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I’ve been back and forth with Allen, who rose to national prominence as the anti-tech prophet on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, for a few weeks now, seeking an entry into the growing movement against AI. I’d come down to Georgia, a hot spot of data center resistance, to hear one of Allen’s lectures, which he’s been giving at locations across the country. But when I got to the event, he told me he had to leave immediately after.
Fortunately, his flight keeps getting pushed back, which means I can follow him around on various side quests—like this one, to meet some friends at a nearby restaurant. He manages to evade most of my questions about their identities, changing the topic to more interesting things, like the “inverse singularity” (his idea that humanity will approach a point where our intellect and creativity collapse as we rely increasingly on AI for information). Allen’s friends at the restaurant have similarly little information about me, it seems. On our way, one of them calls Allen to ask for an ETA. “I’m bringing a friend—well, a frenemy,” he says, giving me a dramatic side-eye.
There are delivery robots all over downtown Atlanta, one of a handful of major metropolitan areas where they’re being rolled out to bring people burgers or tacos. Allen catches up to this one—which, I’m alarmed to see, has luminous white lights shaped like eyes on its front—and reads a name off the side: “CJ.” I think of the title of Allen’s recent book, Dark Aeon: Transhumanism and the War Against Humanity, and wonder what happened to the delivery worker that this robot replaced. Its eyes look pathetically, limply, past me.
When people ask what I’m doing in Georgia, I give them something easy. People hate data centers, I say, so I’m trying to figure out if they hate AI too. That’s all true. But the topic has also consumed me. In all my years of reporting on energy and the environment, I have never seen anything like the type of vitriol leveled at data centers, or the near-religious fury that has built up around their construction, or the way this resistance seems to be uniting people from the complete opposite ends of the political spectrum.
As I’m writing this piece, a friend sends me a post from a “white Christian nationalism” account on X: a seemingly AI-generated cartoon of Smokey Bear standing in front of a burning data-center-like structure, with the text “ONLY YOU CAN PREVENT DATA CENTERS.” What is happening? my friend asks. I’ll try to explain.
For the past few decades, data centers have been quietly built all over the US, largely in areas with both fiber connectivity and proximity to power—Silicon Valley and the DC area were popular choices. They helped stream Netflix or store stuff in the cloud or do any one of the countless stupid and important things we all do constantly online.
Then came ChatGPT and the AI race. Suddenly, tech oligarchs argued, we needed to build as many data centers as possible—and fast. Making the best AI, they said in speeches and news interviews and social media posts, required a massive buildout, especially of hyperscalers—behemoth versions of the structures we already had. The Trump administration bought in, rolling back environmental regulations to get the government out of the way of development.
Data centers began cropping up everywhere, as companies hurried to find the cheapest land, power, and water. Every day brought a splashier headline. Elon Musk reportedly trucked in unpermitted gas turbines to his Memphis xAI campus, located in a majority-Black neighborhood already suffering from high levels of pollution and contamination. A popular (later disputed) Washington Post article estimated that a single ChatGPT search guzzled the equivalent of a bottle of water. People eyed their electric bills as new data center loads caused utilities to forecast sky-high demand. If you trusted various economic outlets, data center construction now underpinned pretty much the entire US economy. All of this as tech CEOs publicly mused about how AI would take everyone’s jobs and replace human creativity itself.
People, naturally, started to ask questions.
Data center resistance certainly has some of its roots in classic NIMBYism: Lots of Americans simply don’t trust stuff being built, in their backyards, by powerful companies for mysterious purposes. But the pace of the outrage that’s built up around the country is shocking. A recent Gallup poll showed that 70 percent of Americans would somewhat oppose or strongly oppose data center construction in their area. In the past few months, we’ve seen an attack on a pro-data-center council member (Indianapolis’ Ron Gibson); an attack on a tech CEO (OpenAI’s Sam Altman); data center moratoriums introduced in at least a dozen states (including Georgia) and passed in one (New York); and countless cities and counties passing their own bans or moratoriums, including in deep-red places like Hill County, Texas. People have been either arrested, detained, or escorted out while protesting data centers at public meetings in New Jersey, California, Wisconsin, and Indiana.
When I started reporting on data centers last year, Washington was, seemingly, completely unprepared for the backlash. It was unprepared for anything AI-related, really—small wonder for a Congress full of folks so old they can barely work their phones. Two of the first national politicians who I saw call out data center development were the right-wing populists Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie, who worried about how a proposed 10-year ban on state-level AI regulations could be leveraged to build data centers on private property. “Forcing eminent domain on people’s private properties to link the future Skynet is not very Republican,” Greene tweeted in June 2025.
Meanwhile, Steve Bannon, Trump’s erstwhile former adviser and a longtime critic of technology, was regularly addressing AI on War Room under Allen’s guidance. At the end of 2025, when the Trump admin...
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