What's Actually Behind Our National Rage Over Data Centers? A Conversation w Community Organizers & Researchers

With the midterms just three weeks away, communities across the country are pushing back against the construction of new AI data centers. In a deeply divided America, opposition to these massive facilities is emerging across party lines: seven in ten Americans say they oppose an AI data center being built near them.

Today, we bring together Midwestern residents on the front lines of this fight, along with researchers examining the electricity demands and potential health impacts of these facilities. AI data centers promise jobs and investment, but they also raise very real questions about who bears the costs, who reaps the benefits, and who gets to decide what's best for a community. 

We often hear that resistance to the centers is really about worry over AI. In our discussion, we discuss how much of that is true and how much of this is about anger over elected officials seen as siding with corporations over people. 

Hosts:

Brinda Adhikari

Tom Johnson

Maggie Bartlett

Dr. Mark Abdelmalek

Guests:

Stuart Day is a community organizer with Ohio Valley Allies and host of the Exposure podcast, covering environmental and industrial issues in the Ohio Valley.

Drew Kassel is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin studying energy systems and the electricity demands of data centers.

Montre Moore is a Milwaukee community advocate involved in local debates over data center development and its effects on residents.

Vina Colley is a longtime environmental activist in Piketon, Ohio, where a massive AI data center campus is proposed near the former Portsmouth uranium enrichment plant.

Natalie Armstrong, is a PhD candidate in environmental health and engineering at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, looking at the environmental & public health impacts of data centers.

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