It Could Happen Here - The Necessary War on Data Centers

Episode Date: June 18, 2026

Robert argues that the current groundswell of public anger against data center projects represents an opportunity to hit Silicon Valley oligarchs where it hurts.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Celebrate Black Music Month with special episodes of the Questlove show. Listen on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. AllZone Media. Welcome to It Could Happen here. I'm Robert Evans. Now, a few days ago, I had the experience of listening to somebody that I've known for a while and known as a fairly mainstream liberal, someone who does not, in general, support the personal ownership of firearms, certainly not weapons like AR-15s, react to the recent race riots, pogroms, you know, whatever term, I guess, is most appropriate in Belfast, where racist mobs ran through the streets, attacking people in their homes, pulling them out of

their homes, lagging their homes on fire, targeting these people because they were not white. And this person, who I've known for a while, reacted to watching footage of this and reading headlines in their general shock and horror by saying something along the lines of, I guess if this kind of stuff is on the table, I understand why people need AR-15s. Now, nothing had actually changed about the way the world works to alter this person's opinion of guns or of reality. They were simply forced to confront an aspect of reality that had previously been obscured to them, because in earlier days, they had assumed that in any civilized nation, and they considered Northern Ireland to be part of a civilized nation,

police would stop this kind of behavior. And if you feel like the rule of law is something you can trust on pretty immutably, than someone else saying, no, I would rather have a gun of my own than trust a cop might sound like a maniac. Today's episode is not about guns or gun rights. It is in the most direct sense about data centers and the current people's war on building more of them. I see the current vast groundswell of support for this kind of activism and this fight in general as the most hopeful change in domestic politics in quite some time. And I think this movement could become a weapon that drives a stake into the hearts of the Silicon oligarchy that currently rule quite a lot of our world. The problem is any mass movement like this, especially one built on what is essentially

also like the biggest name in the news right now, AI, is going to involve a lot of misinformation and even disinformation. People don't just hate data centers for good reasons. They hate them for bad ones, too, or at least it would probably be more accurate for me to say a lot of people hate them for reasons that don't reflect something data centers actually do or make worse. The broader reason that I've seen some people have issues with this fight, with this mass movement against the construction of new data centers, is that data centers are utterly necessary modern infrastructure and incredibly crucial to the maintenance of what we would consider basic daily life.

This is something that's true even without AI, and this is something that was true prior to the introduction of what Silicon Valley likes to call AI into all of our lives. Data centers are what make the age of cloud computing possible. And starting in the 2010s, we decided that the cloud was where everything compute-wise was increasingly going to happen in the future. There were pragmatic reasons for this, having Word save your document to a cloud file that makes it instantly accessible from any machine with Internet access should you desire. that's a big leap forward in capability, at least in one direction. Likewise, having like a watch on your body that cannot just take down your biometric data during a workout, but can store it and analyze it over long periods of time, that offers people real utility. There's a reason

products like this are very popular. You can't, however, have the entire world mapped out and accessible for turn-by-turn navigation without needing a shitload of data centers somewhere, and in fact, in quite a few somewheres, to make that possible. Now, of course, there are also privacy tradeoffs for all of these kinds of products. That's been the entire logic of the Internet of Things era. You hand over your data and we deliver utility. Privacy advocates have had issues with this from the jump, but most people didn't, because the benefits were obvious and most people don't like to read or think very hard

if we can avoid it. For almost 20 years, consumers largely ignored the rollout of data centers around the world, even sometimes into our backyards because big tech had reasonably good PR, and most people were pretty happy with their gizmos, all in all. You get a hint of how uncontroversial this used to be in a 2022 article I found published on Microsoft's Source EMEA website written by Bill Briggs. The title was, critical to our modern society, how data centers power everyday necessities. Now, there was a little bit about AI in there, but this is 2022, and the hype cycle had nearly

hit its peak at that point. The article spent much more time emphasizing how integral data centers are in things that people like. Quote, simply put, they are the physical infrastructure behind cloud computing. And across Europe, Microsoft data centers are operating around the clock to support a wide spectrum of critical services, from the life-saving work of doctors and first responders to essential services like groceries and online banking. At the same time, data centers also empower in everyday necessities, like food deliveries, remote work, and video calls to family. The article goes on to include a quote from Rahil Nasir, an associate research director at a market research firm who called data centers the invisible infrastructure, which I find interesting because absolutely no one would call it that today, right? People only saw them as invisible back then because there hadn't been much public discussion about these things, and there weren't nearly as many of them, to be fair.

In 2022, the Deloro Group estimated global data center CAPX to have been about 241. billion. McKinsey is currently predicting global spending on data centers will reach $7 trillion by 2030. The number of data center projects in development or under contract exploded pretty much right after Microsoft put out the article I quoted from earlier, and this put millions of people face to face with the reality of data center construction projects. Many of them revolted. Q1 of 2026 saw a record 75 data center projects blocked or two to do.

delayed nationwide, which made it, in NBC's words, the most blocked and delayed quarter for data center projects on record. Researchers at Data World Watch told journalists they did not consider this a cyclical spike, calling it instead a structural shift caused as, quote, communities internalize an opposition playbook, legislative sessions introduced formal regulatory uncertainty, and the number of active opposition groups more than doubled to 833 across 49 states. Now, the rapid and obviously organic nature of this growth has alarmed certain Democratic and Republican politicians, largely the ones who have taken money from the tech industry. Some of these folks have panicked and insisted that Chinese government propaganda is behind the growth in opposition to data centers. The New York Times published a piece by sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom,

who argued that Democrats need to make the issue of data centers their issue because she believes that these protests could have a significant impact on the midterms and in 2028. In her column, she states that she wasn't initially sold on the value of data center protests, but time-round activists convinced her that she'd been wrong, in part because this was not an issue that inherently drew urban or suburban or rural voters together, but all of them, like it didn't inherently pull it Republican or Democratic voters. And thus, it was a way to bring people together and get them working together in common cause, which is a really beneficial thing to do if you're trying to pull people closer into like a broader political alignment with you.

And I would add to that point, just based on my own research and what I've seen, I feel like the fight against data centers is something that has what I like to call a high likelihood of fundamentalism in it or HLF. And an HLF issue is a kind of political fight that if you get drawn into it, you're really likely to become some kind of fundamentalist on the matter. And abortion would be a good example of this sort of issue, right? That's why back in the 1970s, the Republican Party adopted abortion as a central concern. Because if you get someone to become an anti-abortion activist, they'll vote just based on that, right? And if one party is against abortion and one parties for it, they'll never consider the party that is even open-minded to a party. it being legal in some limited sense, right? They become an absolutist on the matter. These are great

issues to pull people into like a voting block with because if you can get them to associate that issue with your party, you can kind of immunize that chunk of your voter base from economic concerns or other points of attack, at least in theory. Now, different issues tend to create fundamentalists for different reasons. People who are organizing against data centers aren't doing it usually because they think the idea of a data center is wrong. But many of them do believe that AI is evil and immoral, and AI is the reason that so many new data centers are going up. Many more people oppose new data centers for the specific reason they see them as a threat to their own personal environment and to their own power bills and to the cleanliness of their own

water and air. It may seem as if this is the kind of support that would tend to breed shallow activists. If you just don't want a data center in your hometown, that doesn't mean you give a fuck about one going up in Mississippi or wherever you don't live. After all, none of these people presumably cared about the data centers that had been going up five years ago, ten years ago, before the issue became salient to them. But as Tressy Cottom wrote, the realities of doing this kind of organism on the ground have a tendency to transcend the reasons individuals start getting into the fight. Quote, I have been watching this new ground swell of dissent firsthand in community meetings, organizing sessions, and civic trainings here in North Carolina. The resistance

has lifelong joiners, alumni from environmental and housing movements, and young organizers. There are also a lot of people who have never dreamed of being disagreeable in public, much less consider joining a raucous social movement. The imminent risk of living next to a data center may be why they show up for a meeting, but they're committing to the issue for bigger, deeper reasons. Political corruption and corporate malfeasance make them feel politically impotent. Voicing their objections, sharing their anxieties with others, recalling politicians who override them and in some cases beating the opposition is giving them something few politicians are offering a taste of political power. And we'll continue.

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Anytime, anywhere. Just ask your smart speaker to play IHart Pride Canada. Stream us on your phone. Or listen now at iHeartRadio.ca. Hey, I'm Hoda Kotby, host of the podcast, Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby. Together, we're going to have meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people. Like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges. I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer, and that was more difficult.

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And we're back. I think it's really important to emphasize something that Kottom said at the end of that last quote, which is that part of why the anti-data center movement is potent and why it tends to draw people in much deeper than maybe the initial shallowness of why they got in would suggest is that it offers them a sense of political power and of agency and an agency. in which people are being trained more and more to feel as if they have no agency. You can't stop this. You can't fight this. Or alternatively, this guy will do the fighting for you, right? People are getting it from all sides, wherever they actually land in the political aisle. And that's, quite frankly, not very much fun. It's really fun to feel like you're a part of a movement like this that's kicking ass and taking names. Now, I don't share the long-term goals that led Codham to write that article, at least not all of them.

I get the sense that she wants to give the Democratic Party a powerful new long-term voting block. I don't care so much about that. Now, I do, of course, want to see the Republican Party beaten electorally, and more Democratic votes is the only current way to do that. But the Democratic Party is not morally or logistically capable of doing anything but betraying these people in the long run. I really do believe that. The reason why is the reason why the party has been incredibly slow to embrace these

activists in any cohesive fashion. This movement is death for. Silicon Valley. And Silicon Valley has a lot of fucking money. And when I say death, don't think I'm exaggerate. Data Center Watch is calculated that the total value of data centers blocked in early 2026. This is just the first three months of this year was around $130 billion compared to a total of $156 billion in projects blocked in all of 2025. Now, a huge month last year for data construction expenses in the U.S. was last July, which was actually a historic month. And that represented about $14 billion in expenses. So the value of the projects that have been stopped

are significant, even in tech industry terms. More to the point, nearly all the money that underlies and underwrites these corporations and their owners is fake. Elon Musk could not produce a trillion dollars of real liquid U.S. dollars if he wanted to, because that simply is not how assets work. Most of his wealth is in stock valuation, and those stocks are worth what they're worth because of consumer sentiment as much as anything objectively real. The entire AI bubble is being underwritten by the belief that this will be worth it. There are trillions in value here, and we just need to spend a few trillion more to unlock them. None of that value can be unlocked without data centers,

and if you throw a wrench in their plans to build more, you can hobble the whole effort. Any delay or serious setback creates the risk of a panic, and panic is their greatest enemy. All it takes is one sufficiently disastrous crash to kill many of these big overvalued companies, SpaceX and Anthropic and Open AI and Microsoft and Meta can't all survive a market collapse, just as they won't, sadly, all die. Nor can their billionaire bosses all remain masters of the universe. If they fall off their perch in a raid that shatters the global economy,

we won't even have to bring all of these guys to court. Some of them will get done in by their former friends overseas. There's a reason why some VC types have already started trying to describe anti-Data Center activism as terroristic. They are, in fact, terrified of it. This segment from an ARS-Technica article by Ashley Bellinger should give you an idea of what I'm discussing. Quote, the researchers suggested that the back half of 2025 marked a turning point as data center opposition emerged as a national level narrative that showed the AI industry can no longer see the fights as individual zoning disputes.

It is now reshaping elections, regulation, and site viability nationwide data center watch reported last year. Where before, officials were criticized for quietly signing deals without discussing construction with nearby residents, now they're encountering backlash before any deal is in the books, data center watch found. In some cases, researchers reported, opposition mobilized before any project was officially filed. The mere rumor of a data center was enough to trigger organized resistance. Now, folks, when you hit this level of cultural inflection with a movement,

you are in an extremely powerful, but also very dangerous position. There's a reason that Steve Bannon's also made waves recently by encouraging his side to start reaching out to the anti-Data center people, He knows this energy can be co-opted, or at least he believes it can. For my part, I want to see this energy harnessed, I want to see it burn brightly, like the working flame of an oxyacetylene torch, because I want to see it used to cut directly into the belly of the industry that I hate. The best way for us to do this right now is to create as many moments as possible, where projects to construct new data centers clash with protesters. Each of these conflicts has the potential to spark a panic in the market, and every piece of bad press contributes to the overall, weight of public opinion and expectation against AI and against big tech.

We never know which piece will be the one that breaks this current incarnation of the industry. The name of the game for us, then, is to create as many moments as we can that endanger the future of this market and the industry behind it, and we can do that entirely legally by forcing them to confront reality. None of these data center projects are sold to towns and cities based on real, accurate information about how they will impact the environment and the local community. One good example of this recently from the United States is a story earlier this year about a data center project in Box Elder County, Utah. The proposed buildings together would have been three times the size of Manhattan and stretched across multiple sites.

The project was championed by celebrity billionaire Kevin O'Leary, who was also the VC behind it. For a separate article in Ars Technica, quote, residents' top concern was the Stratos Data Center project draining local waters, and they were willing to pay to protect them, most especially the vulnerable, Salt Lake. Many locals paid a $15 fee to register comets to block the transfer of 1,900 acre feet of water from a ranch to the hyperscale data center. Other concerns include electricity bills rising and potential risks to air

quality, local wildlife, and land. Venture capitalist Kevin O'Leary, chair of O'Leary Digital and Shark Tank investor, is behind the construction of the project. He told a local ABC affiliate that he regrets not working with state officials to be more transparent about the project from the beginning. We really screwed it up, O'Leary said, while confirming he was not expecting this intense kind of blowback from the public. He claimed that he and state officials

anticipated that people would be excited about the major local investment and made huge mistakes by not involving the public more in discussions based on that assumption. We pissed off a lot of people and that's not the way I do business, O'Leary said. That's not. Now, even that he undeniably did business this way, I disagree, but that's beside the point. The resistance was successful. Now, the project wasn't killed entirely, but it has been massively scaled back and may yet die on the vine. The fact that resistance to this huge project and many like it has caused so much damage to the industry has prompted a scale response. In late May and early June of 26, I noticed a drip and then a flood of new articles and viral content critical of the anti-Data Center protests. One good example of this would be a June 10th article on the website Bar Chart by Nash Riggins.

it was titled, Data Centers get a bad rap for using too much water and energy. It turns out almonds suck up even more. Now, in this incredibly snotty little shit of an article, Nash is reporting on the fact that a bunch of pro-AI influencers had with shocking coordination started posting online, responding to complaints about data center water usage by pointing out how wasteful it really is to grow almonds. You know, the almond industry uses even more water than AI does. And, you know, if you want to go, good response to that, just say, sure, put him out of business. Fuck them. Another popular article in this genre was a blog post by Andy Masley. He critiqued the argument that AI was particularly wasteful by making arguments like this, per an interview with him

on azeefamily.com. Almost all of that 1.7 trillion gallons of water per year, specifically water that is withdrawn in the return to the source, Masley told me, referring to a widely cited estimate from Karen Howe's Empire of AI. The book claimed surging AI demand could use up to 1.7 trillion gallons of fresh water globally by 2027, or half the water annually withdrawn in the UK. Masley says the word use in that sentence is misleading. Data centers do evaporate most of the water they use on-site for cooling, but on-site use represents only about 20% of their total water footprint. The other 80% comes from power plants that heat water to spin turbines. That water is then returned mostly unchanged to its source. Masley's viral post got him interviewed

by the New York Times and earned a correction from the author of the book, but his critiques about specific claims made there shouldn't be seen as having any overall legitimacy to the broader argument about data center water use. For one thing, he acts as if all data centers function the same way, basically, both in terms of how they're powered and in terms of how they do cooling, and thus you can make the kind of assumptions about water use that is making, and you just fucking can't. Now, the Environmental and Energy Study Institute has published an expansive analysis of data centers and water consumption. They point out that this is all much more complex than Masley's quote might lead you to believe. And I'm going to read from that article.

Quote, in the context of data centers, water consumption refers to the amount of water withdrawn from blue or gray sources, minus the water discharged by the centers, primarily warm water left over from cooling the IT racks. The consumed water is generally the water that evaporates or is otherwise taken out of immediate human usage. Withdrawal of fresh water from local streams or underground aquifers may lead to aquifer exhaustion, particularly in water stressed areas. Approximately 80% of the water, typically, freshwater withdrawn by data centers evaporates, with the remaining water discharged into municipal wastewater facilities. The large volume of wastewater from data centers may overwhelm existing

local facilities, which were not designed to handle such a high volume. And again, one of the things that Masley tends to ignore is that even when you're putting this water back into the system, quote-unquote, that doesn't mean it's going back into the aquifers that it was pulled out of. It doesn't mean that it's going back into the same way, which can still cause massive issues. Now, how water-efficient a data center is, is going to vary, depending on the climate of its location. But because these tend to require a lot of space, many are built in places where land is cheap. Those places are often hot and dry, like Utah and Wyoming. Data centers in hotter climates use more water. Data centers specifically built for the AI industry also have higher chip density, which requires more cooling,

which uses more water. As time goes on, these increased demands lead to more and more being demanded of the local areas that agree to host data centers. Since data centers, since data centers don't lend themselves to any other industries or create very many jobs, this often leaves local communities dependent upon them, which means they have no choice but to say yes to ever harsher environmental demands. I'm not creating a hypothetical here. This has happened over and over again, and I'm going to read again from that article by eESI.org. Northern Virginia is considered the world capital for data centers with over 300 operational data centers spread across four counties. Collectively, all data centers in Northern Virginia consumed close to two billion

gallons of water in 2023, a 63% increase from 2019. Luton County, with approximately 200 operational data centers, used about 900 million gallons of water in 2023. This has led Luton Water, the county's Fresh Water Authority, to rely heavily on potable water for data centers rather than reclaimed water. Now, activists looking for cautionary tales about what data center addiction can do to an area should look no further than Northern Virginia. The region started saying yes to such development decades ago when the industry was very much different. Back then, AOL was based there, and their data center was part of an overall campus that employed more than 5,000 people, per an article by the Lincoln Institute. The campus has since been demolished, and three large data center

facilities are being built on the site. There's a big fence around it for security purposes, so it's totally isolated from the community now, and it's only going to employ about 100 to 150 people in the same piece of land. That's the difference. That's a quote from a local resident. And we'll hear from some other local residents, but first, here's ads. Pride is like love. You feel it in your heart. IR. Radio. Canada's number one streaming app for radio and podcasts, including IHart Pride Canada,

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Together, we're going to have meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people. Like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges. I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer, and that was more difficult. There's a lot of people who understand postpartner depression. I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety. Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda. be on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, listen up.

The Jonas Brothers here. Our podcast is called, Hey Jonas. We've here, since everyone has a podcast, we want it to as well. And we've had some incredible guests so far. And now our good friend, Nile Horn, is joining the show. How's it going, boys? Hey, Niall. It's the same thing with Slow Hands.

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Now, I've mostly discussed the fight against data centers thus far as an American thing. And it isn't. I think it is particularly relevant to our upcoming elections in a way that deserves particular attention. But this is a global fight. And it is a global fight not just because people hate AI, but because data centers and the AI they enable have come to symbolize the tech elite, who have bought our world and who are in the process of burning it to the ground. Hatred of these people should know no geographical boundary, and this presents the possibility of international outreach,

as well as collaboration and strategizing. As an example, I'll discuss a small community in Romania, Mishli, which is located in one of the poorest sections of the country. In 2020, they said hello to a team from cluster power who wanted to construct a data center in the area. The mayor gave a welcoming speech that should sound familiar to many of you. We are incredibly proud to have an investor on board and to see people talking about the data center in Mischli. The company contributes to the local economy by paying taxes here and has chosen this area as its headquarters.

So that all sounds great, but I found an article for Algorithm watch that notes, quote, no documentation was provided to verify the tax revenue actually generated for the commune. By June of 2024, only 10 jobs had been created compared to at least 300 that had been promised. Now, you can find stories that are almost identical to this. all over the United States, but also elsewhere in Europe, like the Netherlands and Germany, and in many other places besides. Everywhere these companies do business, they leave behind broken promises and lies, like a trail of gasoline reeking behind them as they go.

Why shouldn't we drop a match and watch the fire catch them? There are dangers to embracing a movement based around opposing the construction of infrastructure that is necessary for a lot of modern life. But I might argue, those dangers look a lot less scary if we recognize that necessary, for modern current life, and necessary for life itself, aren't necessarily the same thing. In much the same way, as I would give up my ability to buy pistachios and almonds year-round to avoid California not having water, I'm willing to reconsider what miracles of daily life are really worth the cost if it turns out the cost is that high.

And the scariest thing in the world to the people who currently run it is this. Perhaps one day soon, everyone will start to feel this way. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Coolzone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

Joy is essential and it's also elusive. But now, there's a new and exciting way to start your journey toward a more joyful existence. Joy 101. It's a new podcast hosted. by me, Hoda Kotby. If you're craving inspiration to maximize your joy, tune into these candid, uplifting, and moving on-air

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And we've had some incredible guests so far. And now our good friend, Nile Horn, is joining the show. How's it going, boys? Hey, Niall. It's the same thing with slow hands. Slow hands is not about anything else, really, is it? You know, or taste so good can be about food. You do the same, Nick, with some of the stuff that you've done.

You too, Joe. Drop what you're doing and listen to Hey Jonas on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Happy Pride from the Outspoken Podcast Network. All month long and all year round, we're celebrating being loud, proud, and always original. It's me, Brandon Kyle Goodman, host of the podcast, Tell Me Something Mess. Check out my show for unfiltered takes on dating, relationships, and adulting. Listen to High Key for the best pop culture takes, and there are no girls on the internet for all your tech news.

For your favorite celebrity key keys, check outlaws with T.S. Madison. Learn to love yourself unapologetically with BFF, Black Fat Fem, and start your day with intention with waking up with Ryan coming in July. Celebrate Pride with the Outspoken Network. Open your free IHeart Radio app. Search Pride and listen now. This Black Music Month, the Questlove show celebrates the visionaries, shaping culture through sound. From country trailblazer Mickey Gaiden to hip-hop icon Fat 5 Freddie, the sonic genius of Thundercat, and the revolutionary voice of Chuck D. I want it loud.

So the timing might be off, the sound might be muffled, but what's going to come out of there is something that you can feel. Celebrate Black Music Month with special episodes of the Questlove show. Listen on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your. your podcast. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human.