What widespread data center opposition shows us

Staff writer Story Hinckley reports this week from rural Utah, at the site of what would be one of the largest data centers on Earth.The specs of this proposed project are astounding: bigger than the size of Manhattan; a heat signature that rivals a volcano; the ability, according to some scientific analyses, to raise nearby nighttime temperatures by 12 degrees. This is not what is currently called a hyperscale data center. This is much, much larger.But that’s not the point of Story’s piece. Why We Wrote This In this week’s magazine, writer Story Hinckley explores the pushback to what could be one of the largest data center facilities on Earth. She finds that even in industry-friendly Utah, a growing number of people across the political spectrum are demanding agency, fairness, and accountability. Instead of the predictions of dire environmental consequences, Story focuses on the reaction within Utah to this proposed facility. There is, she found, a cross-partisan, grassroots effort that’s not just about blocking the project, but about citizens reasserting control over the political process and how money influences it. Republicans and Democrats are largely aligned, she says, on wanting more say about how policymakers make choices about the land, about the extent to which artificial intelligence should reshape physical and economic worlds, and about who gets to determine how resources are used.This pushback is increasingly common in the United States. Commentators from across the political spectrum have observed that, while opponents might cite water or electricity usage as their reasons, there are deeper rationales for the reaction against data centers. Some say the opposition is a common response to new technologies, repeated from the printing press forward. Others blame an “activist” class they accuse of bringing climate change concerns to any debate. Still others say it’s a reaction to the rapid development of artificial intelligence and the comparatively snail-paced policymaking around it.But there’s another explanation – one that comes through in a number of articles in this issue and elsewhere across the Monitor’s platforms. And it involves agency, fairness, and accountability.A year and a half ago, I traveled through rural Maryland to talk with people who were slated to lose swaths of land to new, high-powered transmission lines carrying power to data centers in northern Virginia. Local officials, farmers, and most residents opposed the Maryland Piedmont Reliability Project. And they had rapidly joined together, across political lines, to push back against it. People from both the conservative right and progressive left told me how they felt it was simply not right for big business, distant politicians, and even more distant tech moguls to make decisions that impacted the land and homes they had tended for generations.They wanted a say, they told me, and they wanted to redefine what “progress” meant.In this issue, you’ll read about people from South Korea to Canada to Route 66 who are debating and advocating their own versions of progress. There will be disagreements about what that word means for policy and politics and miles-long rows of computer servers. But despite tropes that paint our era as one of apathy and distraction, our reporting shows agency – individuals and communities putting aside differences to demand both fairness and the ability to define what matters.