“Local control” of data centers is a Big Tech con
Despite efforts to tout AI infrastructure as a boon to the American economy, as well as a home-field advantage to a country steeped in capitalistic aspiration, hawkers of this technology have failed to convince 70% of Americans that AI and its data centers are anything other than a hostile intrusion. To the public, they are monoliths that pollute the environment, drive up energy costs, strip people of their livelihoods and degrade the meaning of art. But the catch for some politicians is that supporting AI is an immensely profitable enterprise, even if the money and favors come from just a few very powerful, very rich people. Oh, what are they to do?
Some of them, like David Crowley, Wisconsin’s Democratic candidate for governor, have wisely and belatedly eschewed “turn[ing] Wisconsin into an AI and data hub . . . for the entire globe” as a talking point in favor of convincing voters that local elected boards are the vanguard of communal protection and direct democracy. Attempting to shrug off the perception of being too pro-AI, Crowley told supporters shortly after his primary win in August that “Local communities should be the end all be all when it comes down to data centers. They should be able to make the decision when it comes to data centers and if they don’t want a data center, they should not be forced to have a data center, and there’s no ands, ifs, or buts about that.”
When Tom Tiffany, Crowley’s Republican opponent, has managed to take breaths between his incessant attacks on “Data Center David,” he has also clarified his own position in favor of “local input” and “local control” — even though he previously voted in favor of federal bills to expedite the construction of data centers and ban state and local AI regulations.
Proposals to offload data center permitting, on the other hand, use the vocabulary of democracy and autonomy to hide the fact that “local communities,” in practice, means local governments, which are structurally overmatched, underfunded and vulnerable to the pressure tactics of trillion-dollar technology monopolies.
Significantly, neither candidate’s Paul-on-the-road-to-Madison conversion includes support for a temporary moratorium on data center construction — a cause with especially strong support from the left and elected officials like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., as well as Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in neighboring Michigan. The logic behind that push — buying time to evaluate the extent of data center effects and find a more permanent solution — is a direct answer to damage that has already been inflicted and to what polls have indicated as sweeping, bipartisan opposition to their further construction. Proposals to offload data center permitting, on the other hand, use the vocabulary of democracy and autonomy to hide the fact that “local communities,” in practice, means local governments, which are structurally overmatched, underfunded and vulnerable to the pressure tactics of trillion-dollar technology monopolies.
When politicians invoke the locality or community, they hope that those listening to them imagine a group of working-class residents debating in a town square. The moneyed interests they seem bent on trying to placate those in charge know that decisionmaking falls in the hands of boards of alders, county commissioners and local zoning boards who have time and again chosen AI profiteers over raucous public comment sessions and protests.
In August, the city council in Marietta, Georgia, voted 5-2 to approve an 11-acre data center developed by New York City-based Prime Group Holdings, despite an overflow crowd chanting their disapproval. The council had passed a six-month moratorium earlier this year, but councillors claimed that the restrictions did not apply, as the proposal was submitted before the moratorium went into effect. In July, the city council of Edgerton, Kansas, overrode the warnings of their own planning commission to approve DAMAC Digital’s data center, prompting local opponents to launch a petition requiring voter approval for data centers, as well as a fundraising effort for potential litigation. In May, the city council of Red Oak, Texas, harried by 150 furious residents, waited until midnight to sneak through an 830-acre data center rezoning and tax abatement.
Local politicians’ pockets can be just as hungry as those of a senator or member of Congress, and their calculations just as responsive to whomever feeds them. In Fort Worth, Texas, Mayor Mattie Parker and eight city council members accepted a cumulative $46,000 in campaign contributions from the CEO of Black Mountain Energy, a developer building a data center in the city. The council members and mayor all subsequently pushed forward the approvals of the complex, with Parker refusing to recuse herself even though her husband has ties to the Data Center Coalition, a favored lobbying network for hyperscalers. The oft-used justification for defying the will of the people, whether in bad or misguided faith, is the promise of tax revenue, with technology companies as sovereign powers offering bailouts to local governments that are often short on money.
As of the late 1970s, direct federal aid to municipal governments covered roughly 15% to 25% of their revenues. Forty years of neoliberal austerity policies cut that number down to 3% by the 2000s, forcing them into bidding wars with each other in which they offer up the health of their land, water, infrastructure and communities in the cheapest possible terms to outside corporations. Now, AI-friendly but voter-scared politicians would put on the frontlines against Big Tech the very governments they continue to leave disarmed. In 1989, geographer David Harvey was already identifying that shift in which local governments mutated from a “managerial” role — focused on providing for the common good in the form of public schools, pensions and public goods — to an “entrepreneurial” one, where their primary function is to attract private capital and pray for some tax revenue to make up for budget shortfalls.
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But sterile, polluting data centers are no substitute for the common good, and they do not answer prayers. Even on paper, the promised taxed revenue — with no guarantee of how the government might actually spend it — pales in comparison to billions in increased utility bills, the potentially thousands of deaths caused by its poisonous residue and the millions of gallons of water it sucks from local aquifers every day. In practice, data center developers have aggressively pursued strategies that help them escape the full burden of taxation, while local governments themselves have often eagerly provided enormous tax breaks as a deal sweetener. The basic necessities for human survival and happiness should not be commodities sold to corporate developers, and yet that is also not even the complete reckoning of what would be lost. Marietta, Edgerton, Red Oak, Fort Worth and countless other places have shown that the democratic process is also eroded, and the local community yet more enslaved to the AI tech industry, with each approved permit.
Such is the confidence of corporate tech interests that collective power sometimes doesn’t get as far as the legislature. In 2024, the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce and the office of Mayor Paul Young used a loophole to bypass the Memphis City Council’s standard rezoning and public hearing processes and approve Colossus 1, a data center from Elon Musk’s xAI company, in an abandoned Electrolux manufacturing plan. The residents of South Memphis, a working-class and majority Black neighborhood, only learned about their new neighbor when the chamber held a press conference announcing the deal, and they suddenly saw rows of methane gas turbines being erected across the skyline. Colossus 1 and Colossus 2 collectively draw nearly a gigawatt of power — one billion joules of energy per second — enough to light up a million homes simultaneously. The speed and ambition of its construction far outpaced the local electrical grid, so xAI trucked in dozens of shoddy, unpermitted gas turbines that spewed nitrogen oxides and formaldehyde into the surrounding area.
To make chemical air and crippling utility costs more palatable to the public, politicians like Crowley, Tiffany and Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor Josh Shapiro have touted additional “safeguards,” such as bans on nondisclosure agreements with data center developers and promises to ensure that projects won’t raise household electric bills.
That is procedural theatre. Prohibiting an NDA means that a struggling municipality will sell out its people in broad daylight rather than by night; it does nothing to change the incentives that force a town to accept unequal treaties from a rapacious colonizer to begin with. So-called “ratepayer protection” sacrifices the relative stability of a reasonably-worked electric grid for the whims of policymakers, while accepting that the public commons is still fair game for corporate accumulation.
With politicians like these, we will be left to debate over utility cost-sharing while being eaten alive from the feet up. Thankfully, the excuses are almost as inadequate to most Americans as the policies themselves. Fury from residents forced the Fort Worth City Council to pass a 90-day data center moratorium, which, while laughably unambitious and not applicable to the Black Mountain center permit approval that preceded its passage, is a sharp reversal from its previous stance. And judging by the popular reaction across the country so far, that moratorium will not be enough to placate them.
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