By HERMAN MORRIS

Across the country, the movement against new data centers continues to grow. Every day, in the streets and in town halls, people are speaking out against their construction. July 18 saw 142 protests in 42 states opposing data centers, with most being in Texas. The concerns cited are often high electricity costs, water usage, emissions, and light and noise pollution.

Looking beyond that, though, the anti-data center protests—and allied protests against the proliferation of Flock surveillance cameras—reveal the opening of a new mass movement demanding democratic control of towns and resources around them in opposition to a tech-billionaire takeover of the economy. This new mass movement has also demonstrated the potential to cut through usual partisan divides among working-class communities with Republican and Democratic voters largely in opposition to one another.

This mass protest has thrown capitalist politicians on both sides of the aisle into a crisis, with New York and Texas both having to announce data center moratoriums to curtail outrage. The protests against data centers, and the pressure that these protests are putting on capitalist politicians, represent a new opening for mass politics in the U.S.—one that all working people should be showing up for and supporting, as they directly attack a key plank of authoritarian rule by business interests.

Composition of the movement

Data center construction is now opposed by seven in 10 Americans. The majority of those who are mobilizing against data centers live either in rural or working-class communities, as the data center build-out has prioritized low real estate values and existing industrial zones in city limits, often near marginalized communities who must live with the consequences of industrial waste.

Because these projects are so heavily based in small towns, many of the biggest fights are happening in city or town halls, where residents have packed rooms and demanded that their local elected councils overturn approvals for them. Examples such as Peculiar, Mo., San Marcos, Texas, and Pittsburg, Ca. all involve smaller communities that successfully organized and pushed their city councils to kill data center projects, often after marathon meetings of haranguing officials that lasted for hours.

While these victories are important and should be celebrated, the fight will have to go beyond just city and town council fights. One example of the limitations of organizing at the town hall level was demonstrated in Saline Township, Miss., where the developers behind a Stargate AI data center took the small town to court after the local council denied them the zoning permits. The developers won in the courtroom just by having deeper pockets. Protesters will need to find ways to take the fight beyond the town halls and courts and into the streets to raise demands to stop data center construction.

At town hall meetings, people opposing data centers list reasons such as electricity costs, pollution, water usage, and the lack of any real jobs. Research on the data center build-out reveals these anxieties to be correct. In Utah, for example, the Stratos data center project is projected to consume 9 GW of power. That is more than the entire state of Utah consumes today. Additionally, the data center is being built in an area suffering from drought, and draws water from the Great Salt Lake, which as it drains threatens to release toxins that reside in the lakebed. Another case is the xAI Colossus data center outside of Memphis, Tenn., which has flouted EPA emission restrictions by adding 35 illegal methane gas turbines on site to power them. Based on manufacturing estimates, these generators can produce more emissions than the Memphis airport.

Data centers in context

Beyond the immediate environmental and cost-of-living concerns, the data center build-out also represents a larger political project by tech capitalists to increase the capacity of artificial intelligence technologies for surveillance, automation, and tools of war, largely to benefit a small handful of tech capitalists and defense contractors. Every new data center that gets built increases the computing capacity of a handful of major tech companies. They can then turn around and use these tools for automation of jobs across both blue-collar and white-collar industries and to increase surveillance of communities by using AI tools to churn through mass collection of data such as internet-connected security cameras, internet and social media traffic, government records, etc.

These surveillance systems are also applicable for war zones. And the surveillance systems can spy on occupied territories, such as with the Nimbus contract that Amazon and Google have with the IDF and the Azure contract with the IDF’s cyber ware unit 8200, which collects millions of phone calls from Palestinians every day.

A successful anti-data center movement would be a massive victory against a right-wing take over of the economy and larger society. Every data center that is not built today is money that could instead be going into housing, schools, or green energy generation.

We support the anti-data center movement because it represents democratic demands over the use of land by the big tech capitalists exerting control over the US economy and the state. However, while these demands to stop new data center construction are certainly worthwhile, the movement must go further and push for the demands of seizing the data centers already in existence and placing them under workers’ control.

Even if all data center construction stopped today, the capacity for surveillance, data collection, and pollution of local environments has been greatly increased by what has already been built. Working people need to be put in charge of what already exists for data centers and AI tools; only through their own knowledge and democratic control of these tools can their ability to be used against workers at home and abroad be curtailed.

For further reading:

https://workersvoiceus.org/2026/04/18/struggles-intensify-against-ai-data-centers/

Activists build on victory for anti-surveillance movement in Windsor, Conn.

Photo: A meeting at the Tucson, Ariz., convention center in August 2025 concerning proposed construction of the massive “Project Blue” data center. (Wild Horizons / Universal Images / Getty Images)