Today, I’m talking with Gaby Del Valle, a policy reporter here at The Verge , about the growing backlash against AI data centers.
Gaby recently reported a fantastic piece：/policy/969667/humans-first-data-center-protest-hernando-county-florida-republicans about Hernando County, Florida, where last month the county commission unanimously approved a yearlong moratorium on data center construction. She attended a protest there organized by a group called Humans First：https://www.humansfirst.com/, a conservative grassroots movement focused on combating AI data center build-outs.
You’ll hear Gaby explain that it was part of a bigger, broader, and bipartisan opposition to data centers. Not only as physical buildings, but as infrastructure that powers an AI boom that takes local jobs and fills feeds with slop.
Data center construction has become a proxy for the public’s feelings about AI: something physical they can aim their fear and frustration at — and even create enough pressure to stop through community organizing and protests.
So I wanted Gaby to talk me through what these protests look like on the ground, from voters whose party affiliations have typically aligned them with big business. You’ll hear Gaby say data centers are scrambling party lines, turning diehard Trump voters into protesters who care about left-coded issues like groundwater contamination and forever chemicals.
It’s a confusing time, and data centers are going to play a major role in electoral politics going forward. So I suspect this won’t be the last we hear from Gaby on movements like Humans First.
Okay: Verge policy reporter Gaby Del Valle on the bipartisan data center backlash. Here we go.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Gaby Del Valle, you’re a policy reporter here at The Verge . Welcome back to Decoder .
I’m excited to talk to you. You were on previously with our friend Alex Heath, but this is the first time I’ve gotten to talk to you in Decoder . I think the story you just wrote about data centers and conservative backlash in Florida ：/policy/969667/humans-first-data-center-protest-hernando-county-florida-republicans is just a real preview of what tech policy going into the midterm elections is going to be like.
You were just there. You talked to a bunch of people who are protesting data centers. It is a real alignment scramble in terms of our politics. Tell us what you found.
What I found was people are really, really, really, really mad. And the reasons why they’re mad are different depending on the community, but they’re also all the same, if that makes sense. They have localized concerns. They were telling me Florida’s really humid. It doesn’t make sense to build a data center that needs to be kept very cool and dry in such a humid place. A lot of them were concerned about their groundwater. They were concerned about PFAS getting dumped into the water.
But I’ve also talked to people in Arizona who have the opposite concern. Arizona is not very humid. Arizona’s very dry. And they’re also like, “It doesn’t make sense to build a data center in the desert.” So whatever your community is, you’re like, “It doesn’t make sense to build a data center here because of X reason,” basically.
The thing that really strikes me in reading your piece and hearing about the other reporting you’re doing for pieces to come is that data center build-outs and data center protests do not neatly map to the usual right-left culture war alignment that we have seen play out for so long. And I’m curious about your view on that. Why can’t Elon Musk just command his army of followers to be pro-data centers?
This is so interesting to me. So this is a little bit of backstory that’s going to answer your question. The woman who organized Humans First, which was bipartisan and now is focusing only on organizing conservatives, was an early founder or organizer with the Tea Party way back when. And this has a similar vibe to me. It’s not a left-right thing. It’s a populous technocrat divide.
You’re seeing that on the right and the left. So for example, at the Abundance Conference last year, it was center-right to center-left-ish. And everybody was pro-nuclear, pro-AI. And we were hearing that, “These things are here to stay. We have to figure out how to do it smartly.” At the same time, the populist left and the populist right are both skeptical of tech development, to put it lightly.
That skepticism plays out across a number of dimensions. I couldn’t help but be struck as I read your story by how many strains of conspiracy thinking there are about data centers.
I’m curious if they’re just visible. They’re so big, and they require so much development and so much build-out that you can just glue any concerns you have onto them. “This big thing is happening, and I don’t feel any control. And I’m also worried about 5G, Chinese government interference, and X, Y, Z. And I can just point it all at this very big thing by which there’s a process to say no. I can go to my local town board meeting and literally say no.”
I mean, I think that’s part of it. It’s interesting because I think there’s a spectrum of conspiratorial thinking to, I guess, misinformed thinking on the water use question. We now know that they don’t use as much water as we previously thought：https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/07/how-much-water-data-centers-use/687934/, et cetera, et cetera. But on the far end of the spectrum, one of the people I talked to told me that cattle born near data centers are all stillborn. I tried to track that down. I was like, “Where did this come from?” And it was one farmer in Texas：https://www.facebook.com/groups/1546162433462444/posts/1782623276483024/ who claims he had one stillborn calf on his cattle farm.
So that got spun out via the internet rumor, social media mill. I think that’s part of it. There’s this issue of social collapse that comes out once you talk to people a little bit. One of the women I talked to said, “I had this friend. ChatGPT told her she couldn’t be friends with me anymore.” You have all of these stories of people harming themselves, going off their medication, or whatever because they’ve been talking to a chatbot and it goes awry.
I think this gives people a feeling of control. Where I can go to my community board meeting or my council members’ meeting, and I can say, “I don’t want this big building that houses the scary thing that is fracturing my community here.” So it’s not just the actual building. I think it’s a broader backlash to generative AI and to LLMs specifically.
One of my ideas that I’ve been pushing on lately is that the AI products are not winning over hearts and minds in the market. So if the data centers just said Netflix on them, maybe people would like them more.
But instead, that’s where the slop is coming from, and it’s why the jobs are going to go away. It’s also where Mark Zuckerberg is just going to get even wealthier. Is there a dynamic of that — that people just don’t like the thing that the data centers make?
Yes, absolutely. They don’t like a lot of the things that the data centers make. It’s not just AI. I think AI is a big part of it, but this is a little preview of a different story I’m working on... In Tucson, there’s a data center project that’s getting built out. The people I talked to there said, “Yeah, this might be an Amazon Web Services facility, and Amazon works with ICE.” So this technology is fueling mass deportations through, not directly, but creating the non-sexy infrastructure that surveillance is built on.
There are two things to it. Part of it is a NIMBY, “I don’t want this thing in my backyard, literally. I don’t want my town to get polluted. I don’t want this. I don’t want that. I don’t want to see it. I don’t want the noise pollution.” And then the other part is, “I do not like what this big building represents and what it has wrought on society.”
Does that cut across bipartisan lines? Or is that more culture war coded?
It’s both. It cuts across culture war lines in that people have different concerns about what LLMs do. So one woman I spoke to was talking about the fracturing of social bonds. On the construction front, she was like, “We’re a rural-ish community. We don’t want this big blight on our nice rolling hills.” So that’s a right-coded thing. And there was a lot of anti-development stuff that is neither right nor left.
On the left, I would say there’s similar culture war concerns, but it’s... I don’t know if this is necessarily a culture war concern, but fueling deportations. Both sides, I think, are concerned about the job losses because of AI. And both sides have caught on to the fact that these facilities don’t really have a lot of long-term job prospects. There’s the big construction boom. There’s an HVAC situation. But to actually maintain these facilities, it doesn’t require that many people.
I think people have caught onto that. The promises of the AI data job, or that the AI boom will lead to jobs related to data centers, are not actually true.
Yeah. At most, it’s a few hundred jobs for each of these facilities, at least in the data centers we have now. Why do you think some of the protests make national news? The Kevin O’Leary data center in Utah ：https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/14/us/elections/kevin-oleary-utah-data-center.html is a national story. Maybe it’s just because he’s a cartoon character.
And then there’s a new project in Georgia where there might be a huge OpenAI facility ：https://openai.com/index/building-ai-infrastructure-with-the-effingham-county-community/ that seems to go under the radar. There are all of the projects in Florida that you are reporting on, but don’t seem to be explosive in the way that some of the other ones are.
Yeah, I think that’s a good question. There was one in Florida that was explosive, and it was just because it was near Mar-a-Lago：https://www.businessinsider.com/palm-beach-florida-ai-data-center-trump-mar-a-lago-2026-7. I think that one pretty obviously made the national news because it’s related to the president. I honestly think a cartoon character at the center of it is the deciding factor a lot of the time on whether it’ll become a national story or not. And then also the numbers. The Utah one, I don’t remember off the top of my head how big it’s supposed to be, but it’s supposed to be huge. So then that becomes a proxy for all data center development.
They’re being planned everywhere. And I think what’s so interesting is that the backlash exists everywhere too. I relied a lot on, for example, the Tampa Bay Times to figure out the background for this story. They’re on top of it. They’re going to these meetings and watching people get yelled at and asked, “Did you sign an NDA? Yes or no?“：https://www.citizen.org/news/the-secret-data-center-buildout-how-states-can-stop-big-techs-abuse-of-ndas/
Do you think the local governments are being responsive? You’ve now gone to some of these protests; you’ve talked to people on the ground in various counties across the country. The basic unit of democracy is supposed to be your local government because you know those people and you can yell at them in the grocery store and the town board meeting.
We’re seeing there’s a wall going up in some of these cases where the local governments are saying, “No, we have to do this development. This is the only economic development available.” And the people are saying, “No, we’re going to throw you out.” Do you think local governments on the whole are being responsive or not responsive at all?
I think it really depends. In Hernando County, they did pass a moratorium. There are a lot of counties in Florida where moratoriums have passed. But in Tucson, again, the city government is responsive to what the people want and the county government isn’t, and they’re at odds with each other. There are all these videos of people yelling at their representatives about NDAs again. And then them being like, “We cannot say whether we signed an NDA,” which is an answer, but whatever.
I think it really depends on a lot of things. How small the communities are, for one. How vulnerable the people in office feel to getting voted out, I think, is another big one. In Florida, the Republican primary for governor, I think, might be affected by this issue. The primary is in a few weeks and the front-runner, Byron Donalds, has taken a lot of money from the AI industry and data center development groups. And people are mad. People are really mad.
He was endorsed by Trump, and everyone I spoke to, as proud Trump voters, said things like, “I don’t understand why Trump would endorse him. I’m not going to vote for him.” One woman I talked to who told me she was opposed to everything Democrat said she would vote for a Democrat or an independent if Donalds won the primary. And Donalds has also changed… not his stance on data center development, but the way that he talks about it in response to a lot of this backlash.
How has he changed the stance? How is he talking about it now?
He says his vision is to make Florida the financial capital of the world. And to a lot of people, that would sound great, but these people are really upset by this, both because they... I mean, there are a lot of other things at play here. Housing costs in Florida have gone up exponentially. Not only in big cities like Miami, but in the suburbs of Tampa, for example. Housing prices have shot up to levels that I, as somebody who grew up there, just don’t understand. I literally can’t wrap my head around it.
So I think a lot of the backlash to development and to data centers is also related to people’s cost of living going up and to these, in their words, outside developers coming in and changing a community that’s already changing. He has since said that we need data center development, but we need to do it responsibly.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is another great example of this. He supported a bill that would require data centers to pay their own utilities and also let counties require them to use reclaimed water, which would address the water issue. But the Tampa Bay Times reported that he also supported legislation that gives massive tax breaks to data centers. And that he pushed to amend that law, which I think was signed in 2017, to only apply to hyperscale data centers, which are the ones that people have problems with.
The people I talk to, they know that there are currently data centers in Florida, and they’re smaller. There are no hyperscale data centers, but there are around one hundred smaller ones for Netflix or whatever. And they’re okay with that. One woman I talked to works in IT. She said, “I understand that data centers are a boogeyman, and we need them for stuff. But I don’t want this massive facility using all of our power, emitting these frequencies, et cetera, et cetera.” Another thing that I think is really interesting-
Wait, can you just explain what “emitting these frequencies” means?
[Laughs] Just the noise. I talked to these guys at the Border Security Expo who work for a data center company, and they all live in Virginia. Even they were like, “Yeah, it sucks.” They said, “I hate walking around my neighborhood because I just hear it all the time.” And they work in data centers. I don’t think she meant 5G.
It’s a real element of this, right next to China being a villain of whatever persuasion you need China to be a villain for. Again, there’s just a piece of all this where it’s a big thing that you can stop. The power of NIMBYism can stop this. Maybe we can’t stop everything else. We can’t stop Facebook from doing targeted advertising that feels like it’s listening to you. No one knows how to stop this. It’s bad. We don’t like it, but no one knows how to stop it.
“I can stop this building from being built” seems like it not only scrambles our culture war lines, but it’s scrambling politics, too. Byron Donalds saying ：https://www.facebook.com/TheHillEvents/videos/my-goal-is-to-make-florida-the-financial-capital-of-the-world-were-ranked-1-in-s/1674737633225957/ he wants Florida to be the financial capital of the world. One, it’s very funny in that he has to contend with the existence of New York, London, Beijing, and Amsterdam. Go down the line.
There are a lot of places that can compete for that title where Miami might not be in the running. But doing it via building data centers is not the path to that result. It’s just a bunch of economic development that might result in some short-term gains.
It feels like people have clocked it, and they’ve clocked that it’s a thing you can stop. I’m curious if there’s anything else. You’ve spent a lot of time covering the right, and I wonder if there’s anything else that scrambles the lines like that. Because in almost every other case, “let’s build stuff, let’s tear down the White House and build a ballroom” is fine. Building things is better, and it is coded in one side of the culture war.
Yeah. I mean, this is, again, so Florida specific, but it really surprised me how much of the politics around this were scrambled. One of the women was talking about this ballot initiative that’s going to pass. It’s going to give more tax exemptions to homeowners, which I feel is a standard Republican thing — lower taxes for homeowners. People would like that.
She said, “This is terrible. It’s going to deprive county governments of funds that they would otherwise get from homeowners, which will then entice the counties even further to have data centers come into our communities.” So she was thinking of the second- and third-order effects of this, even though that’s a pretty populist initiative. But yeah, it’s all so scrambled.
How do you see the scramble inside of the right and then carrying over to the populist left? The idea that a bunch of billionaires threw all of their weight behind Donald Trump in 2024, and that led to, I don’t know, a bunch of podcast bros throwing their weight behind Donald Trump in 2024. There was a cultural wave of Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, and the All-In podcast about building and tech and the future. It feels like that has come to one kind of end.
I don’t think that that wave is driving the culture anymore because of the backlash to AI. We can all see the college students booing at graduation. If the backlash is there against the data centers, against AI taking the jobs, against billionaires in general, what does that turn into on the right? Because that was the animating force of the right for so long.
I think that is still an open question. I think the question is whether this backlash is strong enough to shake people’s other partisan concerns.
If you’ve got a Democrat candidate who is anti-data center development, but also not super gung-ho about deputizing all Florida police officers to do ICE arrests, where does that leave someone who supports Trump’s immigration policies but doesn’t want a data center in their neighborhood? I don’t know. I think that’s what the party is struggling with right now.
I mean, I think Trump is this perfect avatar for people because he somehow stands for anti-elite sentiment, but also for hard work and capitalism. He’s just this perfect blend of, I don’t even know how to describe it. He contains multitudes, I guess. And nobody else can contain multitudes like him. They don’t have the juice. They just don’t have it.
I think I can make the argument. I grew up in Wisconsin, which has many similar dynamics to maybe Florida, in that people in Wisconsin remember a time when there were big factories. In the town I grew up in, Racine, there used to be a Case factory that made tractors. There was a Chrysler factory in Kenosha that made Jeep Wranglers. This is a real thing that occurred, and all those things are gone.
So Trump would promise all of this huge economic development that basically looked like manufacturing. I think what his version of this, even with tariffs, was, “We will bring manufacturing back to all of these places. And that manufacturing will require a lot of hard work, but there will be dignity in that hard work.”
At the end of it, you’re going to get to point to a Modine air conditioner and be like, “I made that thing. My community made that thing.” I think that is very seductive. I mean, Trump spent years promising that we would build iPhones in America, and that’s Wisconsin and Foxconn and all this stuff ：/23030465/foxconn-lcd-factory-wisconsin-alan-yeung-trump-scott-walker-wisconn-valley-dome-decoder-interview .
Maybe none of those things were ever going to come true because that’s not how anything gets made anymore. And that’s not even the kind of work people actually want to do in America anymore. But you take all of that energy, and you’re like, “Actually, what we’re going to make is data centers.” And no one can see at the end of that, “I made a Jeep Wrangler.” They get to see that Elon Musk got richer; they just lost their jobs, their children feel like they have no future, and their feeds are full of slop.
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