On Monday Boston Review hosted a panel of three organizers and journalists—Robinson Meyer, Nicholas Rabb, and Astra Taylor—to discuss the growing movement against AI data centers, the political implications ahead of the 2026 elections, and whether community resistance can lead to enduring coalition-building on a national scale. The conversation was moderated by BR contributing editor Lily Hu.
Listen to the conversation on YouTube or via The BR Podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. The following transcript has not been fully edited and may contain errors.
About the Panelists
Robinson Meyer is the founding executive editor of Heatmap News and a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. He was previously a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covered climate change, energy, and technology.
Nicholas Rabb is an organizer with No Data Center Monterey Park and a postdoctoral researcher with the Eco-STEM Project at California State University, Los Angeles.
Astra Taylor is a writer, activist, and documentarian. Her many books include Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone, The Age of Insecurity, and, most recently, End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World, coauthored with Naomi Klein.
Lily Hu is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale and a contributing editor at Boston Review. Her writing has also appeared in Phenomenal World, the Berlin Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Lily Hu: We are, as everybody now knows very well, at the dawn of an AI revolution, or at least if things go according to plan. The new push to a transformation of society by artificial intelligence depends as ever on real material goods and infrastructure and global supply chains, which themselves depend as ever on politics, geopolitics, and, as we’re increasingly finding here in the United States, local politics. In particular, the AI revolution depends crucially on the buildout of behemoth hyperscale data centers, which are millions of square feet large and take up the amount of electricity of entire cities. And this massive buildout of data centers is increasingly what Americans are wary of. According to a recent Gallup poll, 70 percent of Americans would somewhat or strongly oppose a data center being built in their area. And many of these Americans are showing up to the streets, to town halls, and to the ballot box to register their dissent.
By now, in the United States, more than three hundred cities, towns, and counties have already placed bans or moratoriums on the construction of hyperscale data centers. Last month, we saw New York state enacting the first statewide moratorium on new data centers, and some dozen other states, red, blue, and purple, are considering similar bans. This groundswell of local organizing is now growing to a national scale. As Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes in The New Yorker with reference to Abdul El-Sayed’s win in Michigan, AI is now a major election issue, and data centers, to use the headline of a Wired article from last week, are breaking American politics. So, what are the big political lessons or non-lessons that we can take from this explosion of grassroots organizing across the country?
I want to start us off with arguably the most notable and perhaps surprising feature of the opposition against data centers that we’re seeing sweep our nation, which is, of course, how ideologically diverse this movement is. This is a surprising level of unity in a country that is marked by partisan division. So, who is in this big tent? What about the construction of new data centers has sent people of seemingly every walk of life to organize and to disrupt at least seventy-five data center projects, worth approximately $130 billion and counting, in the first quarter of 2026 alone? What are people saying motivates them? Maybe we can start with you, Robinson, though I want to hear from all the panelists on this question.
Robinson Meyer: Heatmap, where I work, is a climate and decarbonization and energy news site. When we started in 2023, we did not realize how much time we would be spending on data centers, but since then, of course, data centers have become the biggest story in American energy, the biggest story in American infrastructure, and, as I think has been testified to by what you just said, the biggest physical infrastructure buildout, people say, in American history (it gets hard because nominal dollars are hard to compare, but let’s certainly say within living memory).
We run polls, we monitor the local regulatory environment. We started out doing this just to follow the renewable buildout, and then so many of the lessons and so much of what was happening around renewables kind of ported over to data centers—which I think we’ll talk about later in this panel—that we started following the buildout and the response to data centers as well. What I would note, just to build on exactly what you asked, is just how widespread the rebellion to data centers is, or the backlash to data centers, let’s say, and how fast it has happened. You mentioned this Gallup poll that found 70 percent of Americans would strongly or somewhat oppose a data center being built in their area. That matches our polling too, but I think what makes our polling maybe a little different is we have polled this question several times over the past year. And as recently as September 2025 or August 2025, when we started polling the question—we said, basically, “Would you support or oppose a data center in your area?”—we found Americans were very split on this question. About 43 percent said they would support, 42 percent said they would oppose, and 15 percent weren’t sure. Seven months later in May 2026, when we asked this question again, we found numbers basically identical to the Gallup polling: 71 percent said they would oppose and 21 percent said they would support. That’s a nearly 50 percent shift in American opinion on this.
What’s remarkable, to now finally answer your question, is how widespread this is. Basically, if you can think of a demographic of Americans, they seem to be opposed to data centers. It’s self-identified MAGA Republicans. It’s Democratic progressives. I would say it hews, in the broad terms, toward more liberal demographics. College-educated women are probably among the most opposed to data centers. But it is a remarkably broad-based phenomenon. What’s interesting is, this goes down the board. We also asked Americans in the same polling, “Are you optimistic about AI? How are you feeling about AI? Do you think it’s going to improve your life? Do you think it’s going to improve society?” What we found is that the only demographic of Americans that really believes that AI will both improve their lives and improve society are men who are sixty-five years old and older, which I would say is probably the cohort that owns more stocks than anyone else, and their income is dependent on the future stock market. So, what we found is just that this is a very broad-based phenomenon. I think this has been challenged by some recent elections, which we can talk about. But broadly, if you ask people, “Do you want a data center in your backyard?” people tend to say no.
Astra Taylor: I think Robinson got it. It’s a Bannon to Bernie coalition, which on the one hand is surprising, but there are other populist things that get this kind of support in polls. It’s just rare to see such an active movement on the ground, and so I think that’s part of it. Also, just that it became such an electoral force, seemingly overnight.
Hu: I want to now ask you, Nicholas, about some of that local organizing on the ground. You’ve been directly involved with local data center organizing through a noted data center, Monterey Park—and I have to say here, I have a 626 area code, so 626 shout out—and I want to talk about scale. I want to talk about your experience on the ground. How do you think it has compared to other local organizing happening around the country? With so much opposition unfolding at the community and even neighborhood levels, how are you thinking about the implications of anti–data center organizing for national politics? Are different local groups coordinating? Is there any national infrastructure for capturing this activist energy and channeling it to broader goals?
Nicholas Rabb: Monterey Park is a small-ish city outside of Los Angeles in California. It’s a majority Asian American community. A developer came in a couple years ago and started talking with the city council to try to build a 50 megawatt—which can be classified as hyperscale—data center right in the heart of the community, right next to a bunch of residential homes. We found out about the project this past November, just coincidentally, because someone was at a local council meeting and noticed that it was on the agenda. No one was informed about this, but we found out, started to mobilize, reached out to local community groups, and built this campaign against the data center, and we had an enormous success. I mean, we banned the data center via three municipal ordinances declaring the data center a public nuisance and that none can be built in the city. We held a ballot measure within Monterey Park, a sort of special election in June, that won with over 80 percent of residents voting against the data center project. So this was a massive success. We’re the first city in the United States to have banned data centers in a whole city via both ordinance and ballot measure, so we’re pretty proud of that.
Read the rest of the transcript of the event on BR’s website.
My publishing company now has a "Human written - No A.I." logo (which I made) on its homepage. I'd like to see more of this, but it sounds as though a lot of the big publishers wouldn't feel confident enough. My own current beef is with the older men who think they'll impress me by sending something they produced with AI, of all the dumb things.