The Elites Built Their AI Cathedrals on Your Land, Your Dime, Your Lights Are Flickering

By Buck Buckhorn · August 9, 2026

Opinion

Funny how this works. For two years, every governor, every senator, every chamber-of-commerce type with a free lunch ticket was falling over themselves to announce the next great data center. Jobs! Innovation! The future! Greg Abbott stood next to Google’s CEO and bragged Texas would be the “centerpiece for AI data centers for Google in the entire world.” Eight months later, Abbott suspended every single one of those projects pending an “audit.” Ask yourself what changed between the photo op and the panic.

What changed is that the people who actually live next to these things started talking to each other.

Seventy percent of Americans, according to Gallup, oppose building hyper-scale data centers near their homes. Not seventy percent of Democrats. Seventy percent of everybody, including sixty-three percent of Republicans. When was the last time sixty-three percent of Republicans agreed with anyone on anything? And yet over four thousand of these facilities have already gone up, with four thousand more on the drawing board. The Michigan Climate Action Network’s monthly webinar usually draws about a hundred people. Their data center webinar drew six hundred. People are showing up because their lights are flickering. In northern Virginia, utility companies fielded complaints about “strange noises coming from refrigerators” after data-center electrical surges. Your fridge is growling at you so some billionaire’s server farm can train a chatbot to write better press releases.

Abdul El-Sayed, who just won the Democratic nomination for Senate in Michigan, put it plainly: “People really effing hate data centers.” He’s right, and the reason is simple. These facilities are enormous, they suck down power and water like there’s no tomorrow, and once construction wraps up they employ almost nobody. Microsoft bragged about a new Wisconsin site requiring 46.6 miles of deep foundation piles and 120 miles of underground cable. A tech journalist noted that opponents time how long it takes to drive past one at highway speed. One minute and forty-two seconds. That’s not a factory. That’s a fortress.

And the people building them know exactly what they’re doing. Microsoft’s AI CEO, Mustafa Suleyman, said in May that the technology would automate most white-collar tasks within twelve to eighteen months. Then he walked it back. Of course he walked it back. You don’t tell the cattle what’s for dinner while they’re still grazing. Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, dismissed the whole political backlash by saying “ideology will not survive the nature of this technology.” Translation: you’ll get in line eventually, so stop complaining now.

Meanwhile, the Trump White House, which rode into 2024 on Elon Musk’s rocket and handed David Sacks the title of “AI and crypto czar,” has barely said a word about any of it. The administration’s most memorable AI moment was Melania Trump walking onstage next to a Stormtrooper-looking robot called Figure 03 that thanked her for revolutionizing education. You can’t make this up. You don’t have to.

The establishment candidates in Michigan are still playing both sides. Haley Stevens, who has Chuck Schumer’s blessing and corporate money in her pockets, talks about “innovation” and “competing with China” while carefully avoiding the word moratorium. Gretchen Whitmer signed the tax breaks that lured these things in. El-Sayed’s opponents in the primary called him “further left than Bernie” for wanting public ownership of AI and a dividend paid to the people whose communities are being paved over. But Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposed a federal moratorium in March, and Kathy Hochul, about as establishment as they come, enacted the first statewide one in New York in July. Ron DeSantis set conditions in Florida. Even Vivek Ramaswamy is now insisting he’s not “pro-data center.” The rats are leaving the ship they built.

Seventy-five data center projects, totaling roughly $130 billion, were stopped in the first three months of 2026 alone. That’s not politicians leading. That’s politicians scrambling to catch up to people who were right months before the experts noticed.

The little guy figured it out first. He always does. And the elites always show up late, pretending they were there all along.

Sources

Editor’s note. The author correctly identifies the contradiction between the promised jobs and the actual workforce, but conveniently omits that the 'flickering lights' are a symptom of the same grid instability that has already blacked out Texas and California, suggesting the problem isn't just data centers but a (W.K.)