Miguel Afonso Caetano"There is a whole lot of NIMBYism packed into these local fights, often in the most literal kind of way. Arguments about traffic and the character of the community are not unique to the AI boom. But I’ve listened to hours and hours of community meetings, in towns across the country, and you can hear in this opposition a reckoning with something more profound, too. At a county commissioners meeting in Indiana, an attorney for an anonymous developer promised that a $12 billion data center in the town of New Carlisle would be “laid out in a way to be bucolic.” Speaker after speaker threw the word back in his face. New Carlisle already had an $11 billion data center. They knew what it looked like. What New Carlisle didn’t need, one Hoosier told her county commissioners, was to give away its power and water for a technology that would “radicalize our teenagers to be hateful and dangerous or suicidal.” This is not the kind of person who can be swayed by Altman’s promise of erotica on demand.
The facelessness of the buildings is a symbol for the coldness of the corporations themselves. “Why should I trust this company that doesn’t trust themselves enough to let me know who you are?” asked a woman at a meeting in Menomonie, Wisconsin, where a $1.6 billion, 300-plus-acre data center was proposed. Another speaker found it suspicious that the anonymous buyer was headquartered in the “tax shelter” of Delaware.
When I asked Timothy Accola about the proposed project in his Menomonie backyard, he quickly set me straight: “Front yard, really.” Accola, a 38-year-old microbiologist with bushy sideburns like a Civil War general, lives with a Great Dane named Hamlet on the edge of town. He recently installed solar panels and tends a small orchard—peaches, cherries, apples, plums. “I was planning,” he told me, “on staying there the rest of my life.”"
Nicolas MØUART
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