# Why Everyone Suddenly Hates AI Data Centers — Transcript (2026-08-21) https://aidailybrief.ai/e/2026-08-21 · Listen: https://pod.link/1680633614 --- Nathaniel Whittemore: [00:00:00] Everyone, 260821 cold_EDIT: it appears, hates data centers Polls show the majority of Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, are opposed to them And politicians are picking up on the anger. One writer joked that every state election is just two politicians who supported data centers five minutes ago accusing their opponent of supporting data centers to some, this is all a consequence of the AI industry's terrible messaging. To others, it's about the negative legacy of big tech. 260821 cold_EDIT: And to some, it's just all one big China psyop However much those things may or may not be true, conversations with the folks in these communities reveal that this is as much, if not more, about their agency and control in shaping their own future now, one could be forgiven for thinking it's getting gloomy out there, especially with all these politicians piling on. But I actually think that not only is there a path forward, 260821 cold_EDIT: this might be the most winnable value-creating political battle of all time 260821 in_EDIT: The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI [00:01:00] All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, KPMG, Blitzy, Harbor, and Hyperagent. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com/aidailybrief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. And to learn more about sponsoring the show, you can go to aidailybrief.ai. There is a link for sponsor information. there's also a link to other things going on in the ecosystem, such as our free upcoming webinar about how to put agentic loops to work for you as a knowledge worker. That's coming up next Wednesday. It is free. You can register on the website. Nathaniel Whittemore-1: Again, 260821 in_EDIT: check it all out at aidailybrief.ai. Today's topic will not be unfamiliar for you regular listeners Nathaniel Whittemore: Questions 260821 p1_EDIT: around the AI infrastructure build-out and AI data center specifically have lurked around the edges of this show for more than a year now as this most concerted wave of AI build-out has come to the fore The issue has now officially, however, escaped containment 260821 p2_EDIT-1: and today the goal is to do an entire primer kind of end to end on this issue Understanding on the other side whether there is [00:02:00] any room for optimism at all So starting off, why are we talking about this right now? The answer, in short, is the midterm elections This is an issue that certain pollsters have been paying attention to for a while now but as it becomes more and more a part of the election discourse, more and more people are surveying about it, and the numbers are not good In a Gallup poll from May, 71% of respondents were already opposed to data centers in their area, and a full 48% were strongly opposed. And things have gotten nothing but worse. Heatmap News has been conducting polling on opposition to local data centers for the past year. in their February poll, 51% of people were opposed to data centers being built close to their home. And in this month's edition of their poll, opposition reached 75%. What's more, strong support has shrunk from 9% in February to just 4% now People who work with polling are shocked at how aggressively the topic is moving. Lobbyist Justin Slaughter wrote, "I've never seen this. Data center opponents are converting supporters not just to neutral, but to opposition." 260821 p2_EDIT-1: Ramez Naam writes, " The trend here is crazy. From [00:03:00] 24% strong opposition to data centers to 61% strong opposition in 12 months. When's the last time political opinions on an issue shifted this fast?" And it's not And it's not just like this is one sensationalist poll. Another one that I shared on an earlier show this week from Echelon Found that Americans would rather have a nuclear power plant in their backyard than a data center to power AI At the moment, people are about twice as likely to be into coal plants being built nearby them as opposed to data centers the... Now for some, this is Exhibit A in why this conversation is not just a rational argument about things like water and pollution as quite clearly a coal plant is going to be worse on those vectors There is, as we will discuss, a lot more going on now now as I said, what matters about the polling is not just the numbers, but the context of an election yearand in that environment, this is a rare bipartisan issue In August of 2025, Republicans were net support for a data center nearby, independents were at net negative 5%, and Democrats were at negative 8%. Now while independents and [00:04:00] Democrats have both fallen stratospherically to 65to negative 65 and negative 75%, even Republicans are net 43% against having a data center near their home Andrew Curran wrote, If you're wondering why this issue is in the news every day and why politicians who were previously supportive are suddenly changing their tune with apanicked look in their eyes, it's because this issue has become incredibly radioactive with the American public." And indeed, noticed the politicians have The Bulwark writes, "Politicians suddenly notice that everybody hates data centers." Pointing out that everywhere you look, politicians are suddenly sprinting away from them The Wall Street Journal wrote, "Politicians who once championed data centers are now bashing them," pointing to the example of state governors, including Texas' Greg Abbott and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro 260821 p2_EDIT-1: so altogether then you have this incredibly toxic mixture of extremely negative public sentiment that becomes picked up by politicians who make the issue even louder by putting it front and center in their campaigns, who are then further amplified by media for whom not just the antagonism but alsoalso the shift among politicians is absolute red meat for their [00:05:00] articles Now at this point, it's worth even asking what is an AI data center? because with due respect to a lot of opponents' concerns about them, I don't necessarily think that most people could even really define what goes on inside one. or what they do, how they interact with the economy, and why they are necessary at all a data center is basically a warehouse-sized computer that is plugged into industrial systems 260821 p2_EDIT-1: Power arrives either via utility lines or dedicated generation and that energy is used to power racks of chips and servers that yes can be used for things like training or serving AI, but are also essential for pretty much everything else that happens on the internet. Your Gmail, your Netflix streaming All of that does have a physical component, and it runs through the data centers Investor Nick Carter wrote, "I think a non-negligiblecomponent of the data center backlash comes from people having imagined that the internet was a weightless thing that lived in the cloud. They are now learning that the internet requires physical infrastructure, cooling and power, and they are upset about it." of, and that cooling is of course a big part of where the controversy comes in Some combination of [00:06:00] air, evaporative towers, or liquid loops remove heat from the ecosystem and push it outside. And then the data leaves once again The point is These are big empty rooms With many, many small computers connected to make one big computer. That's it. That's what a data center is. and they are critical and absolutely essential to the entire infrastructure of the world that we live in Nathaniel Whittemore-1: So So 260821 p2_EDIT-1: why are people so angry about data centers? The short answer is it's everything and untangling All of those various reasons for the animosity is unfortunately, I think, important for figuring out how to move forward asked, Puck News recently asked voters how they believe data centers burden their community, asking whether they thought the following statements about data centers were true or false And you can see here two of the biggest concerns right up at the top. when asked if they believed that data centers placedtoo much strain on the local power grid, forty-five percent said definitely true, and thirty-three percent said probably true, a total of seventy-eight percent. when asked if data centers consume excessive amounts of the local water supply, definitely true was at [00:07:00] forty-four andprobably true was at thirty-one percent When asked whether they believed that data centers would decrease property values in the surrounding community, twenty-seven percent said definitely, thirty-two percent said probably When asked if data centers generate constant disruptive noise, 25% said definitely true, with 34% adding probably When asked if they do not create enough local jobs to justify their construction, twenty-four percent said definitely true, thirty percent said probably true and when asked if data centers increase local taxes Which it isn't even exactly clear by what mechanism that would happen. Still 48% overall said it was either definitely or probably true Nathaniel Whittemore-1: so with that poll 260821 p2_EDIT-1: you see a big cross-section of reasons,for data center antipathy that are about actual quality of life for people near them 260821 p2_EDIT-1: But of course, that is not the whole story now when it comes to who is to blame for all of this anger For some, the rampant factual inaccuracies in a lot of the critiques points to specific deliberate attempts to sow strife and controversy 260821 p2_EDIT-1: A.G. Hamilton on X writes, [00:08:00] "The anti data center stuff is insane and clear evidence that we have entered a post-truth era where many people can be convinced, often by malicious actors, to abandon reality and allow conspiracies and falsehoods to drive policy preferences." Frank Frank Fleming asked a question that is coming up increasingly: Is China behind all the anti data center hysteria, or are we shooting ourselves in the foot over completely homegrown stupidity? f- Anduril co-founder and Founders Fund investor, Trey Stevens Retweeted a post of President Trump talking about how if he were the mayor of a town or governor or a state and had a chance to get a big plant in, an AI plant or a data center, he would absolutely want it. Trey also pointed towards China saying, That's weird. It's almost like not banning TikTok has had real world consequences as the US population continues being poisoned by CCP propaganda. 260821 p2_EDIT-1: Who would have guessed?" Piling on, Rob LeKirk writes, We spent the last 30 years whining about how we lost all our good paying manufacturing jobs. we finally have an opportunity to start building again. Tech companies are willing to spend trillions on CapEx and labor, and now both parties are saying no because of a fake Chinese psyop that data centers use 30,000X more water [00:09:00] than they really do." This accusation that China's behind this has even made it into the courts as Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary loudly proclaimed that it was in fact China behind local activists Who opposed the data center that he was working on in Utah my general take is that the PSYOP argument probably has at least some truth in the sense that sowing social media discord is just now an intentional strategy of all America's adversaries around everything. And so even if there's not some giant campaign specifically about data centers, by virtue of the fact that it is a hot button topic on social media, it is almost absolutely the case that bot farms from somewhere are contributing. 260821 p2_EDIT-1: But I also think it's way too convenient as an excuse. and treating it like it's all that will absolutely halt us from actually dealing with the real issues that could cause many more problems if they're not addressed. responding to someone accusing the whole thing of being a psyop. Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy got at another reason that peoplehave gotten angry. Which is about the way that, the AI industry talks about its likely impact on their lives. Murphy wrote, " I don't know. The AI industry has been basically [00:10:00] promising to destroy jobs at scale and poison our kids with addictive products, and it feels like people are just believing them." Now the poison our kids with addictive products part feels like he's conflating anti-AI with anti-social media, which by the way, I think is actually a big part of this but he is far from alone in thinking that the AI industry bears some of the responsibility here the way that its leaders have talked about job loss Because make no mistake, while people don't like data centers in general, they very specifically don't like AI data centers. And in polls that differentiate between the two, you can see that it isAI data centers specifically that have the most opposition Brendan Steinhauser wrote, " yes, data centers have become politically toxic. It's clear when you review the polling or meet with regular Americans about this. And it's not just concerns about energy costs, water usage, aesthetics, or noise. The people are worried about AI replacing human beings. They don't want the companies to build superintelligence." 260821 p2_EDIT-1: Zerathustra writes, " I'm generally pro data center, but if you're a normie, here's the story you've been hearing from Silicon Valley over the last decade. [00:11:00] AI is probably going to take your job. It might kill you. You will probably become part of the permanent underclass." The very big tech billionaires and companies who have been more hostile and malicious to conservatives than any other business block in the world over the last decade will become unimaginably rich while you and everyone you love will lose your job and become poor. The main spokesmen or faces in charge, Dario and Scam Altman, are openly hostile to you, your values, your politics, your way of life, and everything you stand for the tasteless Philistines in tech are going to plant an utterly hideous industrial monstrosity in your backyard and probably pay you nothing. And for all this, you in return, you get question mark, question mark, question mark It's not remotely difficult, they conclude, to understand why normies have reservations investor Chamath Palihapitiya writes, " The collective leadership of frontier AI has failed miserably in doing the basics, like painting a positive picture of what is possible with AI. Instead Instead of spilling the ink on the glass half full, stories abound of pearl clutching, catastrophizing, or arcane technological jargon that together breed mistrust, fear, and skepticism." but for some, the anti-AI sentiment goes a lot deeper than marketing and about a lack of [00:12:00] demonstrated value. T Greer writes, " Better messaging, i.e. never talking about AI taking jobs, is not the problem. The problem is that AI has just not delivered too many tangible benefits to the country writ large The average person thinks of LLMs as the thing their kids use to cheat on school assignments. AI may have made their life more convenient on the margins, but that is the margins. So you end up asking communities to accept these data centers and sanction the local tentacle of a technology that is already making people far away very rich, but which has not provided the country writ large with any tangible goods. The problem is the substance, not the messaging Another point along these lines that I've seen some make is that even the things that AI does really well, i.e. increasing productivity 260821 p2_EDIT-1: aren't necessarily things that the average person wants. in a recent podcast appearance, writer Ben Thompson said that every 10 years Silicon Valley relearns that consumers do not wanna pay for software and that consumers do not care about being productive. I think when it comes to AI, it's not just that consumers don't care about being more productive, it's that when you combine it with the entire AI industry saying that [00:13:00] AI is going to come for your jobs, and tons of CEOs using it as an excuse for layoffs that they were going to make anyway productivity is just another way of saying You're gonna make me give away more of my labor that I don't own 260821 p2_EDIT-1: Still, if it were just dislike of AI, even that would be different than what it actually is. AI is the inheritor to the mantle of a 15-year decline of people's perception of tech in general Gavin Purcell writes My feeling is that at least seventy-five percent of this negativity against AI is about big tech at large. Over the last ten years, big tech has had the following very bad stories and many more: election manipulation, screen time worries amongst kids, directional content rabbit holes that radicalize people, killing the media business like TV, movies, and news, polarizing communities against one another, massive profits versus local communities getting poorer, woke companies making cultural choices, and on and on and on. I think AI and data centers specifically has finally let a long-simmering anger have real world, in data centers literal real world, targets the same, in the same post I was reading from before, Chamath again [00:14:00] writes, " Data centers have unfortunately become the symbolic representation of the asymmetric upside for a very narrow tech elite and a class that are untrustworthy Now keep in mind, Americans' Nathaniel Whittemore-1: trust 260821 p2_EDIT-1: of elites and institutions right now is at an all-time low Gallup, according to a recent Gallup poll, the average percentage of US adults that express a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in nine major US institutions, including the church, the military, the Supreme Court, banks, public schools, newspapers, Congress, organized labor, and big business is down to its lowest point ever at 27%. Just one in four adults confidence in the major institutions of American life The number when it comes to big business is just 17%. of, and when you're already mistrustful of institutions, the way that data centers have done business i.e., behind closed doors outside the eye of the public using tools like non-disclosure agreements is almost tailor-made to increase that mistrust NBC recently published a piece called "How NDAs Keep AI Data Center Details Hidden From Americans," and this I [00:15:00] think is a massive, massive, 260821 p2_EDIT-1: hard to overstate part of this problem right now Technology moving ahead represents change you can't control Change you can't control makes people feel less agency in their lives And so the fact that already people are feeling less agency, 260821 p2_EDIT-1: and then they don't even have a chance to see what's going on and how these decisions are being made That's not something that anyone, but particularly Americans, is going to take kindly to who's-- Jasmine Sun has done some great reporting around this recently. And in a recent long-form piece that has got her featured on numerous major news outlets and podcasts She argued that this is actually a huge part of the problem In what I think is the most important part of that entire 6,000-word tome, she writes, " My conversations made me wonder if the technical content of data center deals is mostly besides the point. Closed-loop cooling systems, I don't believe them. Paying millions in taxes, I don't believe them. Creating 1,000 jobs, I don't believe them. I hear a reflexive [00:16:00] skepticism of every claim. Rather, the way that AI companies engage with communities, forcing NDAs, dangling billion-dollar promises, pushing environmental externalities far away from AI's wealthy user base, resembles a classic story of about dark money in politics. Your politicians are being bought by billionaires and gigantic corporations to screw you over. It's not Skynet, it's the oligarchy Writes Jonathan Keeperman, " Data centers are a proxy for largely inarticulable concerns over tech and the emerging likelihood that AI is going to radically change our way of life, much in the same way the internet has, and driven at least in part by two populist intuitions. One is that the further human value is abstracted out from the production of tangible things, the worse it is. And also that if the value of that thing isn't easily explained, if its mechanics are opaque or even unknowable, then I, the average guy, am probably somehow getting screwed. This This doesn't mean that the concerns are fake or unjustified, only that they are often misdirected tell, as you can probably tell while there are entire sections of the critiques and concerns that I [00:17:00] either disagree with or that I think are just based on total misinformation, I think that the only realistic starting point for finding a way forward is understanding the real concerns that exist and trying to find solutions for those specific problems. Nathaniel Whittemore-1: Unfortunately, 260821 p2_EDIT-1: the solutions that have come up so far are largely in the form of moratoriums 260821 p2_EDIT-1: Interconnected Capital has a digital map that tracks moratoriums following 97 county bans, 93 city bans, and 28 town bans. recently my state of New York became thefirst state to officially impose a data center moratorium but now the tide is moving quickly. In the last couple of weeks, we've had great examples of formerly extremely data center bullish,governors reversing their opinions, and basically competing to have the strictest rules in the country. I'm referring, of course, to Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and Texas Governor Greg Abbott 260821 p2_EDIT-1: and a recent memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee about the liability of data centers, specifically in Ohio, but in other parts of the country as well, seems to have gotten the entire Republican Party on board with being anti-data center in one fell swoop Michigan Republican Tom [00:18:00] Barrett is running an ad decrying, in his words, "Politicians cozying up with big tech billionaires to force data centers on our communities." Despite his voting record in favor of data centers before wi Republican candidate for Wisconsin governor, Tom Tiffany is going out of his way to paint his Democratic counterpart, David Crowley as the great champion of data centers. Interestingly, Tiffany seems to be trying to combine the culture war, anti-data center sentiment, and anti-environmentalism all in one fell swoop. Posting on X this week, David Crowley's data center plan would destroy at least 100,000 acres of Wisconsin land. His Beyoncé approach calls for data centers powered by 100% solar, wind, and battery storage. You get a data center and thousands of acres of solar panels in your backyard Nathaniel Whittemore-1: 260821 p3_EDIT: heat maps. Matthew Zeitlin perfectly sums it up. Every statewide election now is two people who supported data centers five minutes ago saying that their opponent supports data centers A new study from KPMG and the University of Texas at Austin found that when [00:19:00] people work with AI, similar skills don't guarantee similar outcomes. Researchers studied more than five hundred early career professionals and found that the best performers consistently amplified the value of AI by guiding, evaluating, and refining its outputs. KPMG Aug_EDIT: These top performers, called AI amplifiers, weren't defined by what they knew alone, but by how they worked with AI. Learn more about what separates AI amplifiers from everyone else at kpmg.com/us/aiamplifiers. Blitzy's understanding of massive code bases unlocks autonomous security fixes, modernization, and new features. So what happens when there's no legacy code at all? Greenfield is supposed to be the easy part. Clean slate, no technical debt. blitzy July_EDIT: But even Greenfield moves at human speed one sprint at a time. Blitzy changes the unit of work from the developer to the project, autonomously planning, building, testing, and validating entire applications from scratch. 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So where do we go from here? 260821 p3_EDIT: Firstly, there is work to be [00:22:00] done and good work being done I'm trying to combat the misinformation A lot of the memes about water usage, for example are somewhere between out of context I understanding what these big numbers, Of gallons of water used actually mean relative to all other uses up, or just straight up factual inaccuracies that become memes For example, in Karen Hao's book, Empire of AI she miscalculated the amount of water used by a factor of 1,000. And while she has admitted the error, the misprint remains in circulation and contributing to people's takes on this A similar process is happening around the concern that, as Bloomberg put it in an article last year, AI data centers are sending power bills soaring But when people actually dig in it appears like there's actually no real statistical correlation between where electricity prices are going up the most and where data centers are located. which of course doesn't mean that it's a non-issue But it's a question of specific data center design and the environmental design around it, not some rule of nature that data centers are going tojack up your electricity [00:23:00] prices Unfortunately, that baseline trust gap that we discussed limitsthe ability for these rational arguments to find purchase Again from a Puck News poll, when asked how convincing the respondents found certain arguments in favor of data centers to be The factual fixes ranked pretty low. for example, they asked specifically about the excessive water claim being based on that math error, acknowledging that it has since been corrected. and only 8% of people found that very convincing, and only 20% of people found that somewhat convincing Around the argument The data centers would create thousands of high-paying jobs for local community members. Again, people just don't believe it. Only 12% found that very convincing, and 23% found that somewhat convincing. One has to think that that's not people being dismissive of the value of high-paying jobs It's saying, Yeah, right. we'll talk when I actually see those jobs." The most convincing argument that they could find was data centers generating money and local tax revenue for schools, roads, and other services. This still wasn't a knockout, with only 14% finding it very convincing and another 28% finding it somewhat convincing [00:24:00] was... Now, when it comes to the part of this can be attributed to the messaging around AI and jobs Thankfully, that has shifted lately. I tend to think it's on the too little too late side of things But what's more important than just the messaging changing is the fact that the evidence shows that the argument that AI was going to cause massive job loss was always wrong in the first place. In other words, Ford deciding to rehire what they call graybeard engineers does a lot more than CEOs saying, "Oops, I was wrong about job loss," ever could pro-- there are also better sources for certain types of pro data center messaging than the tech companies or data center builders themselves It would certainly be overstating it to say that all labor unions were on the side of the data centers. But if you are looking for one area where they have had an enormous positive effect right away, it's in the trades And frankly, the unions who are both seeing those benefits but who are also members of those communities are uniquely positioned to navigate the nuance and complexity of the situation without surrendering the realness of the value that is coming from these things being built groups are... and as the [00:25:00] threat of moratoriums gets bigger, these groups are getting louder. the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers recently said that proposed data center bans and moratoriums in New England, quote, " Threaten to block billions of dollars in potential investment and will eliminate critical job opportunities for IBEW members. If statewide bans are implemented, New England will lose countless jobs and infrastructure investments created by the current boom in AI technology." Going on, they said, "Why this matters to the IBEW. Data centers create substantial work opportunities for electrical workers in industries tied to AI and energy build-out. Strong labor standards on data centers will raise wages, improve working conditions, and protect local workers. investment in union apprenticeship and training programs will help build the next generation of skilled IBEW workers. Data center projects can generate significant local tax revenue and infrastructure investment. Total bans discourage investment and send good jobs to other areas." pe- and when you peel back the comment section style anger that surrounds this issue There are folks out there who are unwilling to surrender [00:26:00] to any extremes of any side in the conversation 260821 p3_EDIT: in a response to author Noah Rothman asking, "Is there no cure for the data center hysteria?" Nebraska Congressman Don Bacon said, "Yes, speak the truth. Data centers can be built smartly to conserve water and expand energy production." We can't win the AI war if we're going to wage war against data centers. Data centers have made a positive impact in Sarpy County where I live agenda, and very high on the agenda for the tech companies has to be actually not just explaining how local communities could benefit from hosting data centers, but how they are in practice For example Some recent research is showing areas where, for example, Dominion Energy customers in Virginia actually saw slightly lowered electricity rates because of data centers and the associated load growth Quincy is a small farming town in Washington that started attracting data centers back in 2006 subs- they continued adding data centers over the subsequent two decades and currently have 30 in the municipality There are around 900 engineering and construction jobs that work directly on the data centers. And according to analysis from Washington [00:27:00] State, another four to six jobs in construction, retail, and local services for every one of those 900 data center jobs. The data centers contribute Quin- 57% of Quincy's property taxes And have funded public buildings including a fifteen million dollar six-lane swimming pool, a one hundred and twenty million dollar state-of-the-art high school, and a large indoor sports complex that is currently under construction. The poverty rate in Quincy has fallen from twenty-nine point four percent in twenty twelve to six point two percent in twenty twenty-four. Pat Haley, a former city administrator, called it the Quincy Miracle He said Quincy was a farming and ag town. That was your career path if you were going to stay. Data centers opened up what could have been a low-opportunity town into this place with brand new everything Another example is Loudoun County in North Virginia. It's home to Data Center Alley, which is the region with the highest concentration of data centers on Earth it houses over 200 facilities representing about fourteen percent of global capacity. Data centers take up about three percent of the county's land and around forty percent of its budget however, the data center industry is a massive net contributor to the economy. According to a state audit, [00:28:00] around seventy-four thousand Virginia residents work in the industry, representing five point five billion in labor income It is also the wealthiest county in the US However, unlike other ultra-wealthy counties, it also has one of the lowest residential property tax rates in the country. Nathaniel Whittemore-1: Loudoun 260821 p3_EDIT: Loudoun County has lowered its property tax rate every year over the past 10 years and now charges just 0.8%. And that's largely because data centers are footing the bill. They now contribute around 42% of local tax funding, up from 32.8% in 2024 What's more, in a recent study, the Chamber ofProgress found that Compared to the other three counties in Northern Virginia The county delivers above average spending on schools, libraries, and public safety. Fairfax County, for example, charges around thirty-five percent more in property taxes while spending around forty-five percent less on public services Indeed, for some, the obvious answer to the data center problem is not about messaging, it's about action. Polymath on X writes, "The tech companies need to stop trying to use reason and logic to convince people about data centers. They need to start building parks." Lulu Cheng Meservey writes, " " The most tried and true [00:29:00] PR tactic is just giving people stuff, Julius Caesar's feats, Rockefeller's dimes, the Marshall Plan, Oprah's Favorite Things, Starlink on United. Works every time. Labs and data centers should build parks, subsidize bills, hold a cookout, sponsor field trips. Companies are spending way more on marketing and lobbying that backfires half the time. Just give people stuff." And as cynical as that sounds, Why does that actually have to be cynical in practice? the whole thing here comes down to a simple equation. Does a community feel that the value that they get from a data center being in their community is more than the cost that it incurs 260821 p3_EDIT: And frankly, even people who are extremely pro data center aren't or at least shouldn't be dismissing all of the concerns as actually made up Pirate Wire's Mike Solana writes, "AI messaging has been absolute dog poo, but I've never met a single person in the real world who knows the name Dario. I've heard aesthetic concerns, noise concerns, property value concerns. These are legit and need to be addressed. Everything else is a distraction." 260821 p3_EDIT: and coming back to things like building parks, if that core equation of are those costs worth [00:30:00] it for the benefit doesn't come up just on the basis ofcovering the cost of their own electricity and paying local taxes? Well, it's just like any other negotiation. what more can the developers add to make the equation come up positive for the community? clearly the data center builders are getting the memo. Nathaniel Whittemore-1: Meta 260821 p3_EDIT: has recently launched a billion-dollar fund Nathaniel Whittemore-1: to invest in local initiatives around where they're building 260821 p3_EDIT: In their In their Pike County, Ohio facility, OpenAI has announced $40 billion from OpenAI directly for priorities that they say will be defined by the local community. And that is in addition to what they claim will be the hundreds of millions of dollars in state and local tax revenue over its lifetime They're also giving away $84 million in Codex credits to approximately 844,000 Ohio College, community college, and technical students And in further signs that they're finally getting the memo Microsoft earlier this year announced that they had made the decision to end the use of NDAs with local governments in order to increase transparency po, but what about those politicians? Well, if they do it well, They have an opportunity to be the intermediaries that [00:31:00] minimize the negatives and deliver some incredible positives Reports are coming out that West Virginia is exploring how they could use data centers to eliminate their income tax altogether which is a plan that Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist seems very excited about Suggesting that all states should require that tax payments by data centers will go to reduce property taxes at the local level and income taxes at the state level Kremyonx said, "This is a fun exercise. How large a data center would your town need to replace your property taxes?" doing some back of the napkin math for a 20,000-person town using the average rate that US local governments collect in property taxes They found that, quote, " In short, being generous, you could drop your property taxes entirely with a data center that doesn't even hit the hyperscale threshold of two hundred and fifty megawatts." But, and this is a big but none of this can happen if the policy chosen is moratoriums to be clear, moratoriums do nothing to solve the problem. They simply kick the can down the field. They feel good to people whosecore [00:32:00] emotional consideration is actually just trying to stop change But they do not actually address any problems or create any opportunities to find the good that might be won And here's a real narrative violation that you're not gonna see in clickbait headlines People, shockingly, aren't stupid They have real concerns about data centers that are, yes, based on a variety of different issues Which ask any two people and you might get three different answers for why they don't like data centers. But it turns out if you ask them, they'd rather have plans that addressed those specific problems than just shut everything down morn, a a recent Morning Consult poll found that voters prefer data center rules to a moratorium. When asked what their preferred approach to data center construction would be, 23% said a moratorium on all new projects, but 57% said clear rules, let responsible projects be built When asked about a project that meets disclosure, cost, and public review requirements, 24%, yes, almost a quarter said stop it from being built But 58% said allow it to move forward about, when asked about the companies not just [00:33:00] paying their way But supporting a broader revitalization i.e., requiring companies to pay for the grid upgrades their facilities need, Just 13% opposed that and 78% supported it the irony of this issue is that it is maybe the most winnable political compromise issue that I have ever seen These data centers are absolutely mission critical to the people who are building them and the larger infrastructure that relies on them It does not matter ultimately, and I believe will not matter in the long run, that it might have been easier before when people weren't paying attention to do things as they had always been done through NDAs And a very small number of gatekeepers rather than having to go get the approval of the actual communities But you better believe if given an actionable path forward, especially onewhere the biggest consideration pretty much just comes down to spending more money in the community that those data centers are built in everyone involved with the data centers will jump at the chance so if you're looking for positive places to go, look for the politicians who are jumping on this issue by actually offering a path [00:34:00] forward Wisconsin governor candidate again, David Crowley, recently put out a press release on data centers. The press release reads: " " As governor, Crowley would let communities decide for themselves whether they want a data center at all, and if they say no, that decision would be honored. If a community says yes, the developer must commit to full transparency by banning NDAs, provide 100% renewable energy which will combat the amount of coal we burn, cover 100% of the costs of infrastructure and grid upgrades, require contributions to the state's Focus on Energy fund, which could be used to bring down utility rates for Wisconsinites statewide, build the data center with union labor, project laboragreements, and community benefit agreements, create good-paying, family-supporting jobs, and protect local water and our environment as a whole." I think this is the direction we're gonna see, where the smart politicians create checklists that the developers can actually meet, but do so on the basis of community agency And that goes for Democrats and Republicans. Ohio candidate for governor Vivek Ramaswamy At the beginning of the month, pledged to Ohioans that if a data center was built in their community, that they would no longer have to pay for their home's [00:35:00] electricity, that they would pay lower property taxes, and that the data center would be required to abide by all air and water quality standards Yes, we need to build more data centers. but if we can actually come through this contentious period and build them on these sorts of foundations where people feel heard and they actually understand how they're benefiting directly from them is, that is an unfathomably better foundation for the future than what we might have had I wouldn't I wouldn't be surprised to see this issue get worse before it gets better, at least when it comes to popular perception and media headlines. But boy, when politicians start realizing that they can deliver all these benefits and be the heroes that connect the dots by simply picking up on templates that have and are working for other communities That's when I think we'll see a change for the better. this-- now, that's gonna do it for this very extended episode of AI Daily Brief. Appreciate you listening or watching, as always. And until next time, peace. ​ [00:36:00] Nathaniel Whittemore's audio recording: