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There is a difference between a policy argument and a lie. The data center panic sweeping politics is mostly the second thing wearing the costume of the first.
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Tax policy, immigration, healthcare: Reasonable people build competing arguments out of the same set of facts, shading emphasis to fit their priors. What’s happening with data centers is not that. It’s a fear campaign built on claims that don’t withstand scrutiny by the evidence, aimed at a piece of infrastructure most people have never seen or understood, which is exactly why it works. People are far more willing to believe the worst about the unknown than the best, and someone has figured out how to profit from that instinct.
The politics alone should tell you something is off. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) introduced a bill to impose a federal moratorium on new construction. Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH) spent 2024 praising a Google project that would make Ohio “an important tech hub in America.” By this summer, with a competitive reelection race in front of him, he had introduced legislation aimed at shielding ratepayers from the costs. The National Republican Senatorial Committee is privately warning that data centers have become an anchor around Husted’s neck, and Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) is running for Florida governor with Trump’s backing and still found room to propose restrictions on the industry.
When the far Left and the populist Right land on the same villain within months of each other, it is worth asking whether they found it through independent analysis or whether the villain was manufactured for both of them to find.
The United States went down this kind of road before, and it didn’t end well. In 2010, a lazy documentary by Josh Fox called Gasland gave the anti-fracking movement its baseline for opposition: a Colorado homeowner holding a lighter to his kitchen faucet and igniting the water coming out. The implication was that hydraulic fracturing had poisoned his well.
That scene was brought up in Senate hearings and city council meetings. It was used to push state ballot campaigns for the next decade — it was also a lie.
Investigators traced the methane in that man’s water to natural gas migration and a faulty well casing, not to fracking a mile underground. A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences later reconfirmed that fracking does not contaminate groundwater. Wyoming spent years rebutting claims about contamination in the town of Pavillion, another false claim the movement leaned on for years that turned out to be nonsense. None of that mattered to the politicians who bought into it. Bans and moratoria spread across the country anyway, passed by legislators responding to a fear that had already outlived its factual basis.
The data center backlash is engaging in the same fearmongering and disinformation. Accusations include that these facilities are using up local water supplies, wrecking the power grid, causing skyrocketing electric bills, and existing solely to feed Big Tech’s AI ambitions and stock prices.
Start with that last part because it is the foundation for the rest of the lies. Data centers are associated with AI and Big Tech. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez’s moratorium bill has to define its target narrowly, limited to facilities that draw more than 20 megawatts, run liquid cooling, and support AI models at scale, because “data center” as a category is much broader than their target.
Hospitals rely on data centers. Electronic health records, telehealth platforms, and hospital imaging systems rely on data centers. Banks route transactions through them. Emergency dispatch, payroll systems, online banking, streaming systems, the Zoom calls people make, all live in the same buildings that progressives and populists alike have decided to treat as this hulking evil that is built around chatbots meant to steal jobs.
Husted himself put it plainly on a podcast this summer: “If you’re connected to a wire, you’re using the data center.” A moratorium that sounds like it’s aimed at Big Tech will do more harm than good to local communities.
A big talking point among populists over the last decade has been the “dying town” and the need to save such towns. While data centers aren’t the only solution, to say they don’t offer local benefits is another myth.
Quincy, Washington, sits in the state’s potato country, a farming community of roughly 8,000 people with one open path for anyone who wanted to stay there: agriculture. Microsoft and Yahoo started buying land there in 2005. Twenty years and roughly 30 data centers later, those facilities generate an estimated 57% of the city’s property tax revenue. The money paid for a $120 million high school, a new library, upgraded police and fire stations, and a $15 million aquatic center with a lazy river opening next year.
Quincy’s former city administrator, who watched the town transform in real time, called it a “Quincy miracle.” Poverty in the area fell from 29% to 6%. The data centers created roughly 900 direct jobs, and each one generates several more in construction and local services. On electricity specifically, the complaint anti-data center advocates lean on hardest, Grant County’s rates rose 3.5% over the past year, while Washington state’s rose 10.2%, and the national rate rose 5%.
Why? Because Quincy’s data centers pay for their own grid upgrades rather than passing the cost on to residents.
Debates about the construction of data centers are valid, just as any debate over a large proposed infrastructure project is. That said, those debates should be grounded in data and facts, not hyperbole and lies meant to achieve an end through fear and misdirection. A federal moratorium built on Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez’s usual blather about “billionaires” or a state ban copied from Husted’s doesn’t fit the mold of intelligent, fact-based debate.
A Gallup poll this year found 71% of people oppose a data center near them, more than the 53% who oppose a nuclear plant. That is a reflection of a genuinely effective fear campaign, and those do not require true claims to work. They require claims that feel true to people who can’t or won’t bother to verify them independently, along with a press and political factions that are happy to ride the wave of fear to ratings and political wins.
The fracking debacle should be a lesson worth studying and relearning now with data centers. A flaming faucet had a much quicker impact than a groundwater study, and it didn’t matter that the faucet had nothing to do with fracking, because by the time anyone checked, the fear had already become policy. What’s worse is that data centers have something more durable: politicians on both sides in the same election cycle, telling voters that “data centers are coming for your water and your electric bill,” and it polls well, whether or not it’s accurate.
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Quincy is a prime example where the facts outweigh the fears. The result was a new high school and a falling poverty rate, and job growth, not droning noise, soaring electricity bills, and dried-up drinking water.
The people building an “oppose data centers” movement are not persuading anyone with evidence because none exists. They are relying on distortions, myths, and lies, and it is a dangerous way to make policy.
