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SOCIALISTS CAN LEAD IN THE FIGHT AGAINST AI DATA CENTERS  
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Liza Featherstone
September 9, 2026
Jacobin
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_ Americans across the political spectrum are coming together to
fight against AI data centers and for solutions like public power.
Beholden to big donors, mainstream politicians won’t meet the moment
— but the Left can. _

Seven in ten Americans oppose having an AI data center in their own
community. But both parties take Big Tech money, and neither is
capable of meeting the moment., (Jay Janner / The Austin
American-Statesman via Getty Images) Free international shipping and
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We really thought we had won,” says Lee Ziesche, a cochair of the
Tucson Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in Arizona, ruefully
recalling August 2025. Along with other groups and thousands of
community members, DSA had been battling the developer Beale
Infrastructure over a massive artificial intelligence data center
called Project Blue.

In this desert city, water is precious and also a public utility.
(Excessive water usage is a much-criticized aspect of the data center
boom.) The developers had said they would not build Project Blue
unless the City of Tucson annexed the land; that way, the data center
would be served by Tucson water. “There was massive opposition to
[the data center] for a lot of reasons,” Ziesche explains, “but
the number-one thing is, conserving water is just part of the culture
here. Everyone learns about it in school.” Moreover, Ziesche says,
“It reached 100 degrees here last March, so we are obviously very
aware of the climate crisis.”

“I’ve seen a lot of opposition to major infrastructure
projects,” says Ziesche, who also fought pipelines in New York City,
“and I have never seen anything like the resistance [to Project
Blue] in Tucson. It’s pretty dead here in the summer; the snowbirds
leave, and it’s really hot.” But that summer, a thousand people
showed up to a public meeting. The city council decided unanimously
not to annex the land for the data center, which meant the city
wouldn’t be providing the water. A win!

The massive opposition prevailed in the arena of democratic
decision-making: the municipality. But that turned out not to be the
decisive arena. In an about-face, the developer decided to proceed
with Project Blue anyway, using air instead of water as a coolant.
That’s a big shift — and one entirely due to the resistance —
but it doesn’t resolve the residents’ concerns. With weather that
hot and a data center driving up already sky-high electric bills for
households, Ziesche says, “It’s going to be impossible to
survive.”

“These tech billionaires, as we’ve always known about
capitalists,” says Ziesche, “are willing to sacrifice entire
communities to make a profit.” Even worse, the defeat showed the
fragility of the city’s democratic institutions: the people, united,
can easily be defeated when they don’t have the final say.

Construction crews have broken ground on Project Blue. Protests
continue, but it appears to be a defeat. Nevertheless, Ziesche says
that Tucson socialists are taking the lesson about the community’s
investment in energy and infrastructure issues and moving forward with
a new campaign demanding public power. The data center fight, says
Ziesche, “has really broadened the base of people who believe in
public power and potentially socialist solutions.”

Seven in ten
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Americans oppose the construction of a large AI data center in their
own community. In fact, there are few issues that unite Americans
across the political spectrum like this one does. Even among
Republicans, more say
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that new data center construction is bad than good. Yet most
mainstream politicians, Democratic and Republican alike, are failing
to meet the moment.

That leaves socialists, who are unbeholden to large donors with vested
interests in the AI boom, in a unique position. Democratic socialists
are better positioned than either major party to stand up to
oligarchy, a twenty-first-century American gangrene that every data
center fight seems to reveal anew.

Data Centers Are a Class Issue

There are good reasons for the popular opposition to data centers:
most of all anger over corporate greed and a sense of popular
helplessness at being left out of important decisions at the local
level. Both Republicans and Democrats are funded by Big Tech, the
fossil fuel industry, and the superrich, while socialists argue that
these corporations and billionaires need to get out of politics and
ideally not even exist.

In recent primaries, where data centers have become an issue,
democratic socialists have won or come close. In Michigan, where the
state has given data centers incentives to build and the energy they
demand is being used to exploit loopholes in the state’s clean
energy laws and build new fossil fuel infrastructure, Detroit’s
Chris Gilmer-Hill won his state house primary
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Gilmer-Hill is an environmental justice activist and made data centers
a central issue.

He wasn’t alone: in a state where the issue has been raging, other
anti-data-center socialists and progressives won big, with
congressional primary victories by Will Lawrence and Donavan McKinney,
not to mention Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed. In Denver, democratic
socialist Melat Kiros won her congressional primary in June, also
calling for a moratorium on data centers. And while Francesca Hong did
not prevail in her recent gubernatorial primary in Wisconsin, the data
center issue certainly helped make her a strong contender in what
turned out to be a painfully close loss.

The reasons people hate data centers — and generative AI in its
current, extractive, billionaire-piloted form — are deeply aligned
with democratic socialists’ broader political agenda. Sarahana
Shrestha, a democratic socialist assemblymember in New York’s Hudson
Valley fighting for a state moratorium on new data centers, says that
the data center fight is less about Terminator-style scenarios where
AI turns against us and really about grounded, immediate issues like
affordability and inequality. While rural New Yorkers are struggling
with the rising costs of electricity and threats to the grid, data
centers will drive up their energy costs.

Data centers get ridiculous special treatment in the form of lavish
tax subsidies, which is in itself a broad class issue. Plus, says
Gilmer-Hill, “Even if we were to make data centers pay their fair
share, pay the same rate as everybody else, you’re still not
capturing the fact that they’re making it more expensive for
everybody.”

Data centers also delay the needed transition to renewables by
requiring more fossil fuels, worsening the climate crisis. Indeed, the
energy needs of data centers are being used by fossil fuel companies
to justify more oil and gas infrastructure — even in the face of
record heat, storms, and wildfire pollution connected to the climate
crisis. In Tucson, for example, the utility companies claim they need
gas generation to power these data centers and are pushing a
multimillion-dollar pipeline.

People are “understanding that the data centers aren’t really to
serve _us_,” says Ziesche. As Gilmer-Hill points out, in the
best-case scenario data centers create very few jobs, and in the
worst, they may put many Americans out of work. Although President
Donald Trump said last week — with the characteristic charming
respect that he always shows to his rural voters — that communities
resisting data centers were choosing to be “backwards and poor
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the truth is the economic benefits are greatly exaggerated
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As Shrestha says about the promises tech billionaires are making to
communities, “It’s not just the machines that are
hallucinating.”

Fight Data Centers, Save Democracy

Beyond the specific threats posed by data centers, nationwide fights
against them are awakening people to their disempowerment in the face
of billionaires’ wishes — that is, the weakness of their
democratic institutions. “We really are recognizing how important it
is to be able to make those decisions for ourselves as a community,”
says Ziesche, “and not have these massive projects shoved on us by
Big Tech.”

Democratic socialists are deeply committed to expanding democratic
control and ownership, which makes them well-positioned to speak to
this anger and channel it toward political solutions. “What
socialists are fighting for is public goods for the public,”
Shrestha says, and these fights build the case for publicly owned and
controlled energy.

In Tucson, DSA already had a public power campaign underway, but the
data center defeat greatly strengthened it by highlighting the need
for energy to be controlled by the people of Tucson, just as water is
already. Now, Ziesche says, socialists are making the data center
fight into a referendum on the private utility. After the outrage of
Project Blue, she says, “I’m seeing many people who are definitely
not socialists supporting our public power campaign.”

In New York state, DSA and its elected officials — including
Shrestha and State Senator Kristen Gonzalez — are pushing for a
statewide moratorium on new data center construction. In a compromise,
Governor Kathy Hochul issued an executive order
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establishing a watered-down version, which pauses new construction for
one year. Socialists in New York State are further along in the fight
for publicly owned renewable energy, having passed the Build Public
Renewables Act
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in 2023 (although implementation of that law remains an ongoing
struggle). But in the Hudson Valley, as in Tucson, one of the next big
campaigns is to socialize the electric utility, as many small towns
and cities in America already do.

Gonzalez is also working on legislation to end tax subsidies to data
centers. In Rockland County alone, state and local agencies have
committed at least $321 million in power and tax subsidies
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to data centers. In a recent executive order, Hochul expressed an
intention to work with the legislature to end such subsidies. But that
intention has not yet become law, and given her record on climate and
her history of coziness with polluters, there’s ample reason to
believe it will take a big fight to make it so. If it weren’t for
socialist legislators like Gonzalez, ending subsidies for data centers
wouldn’t even be part of the Democratic policy conversation.

At the grassroots, it’s rare that we as Americans agree on something
so fervently. Looking at the polling, as well as the thousands of
people across the political spectrum thronging public meetings,
talking to their neighbors, and signing petitions for public power, it
seems clear that mainstream Democrats and Republicans would be
electorally wise to become socialists at least on this one issue.

Shrestha reflects that in Wisconsin, Francesca Hong’s opponent, a
Democrat who opposed a statewide moratorium, might now lose the
governorship to a Republican. “Even from just a purely political
point of view,” she says, Democratic support for data centers
“seems so reckless. If the Democratic Party is even remotely
interested in fighting the climate crisis, in making democracy
functional, in winning elections, they need to take a hard stance
against these data centers.”

But even absent the participation of mainstream Democrats, the
democratic socialist movement will likely continue to lead on this
issue. “Everyday people are waking up to how this system has been
rigged against us,” says Gonzalez. She adds that if socialists can
“model good governance on this issue, I think we can prove that our
positive vision for the future, for working people, is popular.”

_Liza Featherstone is a columnist for __Jacobin__, a freelance
journalist, and the author of __Selling Women Short: The Landmark
Battle for Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart__._

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