Since the surreal scene at the 2024 presidential inauguration, when a row of big tech titans took their VIP seats and signaled their new alliance with Maga, the Trump administration has rolled out the red carpet for Silicon Valley’s AI ambitions and shareholder priorities.

Washington has doled out billions in lucrative federal subsidies and contracts to the cash-rich sector, bloating an AI bubble that experts warn may imperil the entire economy while prohibiting any guardrails on the fast-moving technology.

Fortunately for all of us, an unlikely and unruly coalition has emerged to resist the AI takeover by taking aim at the industry’s core infrastructure. In 2025, about 48 datacenter projects worth an estimated $156bn were blocked or stalled by local opposition. By all measures, 2026 is shaping up to be an even bigger year for the AI resistance.

In our view, that’s a good thing. But as the anti-datacenter movement has grown, it’s come under fire from all sides, including from liberal critics who dismiss it as another privileged form of nimby (not in my backyard) politics with naive demands. A New York Times op-ed, for example, called the fight against datacenters a “myopic” “distraction” from the “real fight”. In truth, anti-datacenter organizing is the real fight, one centered on an industry choke point that people can reach out and touch. This brewing populist resistance isn’t just about limiting local development – it represents a critical new front in the fight against tech-enabled authoritarianism. Where else can people push back on job-eating algorithms, distorting deep fakes, and autonomous drone strikes?

From rural North Carolina to suburban Virginia to the foothills and farmlands of New Mexico and Oregon, ordinary people are coming together across partisan divides to say no to a status quo that allows tech lobbyists to ram through datacenter deals at a breathtaking clip, often behind a veil of secrecy enforced by NDAs. In deep red Indiana, more than 10 counties have enacted moratoriums or temporary bans on new AI datacenters; the Seminole Nation in Oklahoma recently passed a moratorium for their territory; and across New Jersey, project after project has been cancelled due to local fury about the raw deals on offer.

And yet instead of lending their support to the cause, people who should be allies are using their platforms to issue misguided critiques.

Consider a recent piece in Jacobin by the academic Holly Buck, which painted the anti-datacenter movement as an elitist “dead end” that will only succeed in denying poor people the benefits of AI tools. Though published in a leading socialist magazine, Buck’s article sounded remarkably like a recent Washington Post op-ed by two executives from the Trump-aligned surveillance technology giant Palantir, which argued that slowing down or stopping datacenters would only hurt the working class: “The surest way to guarantee that artificial intelligence becomes a tool of the wealthy elite is to block the infrastructure that would make it cheap for everyone else.”

These kinds of arguments are becoming distressingly commonplace despite their shaky and condescending logic. Fundamentally, liberal criticisms of the anti-datacenter movement reflect a lack of understanding about how these fights are playing out and how grassroots organizing and power-building works. (Meanwhile, if Palantir’s leadership actually cared about economic justice, they wouldn’t be advocating for a technology their CEO believes will unleash “deep societal upheavals”.)

Buck, for one, says she wants to see the development of AI that is democratically governed, but it is not clear how she would achieve that laudable goal. Today, companies like Meta, xAI and Blackstone have the ability to make backroom deals while their executives have a direct line to Trump and the money to influence politicians. Organizing to block datacenter construction is a way for regular people to ensure their objections and preferences are heard; disruptive protest is a form of leverage for people who lack wealth and political connections. In the words of the antitrust expert Zephyr Teachout: “If you want democratic governance of AI, block datacenters. Google’s not coming to any democratic table, not listening to any rules, without people showing force.”

Datacenters offer a strategic target in other ways. Like the internet, AI is everywhere and nowhere. Datacenters provide a physical place and focal point where people can show up and directly confront out-of-control and otherwise impossible-to-reach tech billionaires.

As such, they also provide unique opportunities for people to meet in real life and come together across otherwise insurmountable political divides. For critics like Buck, the movement’s ideological diversity is a weakness, since it means not everyone shares the same ultimate goals. But what’s striking to us is how much the participants agree on. As we’ve both seen firsthand in our organizing and reporting, the anti-datacenter movement centers on an array of shared concerns: crushing utility bills, unsustainable energy and water consumption, noise and light pollution, soil degradation, the lack of good local jobs (not to mention the prospect of a society-wide job apocalypse), and unchecked corporate power – in addition to all of the socially problematic uses of generative AI, from the bots angling to undress teenagers to the slop choking our social media feeds.

This plethora of ills represent the downsides that aren’t communicated when developers come to town, and that too many politicians remain reluctant to face. Farmers turning down millions for their land is less surprising when you consider the threats posed to the places they call home.

While some dismiss this as nimbyism, local fights help create conditions that are far more conducive to broader reforms, including basic AI controls. Most people aren’t enthusiastic about the bot-filled privacy-invading world Silicon Valley seems hellbent on building, and poll after poll shows that the vast majority of Americans want the industry to be regulated. Right now, there are more rules on opening a salon or a burrito shop than an AI startup.

The anti-datacenter movement, which has popularized the call for pauses or moratoriums on datacenter development, is essential to amassing the political leverage required to implement popular and sensible safety measures. It’s a demand that plays hardball with an industry accustomed to steamrolling the public. The national moratorium bill recently introduced by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, is explicitly designed to force AI regulation – the ban would lift as soon as laws were put in place that actually constrain datacenter harms.

Last month, Maine was the first state to pass a statewide moratorium on hyperscale datacenters. When one of us interviewed Representative Melanie Sachs, who introduced the legislation, she called it a “thoughtful, pragmatic approach to a very complicated issue” with “tentacles” that extend far beyond the communities targeted for development. The 18-month pause was intended to allow people to deliberate and make more informed decisions: “It’s saying, let’s get together, make sure our framework meets the moment and addresses all the things we care about.”

But before the pioneering bill became law, Governor Janet Mills issued a veto. Days later, Mills suspended her Senate primary campaign, in effect conceding the race to the populist Graham Platner, who supported the ban while calling it a “Band-Aid” and demanding stronger federal intervention.

Mills’s misstep should serve as a warning. Anyone paying attention to the political winds can see that AI is shaping up to be a key fault line in this year’s midterms and the 2028 presidential race. Yet most politicians remain mealy-mouthed on the issue. Too many Democrats are afraid to alienate the tech industry, and the party lacks a clear moral vision capable of countering billionaire hype about “innovation” and fearmongering about competition with China.

As usual, ordinary people are ahead of their leaders. The remarkable organic growth of the datacenter resistance movement across geographies, economic interests and ideology reflects the myriad harms that come with AI infrastructure and growing anger at the tech elite. The tremendous energy unleashed by these fights, and their sensible and unifying demands, have the potential to form the foundations of a new and powerful populist coalition, one poised to help define a working-class agenda that meets this moment and resonates with disaffected voters. This excellent organizing should be cultivated rather than dismissed.

Given the movement’s rapid growth and early successes, it’s hardly surprising that the tech sector is fighting back, whether through concerted PR efforts, flooding elections with dark money, or even shadier tactics. At a 2025 datacenter industry conference, according to an attender’s report, panelists suggested a range of methods to suppress local dissent including using shell companies to prevent scrutiny, buying off neighbors near proposed sites, collaborating with local officials to “relegate protesters in out-of-sight staging areas”, and providing youth programming “to normalize datacenters in adjacent communities”. One speaker, the attender wrote, even “described applying counterinsurgency tactics he learned in active duty military service, like going undercover in bars and churches to gauge a community’s potential for resistance to a data center development”.

With enemies like this, it’s galling to see liberals and leftists piling on with takes about how directly affected people should engage (through supposedly proper and effective political channels that always remain undefined). The anti-datacenter movement offers progressives who want to move the political needle an unprecedented opportunity to meet people where they are, listen to what people really want and need, and help nurture a grassroots alternative to the tech-fascist alliance. It’s an opportunity to support up-and-coming organizers as they grow their fights to resist runaway AI and the broader corporate stranglehold on our economy. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance to win the goodwill of communities that have understandably lost faith in politics and don’t trust either party, especially on AI.

The anti-datacenter movement, in other words, isn’t just about the future of a novel technology. It’s about the future of democracy. It’s about who controls the economy and whether regular people have a say in the decisions that affect them. Given how we’ve all been denied a voice in this technological upheaval, everyone should be cheering the movement on. Or better yet, joining the fight.

• Astra Taylor is a writer, organizer and documentary maker and a co-founder of the Debt Collective. Saul Levin is a community organizer and the host of The Hum podcast