Big Tech: AI Data Center Opposition Is An UnAmerican Criminal Conspiracy

If you're one of these folks oddly surprised why the animosity against AI is so white hot, or why younger Americans have inextricably linked AI to the broader rotten body politic, I'd like to direct your attention to Memphis, Tennessee.

In south Memphis, Elon Musk Corp is building two massive new data centers: Colossus 1 and Colossus 2. These data centers are powered by 57 natural gas turbines that are pumping smog and toxic pollutants into minority Memphis neighborhoods that already see a disproportionate rate of pollution-fueled illness.

The pollution isn't meaningfully regulated because America, as I may have mentioned once or twice, is grotesquely corrupt. And our corporate press is too financially compromised to inform Americans that this corruption has completely hollowed out regulators Americans spent generations taking for granted.

The Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) notes that just Colossus 2’s 35 gas turbines alone have the potential to emit more than 2,000 tons of smog-forming nitrogen oxides (“NOx”), formaldehyde, and other carcinogenic HAPs (Hazardous AIR Pollutants) into predominantly poor, minority neighborhoods.

So last April the SELC, AARP, and Earthjustice filed a lawsuit against the effort, correctly pointing out the unpermitted pollution violated the Clean Air Act, and asked for an injunction pausing construction until something vaguely resembling compliance safeguards existed.

"A data center should not be a potential death sentence for a community’s health," NAACP Director Abre' Conner noted at the time. "By looking to evade clear air laws to operate dirty turbines that emit pollution and known carcinogens, these companies are following a shameful, familiar pattern: asking Black and frontline communities to bear the toxic brunt of ‘innovation.'"

In Memphis, Musk's data centers are also having an impact on the already-constrained local water supply. Musk had originally promised to build a new next-generation water recycling system to minimize the centers' water consumption, but construction has mysteriously stopped.

Whether electricity, highways, water, or internet access, America has a long, rich history of infrastructure policy that disproportionately fucks over low income and minority communities. In functioning countries, it's where well-funded, well-staffed, legally-supported regulators are supposed to step in.

But remember: our corporations bought themselves an authoritarian government that's stocked the Supreme Court and several appeals courts with zealots laser-focused on lobotomizing corporate oversight, environmental law, labor rights, civil rights, public safety rules, and consumer protection.

The corporate press tends to downplay or ignore this regulatory assault (despite the profound mass suffering and fatalities it will cause in the decades to come), because white, male, affluent consolidated media ownership approves of what's being done. And because brunchlords believe it somehow won't impact them.

Just in case courts get any fancy ideas about enforcing existing environmental law, the Trump DOJ is also trying to intervene in the Memphis case by claiming Elon Musk's shoddy fifth-place pervert chatbot is essential to national security and therefore effectively above the law:

The Department of Justice intervened in a lawsuit over xAI’s gas turbines on Monday. In a filing, the agency sided with Elon Musk’s company, saying attempts to stop xAI from running the natural gas turbines “threatens American national, economic, and energy security by seeking to shut off the power supply for artificial-intelligence innovation that supports the Department of War’s military operations.”

Grok and xAI are shitty product. The only reason they're even being used by the U.S. military is because of Musk's bulbous wealth and political influence. Musk is a white supremacist accelerationist, keen on inciting a global race war, who views minority populations as disposable waste in the climate catastrophes to come.

Other bigoted Trump devotees, like billionaire Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen, immediately got busy on Elon Musk's right wing propaganda website pretending that they couldn't understand why a civil rights group would oppose unregulated data center pollution killing minority toddlers:

These are foundationally terrible human beings. And as I recently noted, young people have (quite correctly) tethered these tech titans' enthusiastic support of corruption, racism, and fascism to the entirety of AI in a way that cannot be untangled, regardless of what the technology can or can't do.

If you're surprised by the width and depth of the white hot backlash against AI, or are one of these folks convinced you "can't have a nuanced conversation with AI critics," I'd recommend some brief introspection into your own privileged understanding of the political reality of a world on fire.

As it becomes clearer that the architects of the AI revolution are unethical, corrupt, racist, fascism-enablers who aren't really thinking at all about the broader public interest in any equitable way, AI data center polling has swung sharply.

A recent Gallup poll found 7 in 10 Americans now oppose the construction of data centers for "artificial intelligence" in their local area. The opposition, rooted most deeply among women, is focused heavily on extreme resource consumption, environmental impact, soaring consumer costs, and the relentless vibrational hum such data center neighbors get to enjoy.

To try and pre-emptively dismiss growing, legitimate animosity toward AI data center builds, corporations and their favorite politicians have started collaboratively pushing conspiracy theories to justify expanded surveillance of critics and violent crackdowns against activists.

A popular narrative bubbling up within the extraction class is that opposition to U.S. data center construction is in reality a Chinese "psyop," designed to undermine U.S. dominance in the race to create unprofitable, energy-intensive, not at all sentient software automation that's wrong a lot of the time.

In Utah, when local activists balked at the construction of a massive 40,000 square foot new energy-and-water hoovering data center, Shark Tank millionaire Kevin O’Leary accused them of being secret Chinese agents, something that was then parroted broadly across "right wing media" (propaganda outlets):

“You don’t wake up in the morning often thinking, like, maybe I’ll get accused of sedition today on Fox News by Kevin O’Leary, but here we are,” Finlayson told me. “I’d probably get paid a lot more if I was” being paid by a foreign government, Elizabeth Huntchings, of Alliance for a Better Utah, told Fox News. 

Tech moguls and MAGA Republicans chitter in the same cultish chats about how they're going to ratfuck fledgling efforts to ensure the country has functional regulators, and it's clear they've settled on "AI data center opposition is a Chinese op" as their latest agitprop du jour.

For example, Kentucky Rep. Brett Guthrie, Pennsylvania Rep. John Joyce, and Ohio Rep. Bob Latta recently penned an open letter to FBI director Kash Patel falsely claiming that data center opposition is part of a covert op being coordinated by Chinese intelligence to ruin America's good time.

Their evidence? Some dodgy right wing corporate think tank dark money groups like the "Bitcoin Policy Institute" that obscure their donor information:

Investigations by the Bitcoin Policy Institute (BPI) and Power the Future (PTF) have exposed new information regarding how foreign influence campaigns—many originating from China—have engaged in a coordinated effort to slow U.S. growth in AI development and the building of infrastructure supporting AI data centers.

People that actually study foreign social media influence campaigns for a living say the claims are baseless. While there's always some foreign social media bot lemon-juice-in-the wound activity going on, the lion's share of U.S. AI data center animosity, for now, is authentically domestic.

But just in case the xenophobia fear mongering didn't land, Guthrie, Joyce, and Latta also lie about how "research" found that a cabal of shady billionaires is also covertly funding AI data center opposition:

Equally sinister, PFT report details how billionaire donors filter money through a complex financial web to fund America’s non-profit ecosystem—often with strong political or ideological leanings—to skew public opinion against the buildout of AI data center infrastructure.

Virulently-racist Republican Senator Tom Cotton last week sent a similarly stupid letter to acting attorney general Todd Blanche urging for an investigation into whether “the Chinese Communist Party” is manipulating public opinion on AI:

Alarming reports indicate that a network of foreign actors, led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is attempting to manipulate U.S. policy and public opinion on data centers. Maintaining America’s AI advantage is vital to American economic strength, diplomacy, national security, and military power. 

Framing good faith opposition to unregulated corporate predation as unhinged, inauthentic, or unAmerican is a U.S. tradition as old as baseball. In reality, most of the opposition to AI is of the "hey, just maybe there should be some oversight" or "gosh, it sure would be nice to have enough water" variety.

There's no real defense of the total dismantling of democracy and public safety protections by a bunch of unremarkable unelected techno-chodes, so said chodes and their political allies are constructing an elaborate new straw man seeded into the right wing propaganda omniverse and the law enforcement that consumes it.

Right now, opposition to data centers is fairly bipartisan. But as the country's ever-growing right wing propaganda apparatus works tirelessly to frame opposition as some sort of secret unAmerican cabal, a growing number of right wingers, as per tradition, will increasingly root against their own best interests.

And when the AI funding bubble pops and the economy shudders, you can absolutely guarantee that ordinary Americans who think pollution, privacy, and labor guardrails are a good idea will somehow be blamed for it.

Expect a lot more of this kind of demonization as things heat up. Quite literally.

The Guardian revealed this week that most U.S. data centers are being built in places where climate-change-induced drought is already a problem. In power-strained Nevada, one local utility recently announced it would simply stop serving 50.000 residential customers so it could focus on serving tech giants:

“It’s like we don’t exist,” Danielle Hughes, a Lake Tahoe resident and supervisor with the California Energy Commission’s Efficiency Division, told Fortune.

Even the news coverage that can explore the impact somehow can't candidly acknowledge that the federal government no longer functions. That our regulators have been hollowed out by corporate power and are now largely decorative. Being too blunt about this sort of thing is broadly deemed editorially impolite.

Instead you'll get junk like this soggy piece in The Atlantic, which claims the "AI data center panic is overblown," and as proof quotes a corporate think tanker who simply makes up a lie about how an AI data center plunked down in the hills of West Virginia will magically draw innovative new startups to the region.

Here in reality, rabid AI data center expansion is causing most major companies to obliterate their already tepid climate change emission goals, accelerating climate destabilization and the cultural chaos that will result. There will be endless efforts to convince you that what you're seeing with your own eyes isn't happening.

Extremely rich men are getting their justifications ready so that when clear-eyed opposition surges in direct response to their technofascism, it can be dismissed, delegitimized, arrested, or eradicated. They're really not being subtle about it.

In Philadelphia, police say they've started surveilling "disruptive First Amendment activity” surrounding AI. On the federal level, law enforcement is steeling itself for a rise in what's being dubbed "anti-tech extremism." Trumpism is working hard to tether data center opposition to generalized antifa bogeymanism.

Our billionaire techno barons are building a new political order in which they see absolutely no oversight of their extractive predation. And AI is indisputably a centerpiece of their hyper-surveillance, anti-labor, toxic pump and dump ambitions in ways already proving disastrously inequitable.

So again, when I see people suddenly surprised at the white hot animosity surrounding AI, I'm decidedly uncertain what planet they're living on.