WASHINGTON: Opponents of the rapid buildout of data centres held protests on Saturday in at least 125 locations across the United States, the first coordinated national effort to channel anger at the AI infrastructure expansion that has ramped up over the past year and roiled local politics.
The protests were coordinated by a grassroots group called HumansFirst, co-founded by a former leader of the modern-day Tea Party who has compared growing opposition to data centers to the right-wing populist movement that emerged in 2009 to protest what it saw as excessive taxation and government overreach.
Protesters rallied against what HumansFirst calls the unaccountable buildout of data centers and unacceptable infringement on our liberty. Towns and counties have been at the forefront of opposition to data centre projects that in some cases have been greenlit with local officials signing non-disclosure agreements with developers despite resident pushback or a lack of regulatory scrutiny.
Now politicians at the state and national level are scrambling to keep pace with rising voter anger over the threat of higher power bills, the diversion of precious water resources and pollution. Data centre opposition is among the few issues uniting Americans across ideological lines, with just a third of Americans approving of the pace of data-centre construction in the US, according to a June Reuters/Ipsos poll. Only 14pc of respondents would support a data center being built in their community to support artificial intelligence projects for technology firms such as Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and Elon Musk’s xAI.
