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Hello again—I’m Elizabeth Wilkins, Roosevelt Forward’s president and CEO.
Just this week, ahead of launching the new AI-powered America.gov, President Trump said that he would [ [link removed] ] “never stifle the growth of technology that will be bigger than the industrial revolution.”
The American people feel differently [ [link removed] ], and nothing makes it as obvious as the growing backlash against data centers.
While Big Tech CEOs and government leaders claim AI growth is inevitable and the companies in charge can regulate themselves [ [link removed] ], Americans—who are anxious about higher energy prices, job insecurity, and whether their humanity has value in this society—want a say in what the future looks like.
Americans are increasingly resistant to the idea of building data centers—the “guts of the AI revolution,” as we’ll hear today’s guest call them—in their own neighborhoods. As Heatmap polling [ [link removed] ] found in August, 75 percent now oppose it, a rapid turnaround from the 43-42 support just a year earlier. [ [link removed] ]
And their vocal resistance and early victories [ [link removed] ] are evidence that communities aren’t just going to cede their power to AI companies like some of our policymakers have.
Earlier this year in Atlanta, I got the chance to talk about the bottom-up data center fight—and how communities are influencing local decisions—with someone who’s seen a lot of these battles firsthand.
Sameera Fazili was deputy director at the National Economic Council in the Biden administration, where she was in charge of all of its work on industrial policy and supply chains. Today, she’s a senior fellow at Workshop [ [link removed] ] and a visiting senior fellow at The Century Foundation [ [link removed] ], exploring some of the same questions she did at the NEC: How can members of the public assert their power in the economic transformations that affect them, and how do we ensure the prosperity of those transformations make everyone’s lives better?
This interview took place on April 30, 2026. It has been updated by Elizabeth and Sameera to account for recent events, and edited and condensed for clarity.
Elizabeth Wilkins: We’re just a couple blocks away here from a proposed data center. What are data centers and what does it look like for them to go into a community?
Sameera Fazili: Data centers are the guts of the AI revolution. They take an incredible amount of power and water to operate. Depending on the size and scale of the data center, that could be like 100 Walmarts or 10,000 homes.
They’re being built in these partnerships between Wall Street private credit companies, AI big tech companies, and semiconductor firms in joint venture arrangements that make ownership hidden and that blend together hyper-financialized interests with big tech interests.
Elizabeth: When a data center comes to town, what kind of questions does a community need to consider? And in this community, which has a plan for the way in which it wants to develop, what is that debate looking like right now?
Sameera: [Communities are] saying, “We want the right to shape it.” They’re saying, “We want an honest accounting of what the costs of these things are going to be and who’s going to bear those costs.” Are those costs going to be borne by us, the residents? By all of us, the taxpayers? By the corporations? What are they going to contribute to these costs?
And so the concerns that I’ve seen people have over these are: How much are they contributing to the local tax base, or how much are they draining from the local tax base? They’re asking, how much power is it taking from our public grid? How much is it going to cost us to add more power to the grid, and what kind of power? Are we talking about dirty power that’s going to add pollution to the environment or be highly variable in cost, like natural gas? Or are we talking about cleaner power, and is this an opportunity to get clean power on our grids?
You’re seeing communities ask, what kind of jobs is this going to create in our community? And that’s been a very interesting conversation because I think a lot of them recognize that there are a few permanent jobs at a data center—most of the jobs are the construction jobs.
But some communities are actually really concerned that what data centers are doing is allowing AI to spread faster and therefore take away our jobs, increase our surveillance economy, and increase police surveillance of our communities.
So they really get the richness of this. This isn’t just about the physical data center. This is about the future of AI policy and what AI is going to do to us.
Elizabeth: There is a conversation at the highest levels of industrial policy about global competitiveness and national prosperity, and then there’s a conversation at the hyperlocal level about what community means and how we want to live our lives. In addition to that, you’ve pointed out there’s actually a democratic conversation at both of those levels as well.
Can you talk a little bit about what kind of conversation should be happening at the national level as well as at the local level?
Sameera: America is a decentralized country by design in which some powers are held at the federal level, and there are a lot of overlapping powers at the state and local level. As a result, the Biden industrial policy team was trying to set up a deliberative debate to pull local communities into the conversation about what does industrial policy look like in the public’s interest? In your interest as a people, rather than industrial policy just being the purview of federal policymakers and policy elites and corporate elites talking about it in a backroom-deal kind of way in Washington, saying, “This is what we have decided is in the American interest.”
This isn’t just about the physical data center. This is about the future of AI policy and what AI is going to do to us.
Instead, the Biden administration said, “If we’re going to use public funding to build out these strategic sectors, we want the companies to negotiate with local residents about: What is the cost of that development in their community? What would make it be in their interest?
It really was about rewriting the social contract in America. We need a new social contract if we’re going to be in this era of industrial policy that asks what companies and corporations are contributing. What are citizens contributing? What role is government playing in mediating between citizens and business and making sure that power is shared, distributed, and isn’t only held by one side?
It’s a very, very different vision of industrial policy than the Trump administration, which has had a vision of industrial policy that, on one hand, has been a pay-to-play system. “You pay us”—usually the Trump administration and their friends—“personally pay us and enrich us,” instead of, “what are you paying into the public purse?” Or [they] will coerce you. It’s a full-on violent, coercive effort to force business to do a set of things that the government wants.
Elizabeth: Can you give us a couple of examples of other communities that have successfully brought a company that wants to build a data center to the table, and shaped their plans in the community’s interest?
Sameera: I’ve been studying what happened in Memphis when xAI, Elon Musk, came in and built a large data center.
He stuck on a ton of dirty gas turbines [ [link removed] ] to get the power he needed to run that data center. And it was in a predominantly African-American community that already had been burdened by decades of pollution. They had high rates of asthma, high rates of health conditions because of all the pollution.
The community said, “No, we don’t want this. This is not right.” They were able to organize and mobilize. And because they had built power over the years and helped elect certain people into city government, into the city council, they got the city to negotiate a community benefits fund with Elon Musk and xAI.
That community benefits fund is going to put tax dollars aside for that community to use. That community is going to appoint people to control how those funds are used to fund the improvements that they want in their community. It’s going to fund job training, it’s going to fund some health improvements—a variety of things that the community says that they want.
They also were able to get Musk to commit to contributing [ [link removed] ] to a massive water and sewage system upgrade, which had been the primary ask that this community had had for decades. They were really trying to protect their aquifer; it’s a very delicate water ecosystem in Memphis. And so it was a top ask of the community.
We need a new social contract if we’re going to be in this era of industrial policy that asks what companies and corporations are contributing.
Because they fought back, mobilized, and showed up at public hearings, they built a broad-based coalition. What they said was remarkable for them is that they’re a community that has tried to fight a lot of pollution efforts and a lot of development in their community, and they haven’t always built a multiracial, multiclass group of people to resist.
But this time they said they had so many white people join them and support them in this effort, which was huge for solidarity. You had multiracial solidarity being built together because people said, “we want to have the right to shape the future of our community, and the future of how AI is being built out and run in this country.”
Elizabeth: To build a data center, you need not just the hyperscalers, you need the Wall Street investment. You need, sometimes, private credit. These are some of the most powerful corporate interests in our country. How is it that in that kind of conversation, a community can actually come together to build enough power to change the outcome, whether they want to stop development entirely or win serious benefits?
Sameera: That’s what makes some of these fights really incredible.
In Memphis, it’s long-term community organizing that that community had done over the years, and they still held local power.
There was a data center in downtown San Jose that was being built, and the community said, “Well, our long-term plan is that we want more affordable housing in this area.” And so the developer added [ [link removed] ] affordable housing around the data center development.
You see that people actually have power when they organize and when they mobilize, and they have power when they work with elected officials who want to work with the community—in a kind of co-governance relationship, which is what some of us wonks call it. But they’re saying, “we don’t just work with those with the most money. Money is not the only power out there. Votes have power, and organized people have power.”
I think one thing that often gets lost is that it can be in the company’s self-interest to negotiate with the community. The company is going to be a new long-term resident in the community. They [should] want to have strong relationships. They want the social license to operate.
When you have community benefit policies in place you get people coming to the table, leveling the playing field and creating a sense of fairness.
So the companies get to hear, “Here’s what kind of resident we want you to be in our neighborhood,” and the company can say, “we can do that”—because a lot of them can do that.
Elizabeth: It’s been remarkable to see how some communities have been successful in placing restrictions [ [link removed] ] on, or completely stopping, data center development. In one county in Florida, for example, residents ousted [ [link removed] ] a $13.5 billion data center project that would have used 1 gigawatt of electricity—enough to power a mid-size city. And Monterey Park, California, banned [ [link removed] ] data center development entirely.
We’ve been talking about democracy at the most local level and what it means to participate. At the national level, we’re also seeing, or starting to see, some proposals, even from the AI companies, about what kind of policy should govern how we build out AI.
Sameera: I think that one positive step [that even] some of the companies have put out there is that we need to reimagine the social safety net in America.
I think you and I grew up in a country in which people really hotly contested: “Have you earned those benefits?”
What’s remarkable to me is that technology companies are saying things like, “actually, public benefits are a right that people have. They aren’t something that needs to be earned. They are part of your right as a citizen to have a basic set of economic rights and economic protections.”
Of course, these companies need to be held to account to actually follow through on their manifestos [ [link removed] ]. But I think that’s a really important shift in the public conversation that I hope accelerates and people really pick up. Of both business leaders and social movements calling for a new set of economic guarantees for the American people.
It’s remarkable to me that we’re having this industrial policy conversation in this moment. Like, 250 years ago, the Boston Tea Party starts because the British Crown says, “We need you to pay for our foreign wars and our foreign glory. We’re trying to seek glory in India, and this corporation that’s helping us seek that glory has gone bankrupt, and you have to pay in America.”
And the American people said, “Your visions of foreign grandeur are not in our interest, and they are not advancing our idea of the good life, our vision of shared prosperity.” And so we protested, and we started a whole new government.
I think it’s kind of inspirational that we have this opportunity as a people to say, “Is this going to be in our interest? How is this going to be in our interest?”
Well, we’re at another moment in which politicians in Washington and corporate elites are saying [ [link removed] ], “we’re in a global competition. For America’s national and economic security, we need to do all these things to fight abroad and to fight forces from abroad who are going to take us over.”
And I think it’s kind of inspirational that we have this opportunity as a people to say, “Is this going to be in our interest? How is this going to be in our interest?”
And these data center fights are people having that conversation about AI. They’re not just talking about data centers. They are talking about the future of AI and AI policy and who gets to shape it, one place at a time, in a really bottom-up way that I find beautiful, inspirational, and deeply American.
Fireside Stacks is a weekly newsletter from Roosevelt Forward about bold economic ideas and the people who put them into motion. If you enjoyed this installment, consider sharing it [ [link removed] ] with your friends.
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