Data center backlash signals a fight over AI power

“You don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing,” Bob Dylan wrote in 1965. For election season 2026, artificial intelligence (AI) is blowing at gale force.

The flashpoint has been data centers, the multi-football field-sized computing facilities that power AI. Fundamentally, this is a fight about power and whether it will be exercised by democratic institutions or those that control the infrastructure of AI.

Local citizen outrage has taken its toll. The first three months of 2026 saw local data center opposition block or delay 75 projects worth $130 billion in planned construction, according to Data Center Watch. This was roughly the same number of projects affected as in all 12 months of 2025.

AI mega centers have become the symbol of citizen frustration about AI. As the most visible manifestation of AI, they have become the proxy for citizen feedback on AI itself. The debate over land use also represents the crystallization of broader public concern about AI’s effect on American lives and livelihood. “Concerns over data centers relate to broader worries that the rapid ​expansion of AI could upend the labor market,” Reuters reported. “Americans don’t know how to fight AI. So they’re fighting data centers,” a Vox headline explained.

As AI leaps from technology to politics, the central question becomes who is in charge: democratic structures or autocratic executives.

The first decades of the digital era saw a small handful of executives make decisions that affected the rest of us. Those same companies are the primary movers making the rules for the AI era as well.

Long before the public was introduced to large language models and chatbots, early machine intelligence algorithms manipulated online services to optimize for engagement. The result harvested unprecedented amounts of personal information, amplified misinformation, and concentrated decisionmaking power in the hands of a few. These companies became pseudo-governments to make their own rules in their own self-interest. Many of those whose decisions shaped the online experience and social media now seek to make the decisions for computerized cognition. As a New York Times commentary observed, “Social media was the first contact between A.I. and humanity, and humanity lost.”

The AI era is too important to all of us to allow such non-democratic decisionmaking to continue. Of course, the United States should lead in AI. The issue is whether that leadership will be accountable to democratic institutions or concentrated in the hands of a few private actors.

AI has thus leapt from a technology issue to a political issue. It is now a question of power and who will control whether the infrastructure of the 21st century serves the public interest or the interests of the tech oligarchs and their investors.

Fully aware of this challenge and that the local data center movement could metastasize to shape national AI policy, those financing and directing the development of AI have been loosening their purse strings to fund political activity. One of those, Leading the Future, a super PAC, was launched by industry luminaries, reportedly with $50 million from AI investor Andreessen Horowitz and $50 million from OpenAI’s president Greg Brockman. Thanks to deep pockets such as these, the PAC began with $140 million in its coffers for the purpose of “identifying, maintaining, and growing pro-AI candidates.”

Many of those working for the Silicon Valley powerhouses have pushed back, but their wallets are significantly smaller. The Guardrails Alliance, organized by rank-and-file employees of the dominant AI companies, has been collecting small-dollar donations. “AI billionaires are buying our elections. We’re fighting back,” they proclaim. An antidote to the proposition that AI should be largely free of oversight, the group advocates for establishing guardrails for the development and implementation of AI rather than relying on the decisions of the industry.   

The political issues are bipartisan. Republican Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) worries, “We are watching a handful of companies assemble a concentration of capital, information, and political power without precedent in the American experience.” Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) warns, “Today’s big tech companies have too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy. They’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else. And in the process, they have hurt small businesses and stifled innovation.” 

Arriving from opposite ends of the political spectrum, both senators identify the emerging political question for the election and beyond: How much economic, informational, and political power should be concentrated in a small number of technology firms?

As we enter the heart of the political season, the Economist distilled the issue into a single question: “Five men control AI. Who controls them?” That is a question that will now be put to the people. The debate over AI has become a referendum on democratic accountability itself.