Voter backlash against massive data center projects is reshaping U.S. politics, leading to the defeat of local officials and lawmakers who support these developments. In Utah, State Senate President J. Stuart Adams lost his primary election after endorsing a major data center near the Great Salt Lake.

Amazon is investigating engineers who publicly criticized the rapid expansion of AI data centers and called for stronger government regulation. Five employees testified at Seattle City Council meetings regarding a year-long moratorium on new large-scale data center construction.

Amazon Web Services is investing multibillions in a new data center campus in Montgomery County, Missouri. The project will create over 400 full-time jobs and thousands of construction roles, including positions for electricians, HVAC technicians, network specialists, and operations managers.

Cooling GPUs in space presents significant challenges due to the need for innovative designs to manage heat dissipation. Companies like SpaceX and Google are investing in orbital data centers, with SpaceX planning a constellation of these facilities and Google launching Project Sunc.

Meta has constructed six "rapid deployment structures" in tents outside New Albany, Ohio, to expedite data center construction. This strategy aims to reduce construction time by half, drawing inspiration from Tesla and xAI.

Texas's electrical grid has identified risks after data centers and cryptocurrency mining sites failed voltage tests. These failures raise concerns about the reliability and stability of the grid amid increasing energy demands.

Google will pay SpaceX $920 million a month for AI compute capacity at SpaceX's data centers, utilizing approximately 110,000 Nvidia graphics processing units along with other hardware components. The agreement is effective from October 2023 through June 2029.

New York lawmakers have passed a bill imposing a one-year moratorium on permits for new large-scale data centers, which will be the first such freeze in the nation if signed by Governor Kathy Hochul. The ban is a response to rising electricity costs attributed to the energy-intensive demands of data centers supporting the artificial intelligence sector.

Data centers are increasingly being constructed in secret, raising concerns about transparency in their development. Communities often feel excluded from the decision-making process and express worries about potential environmental impacts.

On its surface, the national revolt against data centers seems simple: They are a nuisance, and people do not want them in their proverbial backyards. But I haven’t been able to let go of the idea that there must be something much deeper driving the backlash against them, and few other subjects have confounded me more than trying to figure out what to think about it. Americans don’t know how to fi...