Inside the Towns Saying Hell No to AI Data Centers

Our Take

Credit to Taylor Lorenz and reporter Jasmine Sun for doing the shoe-leather work most outlets skip: actually driving to Wisconsin, Michigan, and New York and asking the people living next to these substations what changed after the ribbon-cutting. The answer, unsurprisingly, is not what the glossy economic-impact studies promised. What's notable here isn't the environmental critique — we've heard versions of that before — it's the coalition. When Trump-voting county board members and progressive climate organizers end up reading the same NDA clause with the same disgust, that's not partisanship, that's a pattern being recognized across the political map.

The NDA piece deserves more attention than it usually gets. Plenty of local officials sign confidentiality agreements before they've even seen a load projection, let alone a water table analysis, and then get asked to trust that the megawatt numbers and tax abatements pencil out. By the time residents see a rate case filing or a well running dry, the deal is already recorded. That's the mechanism we exist to document — who signed, what they were shown, and what got left out.

If your town has a hyperscale project in permitting or under construction, don't wait for the local paper to catch up. Check our facility map to see what's already been sited near you, and use our take-action page for the public-records requests and utility filings that actually get answers before the concrete is poured.