Today, Explained - Data center backlash!

Episode Date: December 1, 2025

AI data centers are driving up the cost of energy — and it's starting to get political. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy and Miles Bryan, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Hady Mawajdeh, engineered by Patrick Boyd and David Tatasciore, and hosted by Noel King. This show was supported by a grant from Arnold Ventures. Vox had full discretion over the content of this reporting. The Google Midlothian Data Center in Texas, one of three new data centers in which Google plans to invest $40 billion. Photo by Ron Jenkins/Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

America's hottest club is data centers. These are the plants that contain the infrastructure for AI, and they are immense. Look at that. That's the size of Manhattan. I think they say 81% of Manhattan. So these are big things. And they're... Immense means construction. Construction means jobs. Jobs means politicians, whether MAGA or Democrat, love to say...

Data centers are coming to Virginia, and many localities want to welcome them. A data center is coming. into town. The problem is town, Noel. Town does not want Manhattan in its backyard. Town has noticed electricity bills creeping higher. Today on Today explained, I go to Pennsylvania Town to report on the data center backlash that's scrambling American politics. We live right down the street and we don't want this shit to happen, man. Support for Today Explain comes from BetterHelp. The holidays are a time of traditions.

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The Downloaded 2. Ghosts in the Machine. only from Audible. This is Today Explained. Miles Brian, go ahead, give me your full name and tell me what you do. My name is Miles Brian, and I'm the senior producer and reporter for Today Explain. You have been out in the world covering how a local community is responding to the data center boom. What's going on? Well, I actually want to start this story with a steel mill. It's this massive hulking, technically

it's a steel plate finishing facility on the banks of the Schuylkill River just outside of Philadelphia near a town called Concha Hawken. Okay, because this is a Miles Bryant story, I feel like I know where this is headed. You do. This is a story I've done versions of on the show. We've all heard a bunch of this story recently because it's a story about the rise and fall of an industrial economy. This mill opened in the 1830s and employed thousands of people. It was this anchor employer for the area, which had a booming economy, making stuff in the 19th and early 20th century. But you know, the next beat here, times change. The economy deindustrialized. The mill lays off a ton of people in the 70s. Concha Hocken becomes more of a white-collar office place. And last summer, the steel mill

was closed indefinitely, laid off about 100 people. Just last summer, when and how do data centers come into this? So our old economy story ends during the summer, and our new economy story begins this fall. We'll call the order the Wednesday, October 1st, 2025 planning agency meeting. A couple of months ago, a developer named Brian O'Neill moved to buy the entire 66-acre mill and turn it into a data center. And what I'm proposing is to enable AI to progress

while replacing 19th century manufacturing with 21st century manufacturing. in the existing manufacturing buildings. And he gave this pitch at a local zoning board, and he built it as a win-win, you know, land an anchor of the AI economy and bring in a ton of tax revenue without the town having to actually provide much in terms of services.

The annual revenue of the building I'm proposing is $21 million a year. And that's with no traffic, no kids in the school system, nothing but cash flow. A version of this pitch is being made all over the country right now. And it's pretty sweet.

You know, most states are now offering tax incentives for data centers, and billions of dollars of data centers are currently being built in the U.S., and hundreds of billions of dollars more are planned. You know, you had Kyla Scanlan, the economic commentator as a guest on the show last week, and she said data center projects are powering basically our whole economy now. The U.S. economy decided to design itself around AI, you know, 40% of GDP growth, is coming from AI build-out. Right.

So Kylo was talking about the upside. The people making the pitch to the towns are talking about the upside. Where are the critics in all of this? They're there. There's a whole lot of them. But I want to start with Genevieve Boland. For residents around data centers,

there's just no positive. And Patty Smith. I kind of like to equate it with like a TikTok dance trend for developers. And they're just jumping on this because they want the money. They want the funding. Patty and Genevieve rent a house just a block or so away from the proposed data center.

They're in their late 20s. They have white-collar jobs. And they've been best friends since high school and roommates since they graduated college. Everything is so fun. Life's so fun with your best friend. And we kind of just have take on challenges together, travel together. You're here, folks. Live with your best friend.

It's worth it. Yes. Live with your best friend. You will never regret it. This is the only, like, good propaganda. I will push. And for the last few months, They've been focused on organizing their neighbors against this proposed data center.

So we found out about this at 9 p.m. on a Sunday night. I had just by chance taken the day off that following Monday. I had probably dropped off 100 to 150 flyers by 10 a.m. the next day. And that is what initially kicked the word off. And then we just hit the town Facebook page. Like we've never hit it before. Gen Z, notoriously not big Facebook fans, but, you know, desperate times call for desperate measures. Yeah, they're trying to reach the boomers. What is

their beef exactly with the data center? There's a couple of things. They worry about the stuff you might expect neighbors of a big industrial building would worry about, you know, noise, light. They're worried that the land could be used for something that has more long-term benefits for the community. Data centers, you know, they support a lot of construction jobs while they're being built, but they hardly need any workers after that. Yeah, and they're really worried about how this is going to impact their electricity bill. We are absolutely worried about this and other energy infrastructure increases from data centers driving up our electric bills and our neighbor's electric bills because it already has been.

What does she mean it already has been? Right. So Pennsylvania is part of a regional power grid that has lots of data centers. Since 2020, demand for electricity in that region has skyrocketed and so has its cost. Electric bills spiked 20% in New Jersey last year. And it's not just New Jersey. Our electric bill was $830. It made me sick to my stomach.

This is crazy. I don't know how people are going to make it. They're going to be paying their rent and sitting in the dark. It's hard to say exactly to what extent data centers are pushing bills up. But as more and more data centers come online, the demand for electricity goes up and up, and so does the price normal people have to pay for it. So Patty and Jen, they start flyering. They start a Facebook group.

And pretty quickly, they get dozens of neighbors on board. It actually wasn't very hard while I was talking to Genevieve and Patty outside near the data center site, two guys interrupted the interview to tell us that they were against it. So thank you for being here. Thank you for doing that. I'm Mark. Nice to meet you. We live right down the street and we don't want this shit to happen in.

And Genevieve and Patty, they don't just link up with people in their neighborhood. People heard the story and started coming to us. People who have experience with data centers in their communities. Yeah. And what did you hear from that? Stop this now. Yeah. Throw everything into this.

and stop this now. These grassroots fights against data centers are still mostly under the radar, but they are everywhere. There's a group tracking this called Data Center Watch that says in the second quarter of this year alone, about 20 projects worth nearly $100 billion were delayed or canceled by community opposition.

Literal, holy crap. Okay, so there is a ton of political energy lining up behind, stop this stuff from coming to our town, our community. Which party do these folks tend to belong to? Are they Democrats? Are they Republicans? Like, which party has this energy?

This is what I think is so interesting because it's not clear yet. It's not really partisan. Genevieve and Patty Lean Democrat, but they told me they're frustrated with how data center friendly their Democratic electeds have been. But so are many Republican politicians. The issue's just starting to bubble up into elections. Do you want more of V's in your backyard? Delegate Gary Higgins personally profited off pushing

hundreds of data centers next to our schools, homes, and playgrounds. I'm John McAuliffe. I'm John McAuliffe. I'm the delegate elect for House District 30 here in Virginia. I called up Democratic Delegate Elect McAuliffe because he used ads like that to flip a Trumpy district last month. Every single day that I knock doors, we would knock 80 to 100 doors and, you know, in that process, have 15 conversations maybe.

Over 10 of them would be about data centers. Wow. Which is remarkable. I asked him if those voters voted Democrat in 2024. He said almost none of them did. And these are folks that are, you know, will generally shut the door in my face on a number of other issues where we disagree. You know, you didn't win by much. It was close. Do you think you would have won without running in large part on data centers and frustration with them? No. I don't. Okay, so he is a Democrat who flipped a Trump district. Is that the pattern?

It's not. You know, as I was getting this story ready, I saw a candidate had declared in Florida's upcoming Republican primary for governor, this guy James Fishback, who's running to beat Trump's chosen pick in that race by running against data centers. And I'll stop the construction of any AI data center that threatens to raise our electricity bills or poison our water supply. It looks like a few more Democrats than Republicans have jumped on this kind of messaging, but it's still early days. There's no real national anti-Data Center campaign yet from either party. For now, it feels like a bit of a jump ball. Okay, so we see a local issue quickly becoming a national issue and, in fact, swinging elections. This is very interesting. What ended up happening in Kansha Hocken outside of Philly?

The Data Center project there is paused for now. Wow. Yeah. At the last zoning hearing, the developer's application hit a snack. I don't think it's over, but it's definitely on pause. I reached out to the developer, but I haven't heard back. Genevieve and Patty, they say they'll remain engaged on this issue, but they kind of feel like they're in the wind. In Pennsylvania, the Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, loves data centers.

And the new Republican senator, Dave McCormick, also loves data centers. This is the vision of the future that they're pursuing. You get it from the federal level, you get it from the state level, right? Like, they're just going to push it through because AI is the future. They're in a race, right, to get AI. A manufactured race to get AI capacity and everything. But again, don't leave people like us behind because we have to deal with the day-to-day impacts of a data center next door. You all don't.

And that's what I guess bothers me the most because it's just it doesn't take into account the real lives of everyday real people. And that's something I can't stop thinking about. The anti-Data Center coalition has so much energy, but it's kind of still up for grabs politically. I don't think it's going to stay that way much longer. Miles, thanks for going out and doing this reporting. It's really interesting. Thank you. When we return, Vox's Umer-Erfahn on whether we've been thinking about the future of energy all wrong.

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You're listening to Today Explained. We're back with Umer Irfan. He covers climate energy and the environment for Vox, your hurricanes, your climate conferences, cops, your mosquito-borne illnesses, and your electricity bill going up. But Umer also recently wrote that maybe we are wrong to be thinking about energy with a scarcity mindset. Umer, what is going on? Well, there's this idea that rather than simply rationing energy or viewing energy as something that has to be constrained, if we start to build energy with the notion of having lots more of it, essentially trying to develop it and get it to the point where the cost is so low that you don't have to really think about it, that could actually be a huge game changer. And essentially, what we're trying to do is deploy clean energy ideally, basically sources that don't emit greenhouse gases. on such a vast scale that it starts to put downward pressure on power prices

and it starts to enable a suite of new technologies, things that weren't feasible before because they were too expensive or that they used too much energy. We're already on some of those trend lines right now. Construction is complete on a wind farm that recently became operational in down east Maine. Power is now flowing from a solar farm in Sanford. A new renewable energy facility is opening, in Middlebury.

Emmerin's new solar energy center is now open in East St. Louis. Last year, more than 90% of new electricity added to the power grid worldwide was from renewable energy. And we're likely to see those costs of installation go down, which will further make this a better business case. We're also seeing a huge explosion in energy storage technologies in the U.S. and around the world. And that is helping mitigate some of the downsides of wind and solar, which is namely their intermittency. That's all she wants is solar and wind. Well, if you look outside, the sun isn't shining and the breeze isn't blowing.

And then what, Abigail, what will you do? What will you do? The green news scam, let's build a windmill on every corner. A windmill that doesn't work, darling, I'd like to watch television. I'm sorry, the wind isn't blowing tonight. When the sun sets and the wind stops blowing, you can use energy storage to sort of back up that power. this combination is actually starting to take off around the world just at a time when overall energy demand is starting to rise as well. And if we continue on this trend line, then we basically

have a glide path towards building a zero emissions economy worldwide that will help us meet all of our needs, but also create new industries and new technologies that we couldn't do before. Are people who are building data centers starting to power them with clean energy? or planning to power them with clean energy? There are already data centers that have things like on-site solar panels. Many data centers have battery backups integrated into them because that's a very important tool for reliability. And increasingly, they're also trying to procure clean energy on the open market as well.

That's not the whole story. There are some data centers that don't care about clean energy at all, and they're using existing fossil fuels or they're using natural gas turbines. There are even some tech companies like Microsoft that are actually, investing in nuclear. There's a new plan to power up a reactor at the side of this country's worst commercial nuclear disaster. Microsoft and power provider Constellation Energy agreeing to a deal that will restart the closed three-mile island and nuclear power plant by 28. Essentially, a lot of tech companies are realizing that energy is the currency that they have

to trade in. And so what they've realized is essentially whoever can manage and wrangle the most energy at the lowest cost will have a huge advantage. Right. Okay. So the classic capitalist formulation is we're all competing for electricity. The person who pays the highest price will get it, right? You're saying that we could be looking at a future where there is more energy available and it is clean energy and where my brain instantly goes is, oh, and that's good for the environment. But actually, what I hear you saying is, Noel, the clean energy might also be cheaper. That's right. And I think that may end up being the better selling point. Oftentimes we talk about clean energy in the context of the environment, in the context of climate change.

But clearly, the momentum for dealing with climate change on the basis of solving climate change is not really there anymore. What does seem to be winning the argument is that cost is really paramount. Essentially, everybody wants to try to save money. Everybody wants to do more with less. and this is where a lot of clean energy technologies have a huge advantage. Okay, you're talking about a lot of very cheap energy. What is that then allow for? Well, we have a huge to-do list of things that we could be doing and should be doing with energy. Right now, obviously, the essentials, food and water, those are things that we can improve a lot with more clean energy.

You could decarbonize the process by which we fertilize the ground to produce our crops. we could actually farm more intensively on smaller plots of land, and that will help reduce things like deforestation. Then we can move on to things like the next generation of agriculture, things like vertical farming, hydropodics, being able to grow food basically year-round in almost any environment. And then on the water side, you know, we've seen a lot of water scarcity issues in many countries and many parts of the world. If we could have a lot of energy, we could desalinate water. We could get water from the ocean and turn that into drinkable water. that we can use to irrigate our crops, and then from there, we can start looking at some of the more

direct environmental problems that we've been dealing with. Climate change is fundamentally caused by too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. What we could do if we had a lot of energy is simply pull that carbon dioxide back out of the air, or we could take carbon dioxide that's dissolved in seawater out as well. Right now, it costs about $500 per metric ton to pull carbon dioxide out of the air. And some investors and some researchers are saying that a target of $100 per ton is what you need. And that's feasible that we could actually get there if we can get the energy cost down and we can make the process more efficient. Are you talking five years from now, 10 years from now? Or like, am I dead and gone when this is underway? Hopefully you'll be around.

I mean, we're looking at basically middle of the century, 2050, 2060. So this might be your retirement world, but definitely it's something that's in the cards. Again, the technology exists now to do this. It's just not cost-effective. President Trump is no big fan of clean energy. He's always talking about how he finds wind farms ugly. I've seen the most beautiful fields, farms, fields, most gorgeous things you've ever seen. And then you have these ugly things going up. And they have to be rebuilt all the time and they start to rust and rot. Does his administration kind of cutting back on U.S. investments in green energy, does that pose an obstacle to this happening soon or in the far future? It certainly applies a drag to it. It slows things down. On the other hand, though, when we look at some of the markets inside the U.S., we see that renewables still seem to have a huge and compelling business case. Take a look at Texas.

Texas basically operates its own grid within the state, and it runs basically a free-for-all open energy market. In that market, renewable energy is taking off. Texas is the largest operator of wind energy in the country. It's now the largest installer of solar, and it's one of the largest installers of battery storage. Texas is also the largest producer of oil and gas, but the fact that renewables are so cheap makes a compelling business case in Texas where they don't really have. the environmental regulations that would otherwise incentivize clean energy. It's just the fact that

it's cheaper and easier to build on a massive scale, and that on its own is helping renewables and clean energy take off in that state. This all sounds very good to me, Umer. It all sounds like pros almost all the way through. What are the problems here? What are we not thinking about? Well, there are some of the social challenges. One is that the energy industry is a big industry. We're talking about close to two million workers here in the U.S. and fossil fuels, for instance, and those people will eventually need new jobs because this is going to be a huge cultural and social dislocation. Another aspect to think about is sometimes the cost declines can actually make energy a victim of its own success. If energy is so cheap, if the price of the

electricity that you're selling is close to zero, how do you make money selling electricity then? how are you going to justify the upfront investment to sell electricity, to sell a product that you're basically going to have to give away? And then there's just the way that we use energy right now. Like we just went through this list of wonderful things that we could potentially be doing with electricity. But historically, we've seen that when we get more energy at our disposal level, we don't do good things with it or we don't do the most useful things with it. In general, as gasoline prices have gone down or have stayed flat relative to the economy, we've seen Americans drive bigger cars and drive longer distances.

As electricity prices drop, people buy bigger houses and they run their thermostats on a higher setting. And oftentimes they end up eating more meat. You know, one concern is that, you know, if you have a lot of cheap electricity on your power grid, if you don't have a good use lined up, then, again, that will probably just end up going to more data centers. It'll go to more Bitcoin miners. It's going to go to people who just need cheap electricity to do marginally useful things. The good news is that there is a lot of momentum built in and that is continuing to build. So the prospect of having more energy is something that we will benefit from.

And we will likely see some of the biggest benefits for the people who currently have the least. There are more than 600 million people in the world that don't have electricity at all. So proliferation of energy, more abundant energy on a larger scale worldwide that is available at low cost. cost will dramatically improve human society, and we will see the biggest effects for the people that are worse off. And in the process, we will start to tackle some of our biggest problems, including climate change. An unusually optimistic Umer or Fawn. You can read them at Vox.com. Miles Bryant and Avashai Artsy produced today's show. Jolie Myers edited.

Bullard and Hadi-Muagdi checked the facts, and Patrick Boyd and David Tadashore are our engineers. I'm Noelle King. It's today explained. Thank you.