it’s almost a given; “the single most bipartisan issue in politics,” and so on and so forth, but I do want to pause to underline how remarkable this is. This time last year, data centers were a niche issue in a handful of local political fights. Now they’re one of America’s most visible, universal and undeniable political battlegrounds.
Despite that, a lot of pundits will try to minimize data center politics. They’ll argue it’s a reactionary movement, or relegate it to a set of Not-in-my-backyard concerns. But it makes a lot more sense to put the backlash in the context of everything else Americans are going through, and angry at, right now. Data centers are a stand-in for so much of what’s wrong with the American economy and American democracy right now. They’re monuments to what we don’t want our future to look like.
To investigate how we got here, I chat with my good friend Paris Marx; tech reporter, critic, and author of the new book Hyperscale: The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech’s Data Empires. Plus, I dig into three things I’ll be watching during the midterm elections next week; data centers, sure, but also the impact of tech money in politics, ambient AI hate, and California’s pioneering, tech titan-opposed billionaire tax.
Hyperscale by Paris Marx
Paris’s Disconnect Newsletter
Paris on Bluesky
Producer Ryan’s Newsletter
Ryan’s Bluesky
Stories Mentioned
Texas sues OpenAI, Sam Altman over product safety - POLITICO
Media — Angela Gonzales-Torres for Congress
Elon Musk’s America PAC Is Quietly Funding November’s Most Consequential Elections
SpaceX and Tesla have high election stakes as Elon Musk pours $366 million into campaigns
Ohio Senate special election | Tech Influence Watch
Leading the Future | Tech Influence Watch
Exclusive: GOP warns AI companies that data centers are politically radioactive
AI and data centers are incredibly unpopular in every poll | The Verge
The data center backlash reveals NIMBYism’s great contradiction
Texas gubernatorial election, 2026 - Ballotpedia
Data Centers | Gina Hinojosa for Texas Governor
Elon Musk Is Trying To Buy Texas. It Might Earn Him ‘Retribution.’
How Billionaires Are Fighting the Prop 40 California Wealth Tax - The New York Times
https://thewatt.org/en/nota/gas-centros-datos-capacidad-eeuu/
Majority of US’s new AI datacenters to be built on drought-hit land
Exclusive: 75% of Americans Now Oppose Local Data Center Development - Heatmap News
Canada’s AI minister blames OpenAI for ‘failure’ after mass shooting - POLITICO
ChatGPT Gave Me Chilling Advice—as I Simulated Planning a Mass Shooting – Mother Jones
The Deepfake Nudes Crisis in Schools Is Much Worse Than You Thought | WIRED
Character.ai’s Bankruptcy Documents Show the Economics of AI Don’t Work
Scoop: Andreessen Horowitz lays off “majority” of portfolio recruiting team
Investors dump data centre bonds as AI borrowers face ‘Darwin moment’
$64 billion of data center projects have been blocked or delayed amid local opposition
