Data Center Boom Sparks Rare Political Unity as Communities Fight AI Infrastructure

Across rural America, a quiet technological revolution is colliding with the rhythms of farming, ranching, and small-town life. The collision is happening at the scale of entire counties, and it is forcing people who have never thought much about politics to reconsider how they vote.

The machinery behind artificial intelligence—the vast server farms that train and run AI models—requires something almost nobody talks about until it arrives: data centers. There are already more than 3,000 of them scattered across the United States. Another 1,500 are in the pipeline. Tech giants like Meta, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are expected to spend 1.5 trillion dollars building these facilities through next year. They are not small. A data center built two years ago might have consumed five megawatts of power. A new one built for AI might consume 1,000 megawatts—200 times larger. They are factories, essentially: vast industrial warehouses packed with computer chips, drawing enormous amounts of electricity and water, and they are being built, increasingly, on land that was recently farmland.

In Red Oak, Texas, a town of about 20,000 people south of Dallas, Jazmin Villegas learned that a developer called Compass planned to build ten two-story data centers on agricultural land the size of Central Park, right next to her family farm. Villegas is a mother of five and a Marine veteran. When she realized the scope of what was coming, she felt obligated to act. She began organizing neighbors, attending town halls, pushing back against a city council that had approved the project with little public discussion. "Not one single person in that room was for the data center," she said later. "And the city council just went ahead and approved it." The anger was real, but so was something else: a sense that this was a fight worth having, that the stakes were high enough to justify the effort.

What made Red Oak unusual was not the opposition itself—communities across the country were raising similar objections—but the political composition of the resistance. Dave Lowe, a lifelong conservative Republican living near the proposed Compass site, told reporters he was prepared to vote differently for the first time in his adult life. "I'm not going to vote red or blue," he said. "I'm going to vote for the candidate that is willing to speak up, and put up, and do something to help us with this issue." Lowe and Villegas, separated by ideology, were part of a group of a few dozen Red Oak residents who met twice a month to stop the project. Polling showed that more than 60 percent of Republicans, Independents, and Democrats all agreed on one thing: they did not want a data center where they lived. It was a rare moment of political unity, born not from shared values but from shared vulnerability.

The concerns were concrete and varied. In Loudoun County, Virginia, which has the world's highest concentration of data centers, electricity bills had surged in the past year, at least partly because of the growing power demand from the facilities. In Chandler, Arizona, residents worried about water being diverted to cool data centers in a state already struggling with shrinking water supplies. In Red Oak, construction workers' cars clogged the roads for miles before dawn. And everywhere, there was a sense that decisions were being made behind closed doors. In Hood County, 70 miles west of Red Oak, an out-of-state company approached county commissioners with vague promises of jobs and growth but refused to say what it actually wanted to build. The proposals had code names: Project Yellow, Project Red, Project Lion, Project Panther. Two months later, Dave Eagle, one of five elected officials on the commissioners court, discovered that Amazon Web Services was behind the pitch. AWS was asking for up to 90 percent in property tax rebates for 30 years. Eagle voted no. But the project moved forward in the next county over, where AWS got the tax break it wanted.

Michael Webber, a professor at the University of Texas who specializes in the relationship between water and energy, has become a go-to advisor for tech companies planning data centers in Texas. His message to them is blunt: "Don't be a jerk. Don't take the water. Don't break the grid. Don't ruin the land." He acknowledges that the speed and scale of construction for AI is unprecedented. The demand for computing power is driven by what tech companies call an "AI arms race"—a competition to develop artificial general intelligence, or AGI, that could match or exceed human capabilities. The implications are framed as both economic and national security concerns. But Webber also notes that some smart people believe the demand will eventually be satisfied, while others believe it never will be. "We will always want more data centers," he said. "We will always want more intelligence."

The political response has been swift. In Texas, Republican Governor Greg Abbott had initially courted data center development, calling Texas "the centerpiece for AI data centers for Google in the entire world." But as opposition mounted and his Democratic challenger, Gina Hinojosa, made data centers a central campaign issue, Abbott shifted. In August, he paused approval of new data centers that would draw from the state's power grid until an audit was complete. He directed regulators to ensure that data centers pay for their own electricity infrastructure, do not take water needed by communities, do not disrupt neighborhoods, and do not raise costs for residential customers. Blake O'Quinn, a third-generation Texas rancher, spoke for many when he said: "We're not all against change. But the values, the traditions. We were blessed with this land. We're stewards of this land. We're here to take care of it and pass it on to the next generation of Texans." Two-thirds of the proposed data centers are planned in rural areas, places more accustomed to farmhouses than warehouses. The fight is far from over, and its outcome will shape not just the landscape of rural America but the speed at which artificial intelligence develops.