Centrifugal Force
“Clinton, Iowa, is topographically flat and economically declining. The sawmills that made the city rich in the late 19th century have been repurposed as a museum. One of the Victorian mansions long since abandoned by the old lumber barons is open for tours, but tourists are scarce. Clinton has shrunk to about 24,000 people, and the town center, along the Mississippi River, feels nearly empty. On the west side, miles of deep-green corn and soy fields are crisscrossed with transmission wires and zoned for heavy industrial use. The city’s economic activity includes corn processing, pet-food production, and methamphetamines. With available land and a dire need for investment, Clinton seems like the perfect place for a gigantic data center.” Well, it seemed perfect to everyone except Clintonians. Instead, the town of Clinton is the latest site where one of the most quickly formed and widely supported partyline-crossing political movements is taking place. “The meteoric emergence of the data-center rebellion is a response to the speed and scale of construction, which in turn reflect the sudden ubiquity of generative and agentic AI. President Trump’s policy has been to turn everything about the technology, including data-center construction, over to private industry … But on this issue, most of Trump’s base remains angry and opposed to him.” A local newspaper editor described the way the issue has formed unlikely partnerships. “Outside of this, there’s no way in hell these people are talking to each other.” George Packer in The Atlantic (Gift Article) on what happened in Clinton and what it has to do with what’s happening across America. The Great Data-Center Rebellion. So what gives? Why is the opposition to data centers (whether it actually works or not) such a potent and often uniting force in America? It’s about a lot more than water use and who gets access to power. It’s about a feeling of powerlessness. “Opposition to data centers comes from a deeper concern than NIMBYism, resource misuse, or environmental harm. Over and over, Clintonians expressed a feeling of being misled, ignored, disrespected, betrayed—of having no say over basic matters in their own lives. The data center seemed to be a deal made among secretive insiders—huge, far-off entities in Silicon Valley, on Wall Street, and in Washington, as well as the local leaders of their own city. To the tech giants, QTS, Blackstone, and the Trump administration’s AI boosters, Clinton is an empty space on the Mississippi that looks like an opportunity. That the industry seeking to buy 1,100 acres on the west side of town is in the business of replacing human beings with machines—and perhaps, according to some AI experts, even rendering them extinct—only intensifies a sense of powerlessness.” Again, it’s unlikely that any political movement will ultimately stop big tech from building out the data centers it needs. But this isn’t just a story about a data center; it’s the story about America’s political center. And this is the first time in a long time that an issue has made it look like the center may hold. For Silicon Valley execs, all of this may not compute. But it’s not a machine story, it’s a human one.
+ NYT (Gift Article): How Meta Uses A.I. Data Centers to Avoid Billions in Federal Taxes. “Under a tax credit created in the 1980s to spur innovation, companies can get a rebate for supplies, but only if they are being tested in an experimental effort, not standard business operations. Meta is claiming that the costly A.I. computer chips it buys from companies, including Nvidia, are entitled to a taxpayer-provided discount as part of the experiment.”
+ Given all this and the upcoming midterms, yesterday seemed like an odd political moment to gather AI execs at the White House to praise data centers and announce that big tech will be left in charge of their own regulation. (But don’t worry, it’s not just any self-regulation. It’s tremendous self-regulation.) Trump, who is now calling AI “super intelligence,” signed a new accord. Sadly, the document had a notable misspelling: The name of our country. (Maybe the new ballroom plan should be replaced by a data center focused on spell check.)
