Search Engine - A road trip through the data center debate

Episode Date: August 11, 2026

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

I follow the news closely, but I'm not an election junkie. I know who's running. I keep an eye on the big and medium races, but I just... Look, there are people who enjoy elections the way they enjoy sports, and I don't enjoy elections. Actually, the way I also don't enjoy sports. Not for me. And because of that, sometimes I will notice that the midterms are approaching in a backwards way.

It'll sneak up on me. I will just become aware, as an otherwise pretty active news and internet consumer, that the vast national jacuzzi that is our discourse has been getting hotter and more bubbly. Leftists and liberals howling into each other's respective voids at a shriller timbre, the sudden arrival of random new politicians dunking or being dunked on, Haley Stevens, an unusual talker here today, gone tomorrow.

Abdul El-Sayat sounds like Obama but says different things. This is my level of tracking. It's blurry. But what I noticed sharply is how all the political attention changes conversations I actually do care about. One of them being technology and how it affects us. And technology is very much in the jacuzzi this year. Really, data centers.

The internet infrastructure powering the AI boom, which we've covered on our show, they are now a part of this year's midterms, with politicians on both sides understanding there's a lot of popular sentiment, some of it quite negative, directed at all this. And voters might be looking at these buildings as the brakes they can slowly.

slam on the AI push. Reporter Jasmine's son got curious about how voters and politicians in two swing states were thinking about data centers. What the backlash looks like, what's causing it, and where it all might be about to go. So she set out on a road trip through the American jacuzzi. I spent about 10 days in Michigan and in Wisconsin driving around between cities, small towns, data center sites to just talk to a ton of people. and figure out, do people actually hate these data centers?

And if so, why? Jazz and Son is one of my favorite reporters covering the San Francisco tech scene, an anthropologist of a town where nearly everybody she knows is all in on AI. She spends a lot of her time writing about talking to the people we normally hear from in the AI race, the people building that future. This summer, she wanted to talk to everybody else. The voters deciding what they think of all this, whether they actually want these supposed gifts they're being offered.

Before you set out on this trip, how would you have explained data center oppositionally? What was your view? I had two concurrent views, I suppose. I was definitely confused. I didn't really get it. I thought that, you know, data centers have existed to power the Internet for a very long time. Northern Virginia is full of them.

And so I was like maybe it's about AI, was what I thought. It might just be that people are scared of AI, that they hate AI, and their polarization of AI is just coming out as, anger at data centers, which are sort of the physical proxy for hating AI in general, which is otherwise a quite difficult thing to shape or to fight. But I also definitely thought that a lot of people were just misinformed about what data centers were and their environmental impacts. And yeah, I wasn't really sure.

So you hit the road? Yes. What was the first sort of place in your road trip where you found one of your assumptions just being challenged, where you found yourself surprised? So the first data center site or proposed data. data center site that we visited was Janesville, Wisconsin. I had heard of Janesville when I was actually doing research on AI and potential labor impacts because I had been interested in deindustrialization and what happens when a bunch of jobs disappear. Once the economic cornerstone of Janesville,

the giant GM plant in its heyday employing 7,000 people. And Janesville is most famous recently nationally because they had like a hundred-year-old GM plant that closed. in 2008 during the financial crisis, and this decimated the community. When the plant idled in 2008, unemployment soared to 13 percent, and the town became a nonpartisan symbol of the Great Recession. Thousands of jobs disappeared basically overnight in not that big of a town. It was the economic centerpiece of the town. People were not able to successfully retrain into new jobs.

It was really bad for the community. And now, with the old GM site, which has been laying dormant for 15 or so years, there was a data center proposal where it's like, why don't we take this brownfield and build a hyperscale data center on top of it? Sorry, if we can start just one time over, that'd be great. Thank you. So I am born and raised, Rock County. So Janesville, Milton area, my entire life. been strictly pretty much Jane'sville area the last 15 years of my life.

So the first person I talked to, his name is Adam Schultz. He had spoken up on a city council meeting in favor of the data center, which is pretty rare, because there's not a lot of people at these meetings who are pro-Data Center, or at least vocally so.

And for Adam, it had been his job for five years to actually sell the brownfield that this GM site had been on. Because from his perspective, it's like, there is a dead spot in town that is doing

nothing. Right. It's like kind of in the middle of downtown. It's like literally a five-minute drive from the main downtown corridor. Got it. It's super close. And it's literally a gigantic 100-acre concrete slab with a bunch of weeds overgrown on it. There is nothing going on there. And there has been nothing going on. And the reason that there's nothing going on is because there's a bunch of contamination and hazardous waste that GM never cleaned up that nobody else wants to buy land full of. Nobody could ever make sense of the contamination and the numbers to develop anything there. What were some of the other businesses that you try to sell the site to?

What kinds of businesses are these? Typically, you know, it's a heavy industrial site that's kind of in the middle of town. Really good infrastructure for heavy manufacturing. I mean, that's what it always was. So those types of users were most of the conversations. And this guy was so frustrated because every interested buyer said, I don't want to clean up the waste. They left.

It's no longer his responsibility. when a data center showed up, and they were like, we will pay the $30 million to clean up the waste. He was like, finally, we will have something that isn't just a slab of concrete in this community. So he wasn't even, like, personally in a position to make money off of it. He was just like, this is a land that human beings have found too expensive to make suitable for humans. His perspective was, why wouldn't you want a factory for computers here? Yes. I've said it a number of times.

I wasted five years in my life marketing the GM property. I'm confident that we will have a data center. down there or we will have a giant slab of concrete. End of story. Like, you will not get a developer to spend money there outside of this industry. It's just not going to happen. And I'd love to be proven wrong. I don't believe I will be.

I mean, he just kept saying over and over, like, it's going to be a data center or it's going to be a concrete slab. The economics do not work for literally any other commercial buyer to buy this plot of land that's contaminated. I know because I tried. And he said, you know, like, I'm from Rock County. I've had GMers and my family. It's kind of a slap in the face to take what was once an economic centerpiece of the community and just let it lie there.

And so for him, it was actually important to bring the business back in order to bring Janesville back, which has been, again, as sort of icon of one of these more economically depressed areas after deindustrialization. The city of Janesville has yet to confirm what will go up at the site of the former GM plant, but Janesville residents at tonight's common council meeting are making it known what they don't want to go up. at the site. On the other hand, though, when I met the activists who were organizing to get the data center blocked, what was surprising to me was, A, definitely not the sort of TikTok Adolidates that some Silicon Valley types might caricature.

And TikTok adult idiots would be like, like for instance, when you see people debating about data centers online, there is a lot of evidence that data centers, because they use a lot of electricity, can raise local electricity prices. The concerns about water usage tend to be, like, pretty overblown or sort of misunderstood. So TikTok adult activists would be, like, people who think that a nearby data center is going to drain the lakes or something like that. Yeah, yeah. And I'm not – there are definitely some people I'd met in general who had said these data centers are draining the Great Lakes. That's why they're building them here.

These organizers were not one of them. In general, the activists tend to be pretty informed. They brought a copy of the local zoning code. That's the GM site there, right? Yep. So this guy right here. So, yeah, we are – We're on the GMJECO site right about there.

So this is how the city of Janesville is zoned out. So anything with that yellow kind of coloration is actually residential zoning. So you can see very strong. They said, yes, this area is industrially zoned, but we don't like that it's next to a residential area. They knew a lot about the local environment. They were willing to admit uncertainty about questions like water, pollution. They were not saying this is going to drain the Great Lakes. What they were making arguments for was, A, no one's done long-term.

environmental studies of hyperscale data centers, which is pretty true. But what I was actually more surprised by was these folks were really, really angry at their local government. They were really angry at the old Janesville city manager and the city council. I think there's a feeling from a lot of these places, which tend to be more rural, tend not to be like the richest areas that we get screwed over by corporations all the time. And we always get the short end of the stick. And how are our part-time city council members getting like $5,000 a year supposed to get a fair contract with these corporate lawyers who can always find a way to back out of a deal, who can leave a brownfield full of contaminated waste that you never cleaned up for 15 years.

So we're talking about small communities that don't have the legal budget to negotiate well. They're not on equal footing. And then they don't have any room for wiggle if something happens on the other end. you'll never hold a company to a contract. They could bury us in legal fees. Like have some sort of exception clause. Right, or whatever it is. If this happens, we can give up on the whatever.

Right. There's no way. There's no municipal funding for enforcement and legal fees and stuff like that. So it's very asymmetric. It's very asymmetric. It's predatory. It's extractionary. It just, the whole thing feels just not right.

So in some ways their opposition, it's not just like sort of like knee-jerk, Luddite stuff. It's like, hey, this isn't transparent. and it's really easy to imagine this going in a different direction. Yes. Like, if you think we could get an ear with city manager or even council members, no, they didn't want to talk about it. And because this is shrouded in secrecy, like, I still don't know the level of involvement of, like, sitting council members or...

NDAs. NDAs galore. Wait, tell me about the NDAs. So a lot of data center developers, when they come into a community, they'll have a municipality, sign an NDA to not reveal the customer, not reveal the environmental costs or what they're going to build there or what electricity use would demand. All people would see is maybe a vague project like Project Canoli or Project Nova that shows up on a city planning meeting. No one knows what it is. No one knows it's going to be a data center.

No one knows it's going to be for OpenAI or Anthropic or whoever. Why do the companies want these NDAs? I've heard different reasons. So partly it's so that they can try to have different localities compete for deals against each other if they haven't made a decision yet. Partly is to not immediately raise the land value of all of the neighborhoods around the data center. Oh, because it's a way to have negotiating leverage against. I think a lot of it has to do with negotiating leverage. Yeah.

But like frankly, every single person I talked to, including every pro data center person I talked to on this trip, was anti-NDA. They thought it made the distrust much worse. They thought the lack of transparency meant that rumors could spread on social media and the city councils would not be able to stop them because they weren't able to talk. So Microsoft has decided to stop doing NDAs, for example. They just didn't realize how much distrust it would so. Interesting. So were you finding the activist argument more sympathetic than you'd imagine before the trip again? I think I was.

I mean, I think like I had obviously not lived through something like the GM plant closing. I had not lived through in Mount Pleasant where Foxcon promised 13,000 jobs. The village of Mount Pleasant and the local county, I think took out like over $100 million in loans for infrastructure investments. And then Foxcon pulled out, built maybe a smaller factory with a thousand jobs,

and just kind of like left the village and the county trying to figure out what to do with all that land now that they'd invested over $100 million for, you know, a town of a couple, tens of thousands of people. Yeah, it's funny. I mean, my search engine's editor, Sharitha Pidemini, she did a story about that Foxcon deal before it had completely, I'm trying to think of a more uptown way to say like shot the bed. But like there is an asymmetry where big corporations can go town to town looking for the best possible deal. And those towns are not necessarily equipped to make a deal for themselves where the risk is distributed in a way that is good for them. Exactly. And like one of the most egregious examples I saw during the road trip was in Saline, Michigan. Celine Township is a small town with just over 2,200 residents.

They have a lot of fight in them, and many of them voiced their concerns over a new data center coming into their community. Selene Township has, I think, 3,000 people in it. So it's really small, really rural, like we're driving down on dirt road. That is the location of a new Stargate site that is being built for OpenAI and for Oracle. So these are gigantic tech companies coming in. It's going to be a huge 1.4 gigawatt data center. And initially in that case, Celine Township actually voted for one against having the data center.

In September, Celine Township board members voted to deny rezoning the 575 acres of farmland needed for the $7 billion data center project, which will house Oracle and check GPT owner, OpenAI. The city council was not excited about the tradeoff. And what happened was they got sued. They got sued by the data center developers over exclusionary zoning, saying that, according to state law, you cannot bar all industrial zoning. You have to have some land allocated for industrial use. You can't just leave it all agricultural. And a count of 3,000 people is not going to win a lawsuit against OpenAI Oracle and the data center developers. So they settled for $14 million.

And people were angry about the settlement. Nobody's here to protect me. Nobody's here to protect us. I am angry. And maybe you can't do anything about it, but I'm angry you didn't fight harder. How dare you? How dare you? That's it.

I think it feels to people who live in that community like there was a democratic decision by the local government to say, no, thank you. Please go somewhere else. And the data centers and the AI company said, screw you, we're doing this anyway. And we have our lawyers to make this happen. You know, we've all lived here, most of us all lived here all over life. You're just coming in here and taking away this. You know what?

I can't believe this. I really can't believe it. The thing is, you already started. And the feeling is that AI is a project that mainly helps some people somewhere else, people who are working computer jobs in San Francisco and New York, maybe. Most people who I talk to, they might use ChatGPT to write emails or make memes, but it's not an essential part of their lives. And so I think that there's this sense that these outside coastal corporations

who are building something for their own, whether ego race, their own software companies, whatever it is, they feel that they can decide what your town should look like and they will use their asymmetric power in order to accomplish their vision and you are mere collateral damage in that process. And so I think this feeling of who gets to shape the future, this feeling of, oh, these corporations, like they don't even care about what we think.

They don't even care about democratic process. They're happy to sort of force democratic process to their will. And it's all for this thing that isn't really producing anything that helps me, I think, was the big feeling there. They feel like they had Google Search and it was working fine. There's this new version of Google Search, which for some reason is massively expensive and requires all these new factories. It's as if there's a big machine in San Francisco that they find a little bit useful but not that useful.

And the big machine requires a giant exhaust pipe in the middle of their town. Maybe not literally in terms of pollution, but in terms of you will take the negative externalities of this. And whether you like it or not, it's kind of going to happen. Yeah, I mean, two different people, one activist and one public school teacher in Madison, who I talked to offhand, just said, why doesn't Mark Zuckerberg build the data center in his backyard? Like, they aren't building these in San Francisco. They're coming to one of the poorest counties in our state with a property that's been vacant, knowing that, like, people are thirsty to have development here or to have something here. Like, it feels predatory.

I think there's this question of if this technology is so important to those people in San Francisco, can't they just put it there? Why are they taking the externalities and imposing that on us? And that feeling, I think, doesn't feel good to people. And it's funny, it's not as if, you know, in the... the brain of like American auto companies, people didn't want the factories in their towns. It's not like they were like, I don't understand why Henry Ford doesn't just live in an auto plant. It's just kind of intangible. I mean, like I think a lot of the public policy problem is you have pretty abstract and diffuse benefits. They don't see the outputs, but then the harms are so tangible.

The fact that there's now an ugly building near you and people hear things about water and pollution and electricity rates. Yeah, it's tangible, narrow harms and like diffuse. abstract benefits that will maybe come to our community and maybe somewhere else. And again, these deals mean that sometimes the property taxes don't show up for like 10 or 20 years. And people think, what if the data center gets abandoned by them? What if the AI bubble pops? Like, it's not necessarily true that just the property taxes mean that you are going to get a tax break next year. Sometimes it means the property taxes are going to be used to pay off the infrastructure improvements to build the data center. And then maybe in 10 or 20 years after they finish

paying for their streets for the data center, they will pay for the schools. So there's like obvious costs theoretical benefits. I think so, yeah. One thing that was really shocking to me was how often anti-Data Center folks told me, I don't believe that that's going to happen. So like I would say something like, if you could guarantee that your electricity prices would stay the same for the next five years while this data center is being built, would you be more open to it?

Because they all say, no, we're not going to let your rates rise, where we're going to cover it, right? That's what they all say. Is it just like, we don't believe it based on their history? No, it's completely false. Everyone that is involved in these fights understands how it works, so we know that's bullshit. And they know that we know that that's bullshit. Does it matter?

Not really. So they're either dumbasses or liars. It's one of the two. Or both. And people would say, I don't believe that they're not going to raise the rates. DTE, the utility provider in Michigan, has raised rates almost every year for the last five years. why would they stop doing it? I don't believe them because we know their grid can't support it without adding more generation.

And I think what I think of now when I say that, oh, they're not going to overtax the grid or anything like that. To me, when I read in between those lines, it's because, oh, instead of a big, noisy data center next to your community, we're also going to stick a private gas generation power plant on the same property or nearby, or a small modular nuclear reactor. And I can't think of anything worse than having a data center except to have a data center and a nuclear reactor next to your kid's school. Or if I said something like, this data center is expected to pay 10, 20 million in property taxes year after year, like that could go towards the streets, that could go towards the schools.

Does that interest you? Folks would say, I don't think they're going to do it. I think that they're probably going to write themselves a carve-out. What if the AI bubble pops before they'd even do that? It's infuriating that if at some point the AI bubble bursts in such a way that they just collapse, which is extremely possible, you know,

then there's nothing, there's no protections for what happens to this land, what happens to communities that have already been burned. They can't recoup money. they can't recoup, and that's our tax dollars, you know? So it's just like supporting what feels like right before the 2008 crash, except for much worse. And so it's not even necessarily that getting the deals slightly tweaked, learning the exact facts on water use or energy would have changed their minds. The fundamental thing going on was this repeated, I don't believe them when they say they're going to pay their property taxes. And I can point to an example in the past where we got screwed over by a big company.

So why should we believe them this time? I think it's an incredibly hard problem to make a deal in an environment of trust that low. And in that sense, I do sympathize with local officials who are trying to raise revenues, trying to bring economic development to their communities, and who are running into a roadblock because there is an element of trust that's required to sign a contract. And you can't guarantee everything will go perfectly. We're going to take a short break. We've visited Janesville and Celine to Midwest.

towns with high levels of data center antepathy. When we come back, our road trip continues to meet a union leader who wants these data centers and a politician, Abdul al-Said, who's fighting against them. The following conversation is brought to you by Lab Corps on demand. I find that sometimes I really, really hyper-focus on work and my social life, and I pay a little bit less attention to my health than I probably should. I was talking recently to a friend, and we had a pretty surprising conversation about this, really about medical tests.

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and use code search. Know yourself. Welcome back to the show. A lot of what Jasmine had captured in her microphone on her mini-American tour was semi-organized rage towards these data centers. I'd wanted to hear more about people

like the real estate agent we'd heard from, though. People who actually wanted these buildings. Who were you, like, in your road trip? Who were you running into who wanted this? Besides people, obviously, who worked for AI companies? Like, who was pro-Data Center? I would say that the few categories are there are definitely some local officials who are really excited about data centers. Again, for tax revenue reasons.

I mean, in Mount Pleasant, Microsoft is paying $20 million a year in taxes to this city of, I think, like, 28,000 people. And so it is a huge boon for the tax base, and it means that these towns, don't have to raise taxes on their actual residents, and they can invest in infrastructure as costs go up. And that was something I heard a lot of from local officials. In addition, you have labor. Maybe the first question, very basic, is just how you got involved in this union and Local 139

and just the basic mini-history. Oh, that goes back. I started when I was 14 years old at a local excavating shop. I would shovel the garage floor at night, change tires on the. I talked to a union leader named Terry McGowan, who gave me his whole backstory. He's with the International Union of Operating Engineers. And he told me that with all the data center projects bringing up around Wisconsin, the skill trades have been kind of booming.

People are getting these super well-paying jobs. The apprenticeship program that the union runs is doubling in size and enrollment. Companies are literally dangling these cash per diems at workers because there are so many shortages and there's such high demand. And so he said from his perspective, the data center boom was such a windfall for the skill trades. It's just been a windfall. I mean, when I started in this business, it was a roller coaster. Okay, work was good, work was bad. Work was good, work was bad.

This has just been a steady stream. I grew up just outside of Milwaukee. Milwaukee was an industrial city. And back in Milwaukee's heyday, when I was a young man, noise was money. And you know what the thing was? The citizens of that area revered these huge, massive industrial factories because this is the engine, is paying our bills, sending our kids of school, feeding us, you know, housing us. And they were hailed.

And so construction workers, the trades workers are pretty excited about data centers. But other than local officials who really rock the tax revenue and maybe the few thousand people who are in the trades, there's not really a super strong pro-Data Center constituency in the way that, at least with housing or with solar farms, there's usually some group of people like environmentalists or people who want to move there who are kind of excited about it. One really interesting thing that shows up in the polling is data center opposition is pretty equal, no matter whether you actually live near a data center or not. So if it was just nimbism, you would think people who live near the housing might not want the new housing, but people who don't live near there would be excited

about housing, right? That's sort of normal standard issue nimbiasm. What you see in data center pulling is that whether or not you live near a proposed data center, everyone kind of hates them equally, which suggests that it is more anger at data centers or a dislike of data centers than it is specifically, I want data centers just not near me. It's funny. The very same people that are afraid of AI, and I think that's what it is more than anything, they're just afraid of the advanced technology, they're so afraid of AI taking over everything or their media or their brain that the negative people, the people against AI, have actually gotten in their brains. That's what I feel. But so it's like what you're seeing, it sounds like, is the support basically comes from local

politicians who say, this is going to be great for the tax base and skilled tradespeople, like those unions like them. Otherwise, it sounds like the picture of the opposition that, that was starting to be drawn for you is if one of the big questions around AI is like if this is really gonna be socially important technology, how are those spoils gonna be shared? The deals around these data centers, it's like one of the early battles.

It's like are the companies going to negotiate deals for themselves where they keep most of the spoils or are there some local city councilor going to be able to learn from a local city councilor somewhere else to carve out a deal that makes sense? And like the intuition that activists have, that people have is that these are bad deals. The intuition is that there is such a power asymmetry that they don't really get to choose.

Please welcome the next United States senator from the state of Michigan, Abdul Al-Said. So one of the most interesting things was going to Lansing, Michigan, a rally that Abdui El-Sayed hosted with Bernie, with AOC. There are things happening in this country that people everywhere are shocked by. A government of, by, and for the oligarchs. This was kind of bundled into the Bernie AOC anti-Oligarchy tour. A lot of it was also about dark money and politics. That was sort of the narrative that was hit again and again.

Dark money could mean APAC. Dark money could mean big pharma. Dark money could mean the utility company everyone hates, but dark money also meant these data center deals. We've got each other. Folks who may never understand the lives that one another lead locking arms together to say that we will not have our friends, future dominated by the likes of your big tech company to put a data center in our backyard.

And it was very interesting to see in speech after speech, even though no rally speech was completely about AI, AI fit perfectly into the story of the oligarchy. The idea that corporations are colluding with the government are paying off your elected officials in order to make decisions that are good for the billionaires and bad for you. And so to go from that experience of like being. at this rally where Abdul is saying, when big tech buys a Senate seat, they're buying a data center in your backyard. When DTE buys a Senate seat, they're buying your local officials staying quiet while they raise the rates on you. When they tell us that they're going to raise our electricity rates, we won't back down.

When they tell us, they want to put that data center in our backyard, we won't back down. When they tell us that they want to take our tax dollars and give them there, when we've got kids who need them, Here, we won't back down. Going from that experience about hearing AI slotted into the money and politics story to Celine, where the developers have literally sued the democratically elected city council in order to build a data center that nobody wanted there, it really became clear how the oligarchy story played together with the data center story. Hey, so nice to meet you, Jasmine. Thanks so much for taking the time.

And so what was Abdul Al-Said life? I mean, so I sat down with Abdul for 30 minutes the day after the rally in Ann Arbor because the team decided it would be a better venue to go deeper on AI policy. And he has a long, long list of demands in terms of regulating AI that go from, we should force a divestment of anthropic from Amazon or Microsoft and Open AI to make sure that you don't end up with AI monopolies, to we should have an international treaty with China so that we can pause and slow down AI, to we should have an FDA merged with the SEC merged with some other regulatory agency solely dedicated to regulating AI.

These corporations have too much incentive to do things that are terrible for humanity, but very good for making money in the short run. If we take seriously the risk to the social contract, then public ownership has to be part of it, right? Similar with utilities. He had a big laundry list of demands for AI regulation. And what did you think? It was a very big list. I'm not sure that I agree that these policy proposals all made a ton of sense.

I mean, I think that what I felt was that populist politicians like Abdul in Michigan or Francesca Hong, the Democratic frontrunner for governor in Wisconsin, who's advocating a moratorium on data centers too, they are tapping into real anger. And I left with a lot more sympathy for the anger and the suspicion that people felt. I didn't leave thinking that all of these very ambitious regulatory ideas were necessarily the right ones, but it became clear that we are going to need some AI plan, maybe at the national level, maybe at the state level, that tackles a bunch of these issues, labor stuff, the data centers, kids safety, and makes people feel that someone has this under control. Because the other thing that people kept telling me, like activists, for example, was like, our local government. government or mayor, they're not doing their homework. They're in over their heads. They don't have this under control. And so I think having state or national governments tell people, this is how we're

thinking about AI, this is how we're thinking about the AI industry. We understand your concerns about labor issues, about the environment, about whether this could be a bubble. And this is what we're going to do to ensure that you're not left holding the bag as normal Americans if the AI companies do this or that. That's the kind of leadership that the public. wants right now and that they're not getting, which is leaving a vacuum for a lot of more blunt populist mechanisms. It's tough, though. I mean, like, the idea that no one's in control I'm very sympathetic to, who should be in control, I find very confusing. Yes. I mean, I don't think the answer to me is that the government is in control of, like, what we use AI for. I think that

the thing that people want is protection against downside risk. And I do think it is the government's job to protect people against downside risk, whether that is a data center becoming a stranded asset if the company decides to up and leave or whether that downside risk is people losing their jobs or whatever else people are worried about. I mean, can you imagine a world where you basically have a bunch of states that do data center moratoriums? You end up with some localities negotiating better deals because anti-A backlash means that there's only a few places you can do data centers. And so you get to a good outcome because of all of this policy. I mean, in a way, absolutely, right?

Like, I think it is a great thing that Microsoft has said publicly. They're not doing NDAs anymore on these. I think that I would expect other AI companies and developers to follow suit. That seems good to have more transparency. I've heard both from people who are in these communities, as well as from folks from the AI and tech side, that the deals are getting better for communities. They are extending more in community benefits.

The question that I'm getting from people I know in AI world is, what do we have to give these communities? What do we want? What can we promise them? We really want to build the data center just tell us how we can use money to solve the problem. And so I think that there's not a world anymore where some small town has to give a subsidy to meta. Like no one should have to be subsidizing metas build out, you know? And so I think that the deals are getting better because of the level of backlash. I think the main thing that I'm thinking is, I suspect there is a way to do the deals right. there is a way for places like Janesville, which does in fact have this giant concrete slab in the middle of the city and could use some commercial revenue to find a way to get a good deal out of the AI companies. Whether or not they are set up to do so at the moment is unclear.

I mean, the best case that I heard, for example, Kathy Hochel's Data Center moratorium is that it can bring the standards for these deals up to the state level because the state is significantly more equipped to figure out what should go on. So that's actually the justification her team has been giving, both in public, and I've talked to them also about this briefly as well, where they're saying in the same way that, like, Gretchen Whitmer set standards on solar farms in Michigan, which were very controversial, you shouldn't leave these tiny towns to figure out how to negotiate with meta. You should pause, set a bunch of standards at the state level, have Kathy Hochel team negotiate with the data center developers and the AI labs to figure out what's possible and what's not. Release statewide standards saying, you want to build a data center in New York State. You're going to do closed-loop cooling. You're going to use X percentage renewable energy. You are going to not sign an NDA. And then once those standards are set at the state level,

it hopefully becomes much easier to make the local deals. It solves the part-time city counselor, like asking like chat GBT, what's a good data center deal problem? I think so. And I actually think that like if that's actually what's going on, that might be a smart way to do it. Huh. So are you more positive towards stuff like the New York State Data Center moratorium

than you were before you went on the road? I think I am. I mean, again, to be clear, I am more positive on it if it means the thing that I just said and not just like it's a permanent moratorium. We're never going to deal with this ever again. Because sometimes people say moratorium, what they mean is ban. Right. And like that I am not sure if I believe in. But like if the actual thing that's happening is that your state government is figuring out what are these standards that we can set? What are the terms of engagement for New York towns for data centers? I think that's pretty interesting.

So you actually came across like I feel like the upside of your trip is like it doesn't just just feel like a polarized nation screaming at each other based off things they saw on TikTok. It feels like a country trying to figure out a deal that makes sense. And how to make those deals in an environment that's already solo trust? Yeah. So that is what I learned from Jasmine's Road Trip. That, as often is the case, this country looks a bit more reasonable when you talk to people offline. That what voters are saying they want is not exactly breaks they can smash to stop this technology.

they want a better, fairer process around these data center deals. They've learned the hard way that industry can burn them, and they want their politicians to make deals they can trust. As for Jasmine, you can find her ongoing, very excellent coverage of AI, San Francisco, and the technological and political currents shooting through our culture at her substack, Jasmine Sun. We'll have a link in our show notes. I do not miss a post, and neither should you. Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey.

This is created by me, PJ Vote, and Shruti Pinnam and Ani. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. Emily Maltaire is our associate producer. Our production intern is Piper Dumont, who also fact-checked this week's episode. Deem, original composition and mixing by Armand Bizarrian, our executive producer is Leah Reese Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor Moore,

current Joseph Unit Francis, Kirk Courtney, Vanessa Tancati, and Hillary Schiff. If you have a business and would like to advertise on our show, please send us an email, PJVote85 at gmail.com subject line advertising. You can also send your questions there if you have a question you'd like the show to answer. If you're a listener and would like to not hear ads on the show, you can sign up for incognito mode. It's our paid feed. You also get bonus episodes. You can find that at search engine.com. Your contributions there are what help us keep this project running. Thank you, as always for listening. We'll see you in a couple weeks.