The growing anger over the AI industry’s obsession with building massive and resource-intensive data centers across the country is as palpable than ever.

A recent survey by the Pew Research Center highlighted widespread public concern over the facilities’ environmental harms, effects on home energy costs, and the quality of life of nearby residents.

These concerns do seem justified. Experts have found that data centers can spike local electricity prices, generate copious amounts of greenhouse gases, and place a major strain on freshwater resources.

Now, a self-described content creator and digital artist named Will Hollingsworth who spoke up during a city council meeting in Ravenna, Ohio — a small town of 11,000 residents — is turning heads with his passionate argument against data centers. The council’s chambers became overwhelmed with a crowd of almost 100 people during the April 10 meeting, which hosted a debate over a proposed 12-month moratorium on data center construction in the area inspired by a nearby community’s own moratorium.

Hollingsworth’s four-minute speech perfectly summarizes why the backlash is starting to reach a tipping point, as more politicians are calling for a moratorium on new construction.

“These facilities can use millions of gallons of water per day,” he said, as seen in a video that went viral over the weekend. “We are being asked to drain our reservoirs so a chatbot can write a poem or so our sheriff can generate a picture of himself standing next to Bigfoot,” he added, picking up laughter in the room.

Hollingsworth said that he used to rely on AI at his job overseeing video content production at a mattress company, making his point of view particularly noteworthy. He explained that he used to feed AI image generating app Midjourney “prompts to create the perfect commercial, training the very machine that would eventually replace me as three months later they would lay me off.”

Now he’s become a foe of the tech, he said.

“They want us to trust a trillion dollar industry that tells us with a straight face that they can suck five million gallons of water out of our ground a day,” Hollingsworth argued, to “use it as a liquid heat sink, and return it to our rivers without a single consequence.”

Yet the water “does not stay in the loop,” he explained, but “evaporates into the sky by millions of gallons,” while AI companies downplay the amount of “forever chemical runoff” which is used to “bleed the lines to remove toxic sludge.”

“They say the water is filled once and recycled forever,” Hollingsworth said. “In a laboratory, that might be true. But we aren’t living in a laboratory. We’re living in Ohio.”

The content creator also pointed out how few jobs these data centers could offer, despite being a massive strain on resources.

“A big employer who uses the water of 50,000 people… which only hires about ten people is not an employer,” Hollingsworth said. “They are an extraction.”

“I am not a cynic when it comes to technology,” he concluded. “I am a believer in community. I believe that a drop of clean water for a Ravenna child is worth more than a billion AI generated images. Let us choose the child.”

His powerful speech clearly struck a chord. Beyond the assembled committee voting for a one-year moratorium on all new data centers in the area, other netizens lauded him for speaking up.

“There it is right there,” one Reddit user wrote. “Lies, lies and more lies from megacorps invested up to their eyeballs in having just a few people in government believe them.”

“God damn that was good,” another user wrote. “Seriously this should be used as a script in every county these corporations are hustling.”

The fight is far from over. Ravenna is only one of several locations across the state being eyed for data center expansion projects. And plenty of other battles are being fought in other parts of the country as well, as the anger continues to grow.

Just earlier this week, voters in a small town outside of St. Louis, Missouri, were furious after city council approved a $6 billion data center. As Politico reports, local residents showed up in droves, successfully unseating four incumbents mere days later.

“I do hope other towns stand up and speak out like I did,” Hollingsworth later argued in a comment on Reddit. “I know I’m not the only good orator here in the country, maybe this will inspire a wave of political action!”

More on data centers: Almost Half of US Data Centers That Were Supposed to Open This Year Slated to Be Canceled or Delayed