A road trip through the data center debate

Summary

Search Engine — “A Road Trip Through the Data Center Debate” Host: PJ Vogt | Reported by: Jasmine Sun
Date: August 11, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, PJ Vogt and reporter Jasmine Sun take listeners on a road trip through Michigan and Wisconsin to explore the heated debate over data centers—the physical infrastructure powering the AI boom. As these facilities become political flashpoints in swing states, Sun meets citizens, activists, local officials, and union leaders to uncover what’s really driving the backlash, the fears and hopes around these massive digital factories, and how the debate reveals broader anxieties about technology, democracy, corporate power, and the future of American communities.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Stage: The Data Center Wars

• PJ Vogt reflects on how technology has emerged as a central yet divisive topic in America’s political discourse, especially during the 2026 midterms.
  “Data centers, the Internet infrastructure powering the AI boom...are now a part of this year’s midterms, with politicians on both sides understanding there’s a lot of popular sentiment—some of it quite negative—directed at all this.” [03:53]

2. Why the Backlash? Confusion and Mistrust

• Jasmine Sun sets out to understand the roots of anti-data center sentiment:
  • Initial assumptions: People’s fears might just be proxies for wider AI anxieties or misunderstandings about environmental impact.
  • Surprise #1: Pushback isn’t always rooted in ignorance.
  • “I also definitely thought that a lot of people were just misinformed about what data centers were... but I wasn’t really sure.” [05:17]

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On The Ground: Janesville, Wisconsin

3. Economic Despair & Hope

• Janesville’s abandoned GM plant symbolizes industrial decline.
  • Adam Schultz, real estate agent:
    “I wasted five years of my life marketing the GM property... we will have a data center down there or we will have a giant slab of concrete.” [09:42]
  • Data center developers offered to clean up toxic waste no other buyer would touch.

4. Local Distrust of Institutions

• Activists voiced deeper fears regarding local governance and corporate power—not just environmental worries:
  • Distrust centered on legal asymmetry, weak local councils, and persistent NDAs (non-disclosure agreements).
  • Activist:
    “There’s no way. There’s no municipal funding for enforcement and legal fees and stuff like that...it’s very asymmetric. It’s predatory, it’s extractionary. The whole thing feels just not right.” [13:21–13:37]
• NDAs: Create an environment ripe for rumor, suspicion, and erode public trust.
  • Even pro-data center voices dislike them: “Frankly, every single person I talked to...was anti NDA. They thought it made the distrust much worse.” [15:02]

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Democracy vs. Big Tech: Saline, Michigan

5. Clash of Local Democracy and Corporate Muscle

• Saline Township, population ~3,000, denied a proposed 1.4 GW data center for OpenAI & Oracle.
• Developers sued the town for “exclusionary zoning”; local government forced to settle for $14 million.
  • Jasmine Sun:
    “I think it feels to people who live in that community like there was a democratic decision by the local government...and the data centers and the AI companies said, ‘screw you, we’re doing this anyway.’” [18:16]
  • Local Resident:
    “They’re just coming in here and taking away from us.” [18:33]

6. Power Asymmetry & a Sense of Injustice

• Community members feel they bear the costs (ugly buildings, possible higher rates, uncertainty) without clear benefits or agency.
• PJ Vogt:
  “They feel like they had Google Search and it was working fine...it’s as if there’s a big machine in San Francisco that they find a little bit useful, but not that useful. And the big machine requires a giant exhaust pipe in the middle of their town.” [19:54]
• Questions about why tech companies don’t build these data centers “in their own backyard.” [20:20]

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Tangible Harms vs. Vague Benefits

7. Skepticism of Promised Rewards

• Activists fundamentally don’t believe assurances about property taxes and electric rates.
  • Activist:
    “Everyone that is involved in these fights understands how it works. So we know that’s bullshit and they know that we know that’s bullshit. Does it matter? Not really. So they’re either dumbasses or liars. It’s one of the two.” [22:35]
  • Anxiety about stranded facilities if the “AI bubble bursts”—with communities left holding debts.
    • “It’s just like supporting what feels like right before the 2008 crash, except for much worse.” [24:06]

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Who’s For Data Centers?

8. Labor's Perspective: A Rare Winner

• Unionized skilled trades see “windfall” from construction jobs.
  • Terry McGowan, union leader:
    “When I started in this business, it was a rollercoaster...This has just been a steady stream.” [32:13]
• Local officials are attracted by sorely needed tax revenues, sometimes in the millions for small towns.

9. A Distinct Lack of Broader Support

• There's no broad “pro-data center” movement.
• Polling: Dislike for data centers is “pretty equal whether you actually live near a data center or not.”
  • “Everyone kind of hates them equally…suggests that it is more anger at data centers or a dislike of data centers than it is specifically, I want data centers just not near me.” [33:32]

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The National/Populist Frame

10. Politicians Seize the Moment

• Abdul El Sayed, progressive politician, channels anti-corporate anger at rallies with Bernie Sanders and AOC, tying data center deals to “oligarchy” and "dark money" in politics:

  • “When big Tech buys a Senate seat, they’re buying a data center in your backyard. When DTE buys a Senate seat, they’re buying your local officials staying quiet while they raise the rates on you.” [36:25]

• El Sayed’s Policy Demands: Breaking up tech monopolies, international AI treaties, and an “FDA for AI.”

11. Jasmine’s Takeaway

• Sympathy for community anger and suspicion is warranted; there is a vacuum of trust and perceived lack of control.
  • “People want...protection against downside risk. And I do think it is the government’s job to protect people against downside risk…” [40:16]

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What Next? Possible Solutions

12. Reforming the Process

• Jasmine and PJ discuss whether state-level regulation or moratoriums (like New York State’s) could help localities negotiate better deals.
  • Align standards on energy use, environmental protections, public transparency, and benefits—so “part-time city councilors” aren’t outmatched by multinationals.
    • “You shouldn’t leave these tiny towns to figure out how to negotiate with Meta. You should pause, set a bunch of standards at the state level…” [42:48]
  • Jasmine becomes somewhat more supportive of state moratoriums if they are used to set higher standards, not just to ban.

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On Transparency and Trust:
  “We're talking about small communities that don't have the legal budget to negotiate. If something happens on the other end, you'll never hold a company to a contract. They could bury us in legal fees… it's very asymmetric.” — Activist [13:02–13:30]

• The Macro View:
  “It’s like obvious costs, theoretical benefits.” — PJ Vogt [22:07]

• On Skepticism:
  “Everyone that is involved in these fights understands how it works... we know that’s bullshit and they know that we know that’s bullshit.” — Activist [22:35]

• On Political Narratives:
  “Corporations are colluding with the government, are paying off your elected officials in order to make decisions that are good for the billionaires and bad for you.” — Jasmine Sun [35:51]

• On Possible Policy Solutions:
  “If your state government is figuring out what are these standards that we can set?... I think that’s pretty interesting, huh?” — Jasmine Sun [43:20]

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Conclusion

• PJ Vogt’s Final Reflection:
  “What voters are saying they want is not exactly brakes they can smash to stop this technology. They want a better, fairer process around these data center deals. They’ve learned the hard way that industry can burn them and they want their politicians to make deals they can trust.” [44:05]
• The recurring themes are distrust born of history, the search for transparency and fairness, and the need for stronger government safeguards in tech-driven development.

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Key Timestamps

• 03:53 — Data centers enter the political spotlight
• 05:17 — Jasmine Sun’s initial assumptions and confusion
• 09:42 — Adam Schultz on the Janesville brownfield dilemma
• 13:21–13:37 — Activists voice distrust in legal/economic dynamics
• 15:02 — Broad opposition to NDAs, even from pro-data center voices
• 18:16–18:39 — The community reaction to Saline Township’s lawsuit (democracy vs. corporate lawyers)
• 22:07–22:54 — Skepticism about economic promises and concern about AI bubble
• 32:13 — Union leader describes the “windfall” for trades
• 35:51 — Populist politicians link data centers to “oligarchy”
• 43:01-43:20 — Discussion on statewide standards as a solution
• 44:05 — Episode wrap & reflection

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Summary Tone

Search Engine’s tone is curious, empathetic, and lightly irreverent, with both PJ and Jasmine emphasizing the complexity behind local resistance—dispelling stereotypes of ignorant opposition—and highlighting a genuine demand for fair process, transparency, and protection from economic risk. The reporting values hearing people in their own words, countering the sense of national polarization with on-the-ground nuance, skepticism, and hope for smarter policy solutions.

Transcript

[PJ Vogt]

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[Jasmine Sun]

I spent about 10 days in Michigan and in Wisconsin, driving around between cities, small towns, data center sites, to just talk to a ton of people and figure out, do people actually hate these data centers? And if so, why?

[PJ Vogt]

Jasmine sun is one of my favorite reporters covering the San Francisco tech scene. An anthropologist of a town where nearly everybody she knows is all in on AI, she spends a lot of her time writing about talking to the people we normally hear from in the AI race, the people building that future. This summer, she wanted to talk to everybody else, the voters, deciding what they think of all this, whether they actually want these supposed gifts they're being offered. Before you set out on this trip, how would you have explained data center opposition? Like, what was your view?

[Jasmine Sun]

I had two concurrent views. I suppose I was definitely confused. I didn't really get it. I thought that, you know, data centers have existed to power the Internet for a very long time. Northern Virginia is full of them. And so I was like, maybe it's about AI, was what I thought it might just be that people are scared of AI, that they hate AI and their polarization of AI is just coming out as anger at data centers, which are sort of the physical proxy for hating AI in general, which is otherwise a quite difficult thing to shape or to fight. But I also definitely thought that a lot of people were just misinformed about what data centers were and their environmental impacts. And yeah, I wasn't really sure.

[PJ Vogt]

So you hit the road.

[Jasmine Sun]

Yes.

[PJ Vogt]

What was the first sort of place in your road trip where you found one of your assumptions just being challenged? Where you found yourself surprised?

[Jasmine Sun]

So the first data center site or proposed data center site that we visited was Janesville, Wisconsin. I had heard of Janesville when I was actually doing research on AI and potential labor impacts because I had been interested in deindustrialization and what happens when a bunch of jobs disappear.

[Terry McGowan]

Once the economic cornerstone of janesville, the giant GM plant in its heyday employing

[PJ Vogt]

7,000 people, even I was dispatched.

[Jasmine Sun]

And Janesville is most famous recently nationally because they had like a hundred year old GM plant that closed in 2008 during the financial crisis and this decimated the community.

[PJ Vogt]

When the plant idled in 2008, unemployment soared to 13% and the town became a nonpartisan symbol of the Great Recession.

[Jasmine Sun]

Thousands of jobs disappeared basically overnight in not that big of a town. It was the economic centerpiece of the town. People were not able to successfully retrain into new jobs. It was really bad for the community. And now with the old GM site, which has been laying dormant for 15 or so years, there was a data center proposal where it's like, why don't we take this brownfield and build a hyperscale data center on top of it. Okay, sorry. If we could start just one time over. Yeah, that'd be great. Thank you.

[Adam Schultz]

So I am born and raised, Rock county, so Janesville, Milton area. My entire life been strictly pretty much Janesville area the last 15 years of my life.

[Jasmine Sun]

So the first person I talked to, his name is Adam Schultz. He had spoken up on a city council meeting in favor of the data center, which is pretty rare because there's not a lot of people at these meetings who are pro data center or at least vocally so. And for Adam, it had been his job for five years to actually sell the brownfield that this GM site had been on.

[PJ Vogt]

Because from his perspective, it's like there is a dead spot in town that is doing nothing.

[Jasmine Sun]

Right. It's like kind of in the middle of downtown. It's like literally a five minute drive from the main downtown corridor.

[PJ Vogt]

Got it.

[Jasmine Sun]

It's super close and it's literally a gigantic 100 acre concrete slab with a bunch of weeds overgrown on it. There is nothing going on there and there has been nothing going on. And the reason that there's nothing going on is because there's a bunch of contamination and hazardous waste that GM never cleaned up that nobody else wants to buy, land full of.

[Adam Schultz]

Nobody could ever make sense of the contamination and the numbers to develop anything there.

[Jasmine Sun]

What were some of the other businesses that you tried to sell the site to? What kinds of businesses are these?

[Adam Schultz]

Typically, you know, it's a heavy industrial site that's kind of in the middle of town. Really good infrastructure for heavy manufacturing. I mean, that's what it always was. So those types of users were most of the conversations.

[Jasmine Sun]

And this guy was so frustrated because every interested buyer said, I don't want to clean up the waste they left. It's no longer his responsibility. But when a data center showed up and they were like, we will pay the $30 million to clean up the was, he was like, finally we will have something that isn't just a slab of concrete in this community.

[PJ Vogt]

So he wasn't even like personally in a position to make money off of it. He was just like, this is land that human beings have found too expensive to make suitable for humans. His perspective was, why wouldn't you want a factory for computers here?

[Adam Schultz]

Yes, I've said it a number of times. I wasted five years of my life marketing the GM property. I'm confident that we will have a data center down there or we will have a giant slab of concrete. End of story. Like, you will not get a developer to spend money there outside of this industry. It's just not going to happen. And I'd love to be proven wrong. I don't believe I will be.

[Jasmine Sun]

I mean, he just kept saying over and over, like, it's going to be a data center or it's going to be a concrete slab. The economics do not work for literally any other commercial buyer to buy this plot of land that's contaminated. I know because I tried. And he said, you know, like, I'm from Rock county, I've had GMers in my family. It's kind of a slap in the face to take what was once an economic centerpiece of the community and just let it lie there. And so for him, it was actually important to bring the business back in order to bring Janesville back, which has been again, a sort of icon of one of these more economically depressed areas after deindustrialization. The city of Janesville has yet to confirm what will go up at the site of the former GM plant. But Janesville residents at tonight's Common Council

[Activist 1]

meeting are making it known what they

[Jasmine Sun]

don't want to go up at the site. Our hair, our rights, Stand up.

[Activist 2]

Change.

[Jasmine Sun]

On the other hand, though, when I met the activists who were organizing to get the data center blocked, what was surprising to me was a definitely not the sort of TikTok adult idiots that some Silicon Valley types might caricature.

[PJ Vogt]

TikTok adult idiots would be like. Like for instance, when you see people debating about data centers online, there is a lot of evidence that data centers, because they use a lot of electricity, can like raise local electricity prices. The concerns about water usage tend to be like pretty overblown or sort of misunderstood. So TikTok adult activists would be like people who think that a nearby data center is going to drain the lakes or something like that.

[Activist 3]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jasmine Sun]

And I'm not. There are definitely some people I'd met in general who had said these data centers are draining the Great Lakes. That's why they're building them here. These organizers were not one of them. In general, the activists tend to be pretty informed. They brought a copy of the local zoning code. That's the GM site there, right?

[Activist 2]

Yep, we're right.

[Activist 3]

So yeah, we are. We're on the GMJATCO site right about there. So this is how the city of Janesville is zoned out. So anything with that yellow kind of coloration is actually residential zoning. So you can see very.

[Jasmine Sun]

They said, yes, this area is industrially zoned, but we don't like that it's next to a residential area. They knew a lot about the local environment. They were willing to admit uncertainty about questions like water pollution. They were not saying this is going to drain the Great Lakes. What they were making arguments for Washington A. No one's done long term environmental studies of hyperscale data centers, which is pretty true. But what I was actually more surprised by was these folks were really, really angry at their local government. They were really angry at the old Janesville city manager and the city council. I think there's a feeling from a lot of these places, which tend to be more rural, tend not to be like the richest areas, that we get screwed over by corporations all the time and we always get the short end of the stick. And how are our part time city council members getting like 5,000 bucks a year supposed to get a fair contract with these corporate lawyers who can always find a way to back out of a deal, who can leave a brownfield full of contaminated waste that you never cleaned up for 15 years.

[Activist 3]

So we're talking about small communities that don't have the legal budget to negotiate. Well, they're not on equal footing and then they don't have any room for wiggles. If something happens on the other end, you'll never hold a company to a contract. They could bury us in legal fees,

[Jasmine Sun]

like have some sort of exception.

[Activist 3]

Right.

[Jasmine Sun]

Or whatever it is. If this happens, we can give up on the whatever.

[Activist 3]

Right. There's no way. There's no municipal funding for enforcement and legal fees and stuff like that.

[Jasmine Sun]

Definitely very asymmetric.

[Activist 3]

It's very asymmetric. It's predatory, it's extractionary. The whole thing feels just not right.

[PJ Vogt]

So in some ways their opposition is not just like sort of like knee jerk Luddite stuff. It's like, hey, this isn't transparent. And it's really easy to imagine this going in a different direction.

[Activist 3]

Yes.

[Activist 2]

Like if you think we could get an ear with city manager or even council members. No, they didn't want to talk about it. And because this is shrouded in secrecy, like, I still don't know the level of involvement of like sitting council members or NDAs. NDAs galore.

[PJ Vogt]

Tell me about the NDAs.

[Jasmine Sun]

So a lot of data center developers, when they come into a community, they'll have a municipality sign an NDA to not reveal the customer, not reveal the environmental costs or what they're going to build there or what electricity use it would demand. All people would see is maybe a vague project like Project Cannoli or Project Nova that shows up on a city planning meeting. No one knows what it is. No one knows it's going to be a data center. No one knows it's going to be for OpenAI or Anthropic or whoever.

[PJ Vogt]

Why are they, why do the companies want these NDAs?

[Jasmine Sun]

I've heard different reasons. So partly it's so that they can try to have different localities compete for deals against each other if they haven't made a decision yet. Partly it's to not immediately raise the land value of all of the neighborhoods around the data center.

[Adam Schultz]

Oh.

[PJ Vogt]

Because it's a way to have negotiating leverage against.

[Jasmine Sun]

I think a lot of it has to do with negotiating leverage. Yeah, but like, frankly, every single person I talked to, even including every pro data center person I talked to on this trip, was anti NDA. They thought it made the distrust much worse. They thought the lack of transparency meant that rumors could spread on social media and the city councils would not be able to stop them because they weren't able to talk. So Microsoft has decided to stop doing NDAs, for example. They just didn't realize how much distrust it would sow.

[PJ Vogt]

Interesting. So were you finding the activist argument more sympathetic than you'd imagined before the trip?

[Jasmine Sun]

Again, I think I was. I mean, I think like, I had obviously not lived through something like the GM plant closing. I had not lived through in Mount Pleasant, where Foxconn promised 13,000 jobs. The village of Mount Pleasant and the local county, I think, took out like over a hundred million dollars in loans for infrastructure investments. And then Foxconn pulled out, built maybe a smaller factory with a thousand jobs and just kind of like left the village and the county trying to figure out what to do with all that land now that they'd invested over $100 million for, you know, a town of a couple tens of thousands of people.

[PJ Vogt]

Yeah, it's funny, I mean, my Search Engines editor, Shruti Pinamani, she did a story about that Foxconn deal before it had completely. I'm trying to think of a more uptown way to say, like, shat the bed, but like, there is an asymmetry where big corporations can go town to town looking for the best possible deal, and those towns are not necessarily equipped to make a deal for themselves where the risk is distributed in a way that is good for them.

[Jasmine Sun]

Exactly. And like, one of the most egregious examples I saw during the road trip was in Saline, Michigan.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Saline Township is a small town with just over 2,200 residents. They have a lot of fight in them and many of them voice their concerns over a of number new data center coming into their community.

[Jasmine Sun]

Saline Township has, I think, 3,000 people in it. So it's really small, really rural. Like, we're driving down a dirt road that is the location of a new Stargate site that is being built for OpenAI and for Oracle. So these are gigantic tech companies coming in. It's going to be a huge 1.4 gigawatt data center. And initially, in that case, Saline Township actually voted for one against having the data center.

[Narrator/Reporter]

In September, Saline Township board members voted to deny rezoning the 575 acres of farmland needed for the $7 billion data center project, which will house Oracle and ChatGPT owner OpenAI.

[Jasmine Sun]

The City Council was not excited about the trade off. And what happened was they got sued. They got sued by the data center developers over exclusionary zoning, saying that according to state law, you cannot bar all industrial zoning. You have to have some land Allocated for industrial use. You can't just leave it all agricultural. And a town of 3,000 people is not going to win a lawsuit against OpenAI, Oracle and the data center developers. So they settled for $14 million. And people were angry about the settlement. Nobody's here to protect me. Nobody's here to protect us. I am angry. And maybe you can't do anything about it, but I'm angry. You can fight harder. How dare you? How dare you.

[Narrator/Reporter]

You.

[Activist 1]

That's it.

[Jasmine Sun]

I think it feels to people who live in that community like there was a democratic decision by the local government to say, no, thank you, please go somewhere else. And the data centers and the AI companies said, screw you, we're doing this anyway. And we have our lawyers to make this happen.

[Activist 4]

You know, we've all lived here, most

[Activist 5]

of us all lived here all our

[Jasmine Sun]

lives, and they're just coming in here and taken away from us.

[PJ Vogt]

You know what?

[Jasmine Sun]

I can't believe this. I really can't believe it.

[Activist 5]

The thing with this, it already started already.

[Jasmine Sun]

And the feeling is that AI is a project that mainly helps some people somewhere else. People who are working computer jobs in San Francisco and New York. Maybe most people who I talk to most, they might use ChatGPT to write emails or make memes, but it's not an essential part of their lives. And so I think that there's this sense that these outside coastal corporations who are building something for their own, whether egorace their own software companies, whatever it is, they feel that they can decide what your town should look like and they will use their asymmetric power in order to accomplish their vision and use. You are mere collateral damage in that process. And so I think this feeling of who gets to shape the future, this feeling of, oh, these corporations, like, they don't even care about what we think. They don't even care about democratic process. They're happy to sort of force democratic process to their will. And it's all for this thing that isn't really producing anything. That helps me, I think, was the big feeling there.

[PJ Vogt]

They feel like they had Google Search and it was working fine. There's this new version of Google Search, which for some reason is massively expensive and requires all these new factories. It's as if there's a big machine in San Francisco that they find a little bit useful, but not that useful. And the big machine requires a giant exhaust pipe in the middle of their town. Maybe not literally in terms of pollution, but in terms of, you will take the negative externalities of this and whether you like it or not, it's kind of going to happen.

[Jasmine Sun]

Yeah. I mean, two different people, one activist and one public school teacher in Madison who I talked to offhand, just said, why doesn't Mark Zuckerberg build the data center in his backyard?

[Activist 2]

Like, they aren't building these in San Francisco. They're coming to one of the poorest counties in our state with a property that's been vacant. Knowing that, like, people are thirsty to have development here or to have something here, like, it feels predatory.

[Jasmine Sun]

I think there's this question of, if this technology is so important to those people in San Francisco, can't they just put it there? Why are they taking the externalities and imposing that on us? And that feeling, I think, doesn't feel good to people.

[PJ Vogt]

And it's funny, it's not as if, you know, in the reign of, like, American auto companies, people didn't want the factories in their towns. It's not like they were like, I don't understand why Henry Ford doesn't just live in an auto plant. People are.

[Jasmine Sun]

It's just kind of intangible. I mean, like, I think a lot of the public policy problem is you have pretty abstract and diffuse benefits. They don't see the outputs. But then the harms are so tangible. The fact that there's now an ugly building near you and people hear things about water and pollution and electricity rates. Yeah, it's tangible, narrow harms and like, diffuse abstract benefits that will maybe come to our community and maybe somewhere else. And again, these deals mean that sometimes the property taxes don't show up for like 10 or 20 years. And people think, what if the data center gets abandoned by them? What if the AI bubble pops? Like, it's not necessarily true that just the property taxes mean that you are going to get a tax break next year. Sometimes it means the property taxes are going to be used to pay off the infrastructure improvements to build the data center. And then maybe in 10 or 20 years after they finish paying for their streets, for the data center, they will pay for the schools.

[PJ Vogt]

So it's like obvious costs, theoretical benefits?

[Jasmine Sun]

I think so, yeah. One thing that was really shocking to me was how often anti data center folks told me, I don't believe that that's going to happen. So, like I would say something like, if you could guarantee that your electricity prices would stay the same for the next five years while this data center is being built, would you be more open to it? Because they all say, no, we're not going to let your rates rise. We're going to cover it, right? That's what they all say. Is it just like we don't believe it based on their history?

[Activist 1]

No, it's completely false. Everyone that is involved in these fights understands how it works. So we know that's bullshit and they know that we know that that's bullshit. Does it matter? Not really. So far. So they're either dumbasses or liars. It's one of the two.

[Activist 3]

Or both.

[Activist 1]

Or both, yeah, because that's.

[Jasmine Sun]

And people would say, I don't believe that they're not gonna raise the rates. Dte, the utility provider in Michigan has raised rates almost every year for the last five years. Why would they stop doing it?

[Activist 4]

I don't believe them because we know their grid can't support it without adding more generation. And I think what I think of now when I say that, oh, they're not going to overtax the grid or anything like that. To me when I read in between those lines, it's because, oh, instead of a big noisy data center next to your community, we're also going to stick a private gas generation power plant on the same property or nearby or a small modular nuclear reactor. And I can't think of anything worse than having a data center except to have a data center and a nuclear reactor next to your kid's school.

[Jasmine Sun]

Or if I said something like this data center is expected to pay 10, 20 million in property taxes year after year. Like that could go towards the streets, that could go towards the schools. Does that interest you? Folks would say, I don't think they're going to do it. I think that they're probably going to write themselves a carve out. What if the AI bubble pops before they even do that?

[Activist 1]

It's infuriating that if at some point the AI bubble bursts in such a way that they just collapse, which is extremely possible, you know, then there's nothing, there's no protections for what happens to this land, what happens to communities that have already been burned. They can't recoup money, they can't recoup and that's our tax dollars, you know, so it's just like supporting what feels like right before the 2008 crash, except for much worse.

[Jasmine Sun]

And so it's not even necessarily that getting the deals slightly tweaked, learning the exact facts on water use or energy would have changed their minds. The fundamental thing going on was this repeated. I don't believe them when they say they're going to pay their property taxes. And I can point to an example in the past where we got screwed over by a big company. So why should we believe them this time? And I think it's an incredibly hard problem to make a deal in an environment of trust that low. And in that sense, I do sympathize with local officials who are trying to raise revenues, trying to bring a economic development to their communities, and who are running into a roadblock because there is an element of trust that's required to sign a contract, and you can't guarantee everything will go perfectly.

[PJ Vogt]

We're going to take a short break. We visited Janesville and Saline, two midwestern towns with high levels of data center antipathy. When we come back back. Our road trip continues to meet a union leader who wants these data centers and a politician, Abdul El Sayed, who's fighting against them. The following conversation is brought to you by LabCorp on demand. I find that sometimes I really, really hyper focus on work and my social life, and I pay a little bit less attention to my health than I probably should. I was talking recently to a friend and we had a pretty surprising conversation about this, really about medical tests. So have you ever. Have you ever done a blood test?

[Jenna Weiss Berman]

I mean, so many. Haven't you?

[PJ Vogt]

I've done so many. Have you ever done one where you learned anything about your health?

[Jenna Weiss Berman]

Uh, yeah.

[PJ Vogt]

This is Jenna Weiss Berman. She works in podcasting. She's actually the person who greenlit search engine. She's the reason you're listening to this show at all. But today we were talking because she was telling me a story from her life from a few years ago. There's this time when she hadn't been feeling well, and so she'd gone to

[Jenna Weiss Berman]

the doctor, and this doctor decided to test me for something called my ceruloplasmin. It's a copper binding protein. And it was found that I have this thing called Wilson's disease, which is a very rare and very deadly and dangerous liver disease. I mean, I really thought I was gonna die, and I had just had a baby, so it would have been a real bummer to die right after that.

[PJ Vogt]

And the worst case scenario would have been had you not been diagnosed, you would have died.

[Jenna Weiss Berman]

Yeah, I would have died for sure. It's like a real killer.

[PJ Vogt]

One strange symptom of Wilson's disease. Tiny copper rings around your cornea, usually only visible in an eye exam. It's a rare disease, not always detected, which meant Jenna was very fortunate to have caught it and to know what to do to treat it, which is mainly just avoid all the foods that surprisingly have small amounts of copper in them. Avocados. Who knew? But to her the takeaway lesson everybody get blood tests.

[Jenna Weiss Berman]

They're great.

[PJ Vogt]

LabCorp saved your life. You were the person who signed Search Engine. And so because of LabCorp, search engine exists.

[Jasmine Sun]

Oh my God. That's true. That's amazing.

[PJ Vogt]

It's important as a person to be proactive about your health, find out what's going on in your body and not just wait for things to go wrong. And if you want more insight into what's happening, there's an easy way to find it. If you have questions about your health, LabCorp On Demand is a convenient and accurate way to get closer to answers. And you can do it from home. Here's how it works. Visit the website and choose from a suite of more than 100 lab tests ranging from micronutrient and cortisol to testosterone and sexual wellness. From there, visit the LabCorp location closest to you to provide your sample. Within days, you'll receive reliable, easy to understand results from a lab doctors Trust. It's a first step towards truly knowing yourself and what's going on in your body from the inside out. To start, just visit labcorp.com searchengine and use code SEARCH to save up to 15% on select tests. That's labcorp.com searChengine and use code Search Know Yourself. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Ray Khan. As Back to School season kicks off, I've been thinking about the one piece of technology I desperately needed during my school days. Headphones. Specifically, Raycon's Essential Open Earbuds. Whether you're heading off to class or getting your kids set for the new academic year, these are a total game changer. They feature a unique open ear design that sits right outside your ear canal so you can enjoy high quality sound while remaining completely aware of traffic or campus announcements. I've been using them when I'm just moving around Brooklyn. They become a really nice part of my routine because they stay comfortable for hours without blocking out the world. The rotating multiangular ear hooks ensure a secure, ultra lightweight fit, while multi point connection lets you switch effortlessly between your laptop and phone. Plus, you get up to 36 total hours of battery life with the case. Alongside a 30 day guarantee from a brand trusted by over 3 million people, the Essential Open earbuds are the perfect back to school companion. Go to buyraycon.com searchengineopen to get 20% off. Welcome back to the show. A lot of what Jasmine had captured in her microphone on her mini American tour was semi organized. Rage towards these data centers. I'd wanted to hear more about people like the real estate agent we'd heard from though, people who actually wanted these buildings. Who were you like in your road trip, who were you running into? Who wanted this? Besides people obviously who work for AI companies. Like who, who was pro data center?

[Jasmine Sun]

I would say that the few categories are there are definitely some local officials who are really excited about data centers again for tax revenue reasons. I mean, in Mount Pleasant, Microsoft is paying $20 million a year in taxes to this city of I think like 28,000 people. And so it is a huge boon for the tax base. And it means that these towns don't have to raise taxes on their actual residents and they can invest in infrastructure as costs go up. And that was something I heard a lot of from local officials. In addition, you have labor. I mean, maybe the first question, very basic, is just how you got involved in this Union in Local139. And just the basic mini history of.

[Terry McGowan]

Well, that goes back. I started when I was 14 years old at a local excavating shop. I would shovel the garage floor at night, change tires on the trucks.

[Jasmine Sun]

I talked to a union leader named Terry McGowan who gave me his whole backstory. He's with the International Union of Operating Engineers. And he told me that with all the data center projects springing up around Wisconsin, the skill trades have been kind of booming. People are getting these super well paying jobs. The apprenticeship program that the union runs is doubling in size and enrollment. Companies are literally dangling these cash per diem's at workers because there are so many shortages and there's such high demand. And so he said from his perspective, the data center boom was such a windfall for the skilled trades.

[Terry McGowan]

It's just been a windfall. I mean, when I started in this business, it was a roller coaster. Okay, Work was good, work was bad, work was good, work was bad. This has just been a steady stream. I grew up just outside of Milwaukee. Milwaukee was an industrial city. And back in Milwaukee's heyday, when I was a young man, noise was money. And you know, the thing was, the citizens of that area revered these huge, massive industrial factories because this is the engine is paying our bills, sending our kids to school, feeding us, you know, housing us, and they were hailed.

[Jasmine Sun]

And so construction workers, the trades workers, are pretty excited about data centers. But other than local officials who really grok the tax revenue and maybe the few thousand people who are in the trades, there's not really a super strong pro data center constituency in the way that at least with housing or with solar farms, there's usually some group of people like environmentalists or people who want to move there who are kind of excited about it. One really interesting thing that shows up in the polling is data center opposition is pretty equal no matter whether you actually live near a data center or not. So if it was just NIMBYism, you would think people who live near the housing might not want the new housing, but people who don't live near there would be excited about housing. Right? That's sort of normal standard issue NIMBYism. What you see in data center polling is that whether or not you live near a proposed data center, everyone kind of hates them equally. Which suggests that it is more anger at data centers or a dislike of data centers than it is specifically, I want data centers just not near me.

[Terry McGowan]

It's funny, the very same people that are afraid of AI, and I think that's what it is more than anything. They're just afraid of the advanced technology. They're so afraid of AI taking over everything or their media or their brain that the negative people, the people against AI have actually gotten in their brains.

[Activist 5]

That's.

[Terry McGowan]

That's what I feel.

[Activist 1]

But.

[PJ Vogt]

So it's like what you're seeing, it sounds like is the support basically comes from local politicians who say this is gonna be great for the tax base and skilled tradespeople like those unions like them otherw, it sounds like the picture of the opposition that was starting to be drawn for you is if one of the big questions around AI is like, if this is really going to be socially important technology, how are those spoils going to be shared? The deals around these data centers, it's like one of the early battles. It's like, are the companies going to negotiate deals for themselves where they keep most of the spoils, or is some local city councilor going to be able to learn from a local city councilor somewhere else to carve out a deal that makes sense. And like the intuition that activists have that people have is that these are bad deals.

[Jasmine Sun]

The intuition is that there is such a power asymmetry that they don't really get to choose. Please welcome the next United States senator from the state of Michigan, Abdul El Said. I see no changes.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Can a brother get a little?

[Jasmine Sun]

So one of the most interesting things was going to Lansing, Michigan, a rally that Abdoi El Sayed hosted with Bernie with aoc. There are things happening in this country that people everywhere are shocked by. A government of, by, and for the oligarchs. This was kind of bundled into the Bernie AOC anti oligarchy tour. A lot of it was also about dark money and politics. That was sort of the narrative that was hit again and again. Dark money could mean a pack. Dark money could mean Big Pharma. Dark money could mean the utility company everyone hates. But dark money also meant these data center deals.

[Activist 5]

We've got each other folks who may never understand the lives that one another lead, locking arms together to say that we will not have our future dominated by the likes of your big tech company to put a data center in our backyard.

[Jasmine Sun]

It was very interesting to see in speech after speech, even though no rally speech was completely about AI, AI fit perfectly into the story of the oligarchy. The idea that corporations are colluding with the government, are paying off your elected officials in order to make decisions that are good for the billionaires and bad for you. And so to go from that experience of like being at this rally where Abdul is saying, when big Tech buys a Senate seat, they're buying a data center in your backyard. When DTE buys a Senate seat, they're buying your local officials staying quiet while they raise the rates on you, when

[Activist 5]

they tell us that they're going to raise our electricity rates, we won't back down. When they tell us they want to put that data center in our backyard, we won't back down. When they tell us that they want to take our tax dollars and give them there. When we've got kids who need them here, we won't back down.

[Jasmine Sun]

Going from that experience about hearing AI slotted into the money and politics story to seline, where the developers have literally sued the democratically elected city council in order to build a data center that nobody wanted there, it really became clear how the oligarchy story played together with the data center story. So nice to meet you, Jasmine.

[Activist 5]

Jasmine, nice to meet you.

[Activist 1]

Nice to meet you.

[Activist 5]

Nice to meet you.

[PJ Vogt]

And so what was Abdul El sayed love?

[Jasmine Sun]

I mean, so I sat down with Abdul for 30 minutes the day after the rally in Ann Arbor because the team decided it would be a better venue to go deeper on AI policy. And he has a long, long list of demands in terms of regulating AI that go from we should force a divestment of Anthropic from Amazon or Microsoft and OpenAI to make sure that you don't end up with AI monopolies to we should have an international treaty with China so that we can pause and slow down AI, we should have an fda, merged with the sec, merged with some other regulatory agency solely dedicated to regulating AI.

[Activist 5]

These corporations have too much incentive to

[PJ Vogt]

do things that are terrible for humanity,

[Activist 5]

but very good for making money in the short run. If we take seriously the risk to the social contract, then public ownership has to be part of it.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Right?

[Activist 5]

Similar with utilities.

[Jasmine Sun]

He had a big laundry list of demands for AI right now regulation.

[PJ Vogt]

And what did you think?

[Jasmine Sun]

It was a very big list. I'm not sure that I agree that these policy proposals all made a ton of sense. I mean, I think that what I felt was that populist politicians like Abdul in Michigan or Francesca Hong, the Democratic front runner for governor in Wisconsin who's advocating a moratorium on data centers, too, they are tapping into real anger. And I left with a lot more sympathy for the anger and the suspicion that people felt. I didn't leave thinking that all of these very ambitious regulatory ideas were necessarily the right ones. But it became clear that we are going to need some AI plan, maybe at the national level, maybe at the state level, that tackles a bunch of these issues. Labor stuff, the data centers, kids, safety, and makes people feel that someone has this under control. Because the other thing that people kept telling me, like activists, for example, was like, our local government, our mayor, they're not doing their homework. They're in over their heads. They don't have this under control. And so I think having state or national governments tell people, this is how we're thinking about AI. This is how we're thinking about the AI industry. We understand your concerns about labor issues, about the environment, about whether this could be a bubble. And this is what we're going to do to ensure that you're not left holding the bag as normal Americans. If the AI companies do this or that, that's the kind of leadership that the public wants right now and that they're not getting, which is leaving a vacuum for a lot of more blunt populist mechanisms.

[PJ Vogt]

It's tough, though. I mean, like, the idea that no one's in control. I'm very sympathetic to who should be in control. I find very confusing.

[Jasmine Sun]

Yes. I mean, I don't think the answer to me is that the government is in control of, like, what we use AI for. I think that the. The thing that people want is protection against downside risk. And I do think it is the government's job to protect people against downside risk, whether that is a data center becoming a stranded asset if the company decides to up and leave, or whether that downside risk is People losing their jobs or whatever else people are worried about.

[PJ Vogt]

I mean, can you imagine a world where you basically have a bunch of states that do data center moratoriums? You end up with some localities negotiating better deals because anti aid backlash means that there's only a few places you can do data centers. And so you get to a good outcome because of all of this politicking.

[Jasmine Sun]

I mean, in a way, absolutely right. Like, I think it is a great thing that Microsoft has said publicly they're not doing NDAs anymore on these. I think that I would expect other AI companies and developers to follow suit. That seems good, to have more transparency. I've heard both from people who are in these communities as well as from folks from the AI and tech side, that the deals are getting better for communities. They are extending more in community benefits. The question that I'm getting from people I know in AI world is what do we have to give these communities? What do we want? What can we promise them? We really want to build this data center. Just tell us how we can use money to solve the problem. And so I think that there's not a world anymore where some small town has to give a subsidy to Meta. Like no one should have to be subsidizing Meta's build out, you know. And so I think that the deals are getting better because of the level of backlash. I think the main thing that I'm thinking is I suspect there is a way to do the deals, right? There is a way for places like Janesville, which does in fact have this giant concrete slab in the middle of the city and could use some commercial revenue to find a way to get a good deal out of the AI companies. Whether or not they are set up to do so at the moment is unclear. I mean, the best case that I heard, for example, Kathy Hochul's data center moratorium, is that it can bring the standards for these deals up to the state level because the state is significantly more equipped to figure out what should go on. So that's actually the justification her team has been giving, both in public. And I've talked to them also about this briefly as well, where they're saying in the same way that, like Gretchen Whitmer set standards on solar farms in Michigan, which were very controversial, you shouldn't leave these tiny towns to figure out how to negotiate with Meta. You should pause, set a bunch of standards at the state level, have Kathy Hochul's team negotiate with the data center developers and the AI labs to figure out what's possible and what's not release statewide standards saying you want to build a data center in New York State, you're going to do closed loop cooling, you're going to use X percentage renewable energy, you are going to not sign an NDA. And then once those standards are set at the state level, it hopefully becomes much easier to make the local deals.

[PJ Vogt]

It solves the part time city councilor like asking like ChatGPT, what's a good data center deal problem?

[Jasmine Sun]

I think so. And I actually think that like if that's actually what's going on, that might be a smart way to do it.

[PJ Vogt]

So are you more positive towards stuff like the New York State data center moratorium than you were before you went on the road?

[Jasmine Sun]

I think I am. I mean again, to be clear, like I am more positive on it. If it means the thing that I just. And not just like it's a permanent moratorium, we're never going to deal with this ever again. Because sometimes people say moratorium. What they mean is banned. Right? And like that I am not sure if I believe in, but like if the actual thing that's happening is that your state government is figuring out what are these standards that we can set? What are the terms of engagement for New York towns for data centers? I think that's pretty interesting, huh?

[PJ Vogt]

So you actually came across like, I feel like the upside of your trip is like it doesn't just feel like a polarized nation screaming at each other based off things they saw on TikTok. It feels like a country trying to figure out a deal that makes sense

[Jasmine Sun]

and how to make those deals in an environment that's already solo. Trust.

[PJ Vogt]

Yeah. So that is what I learned from Jasmine's road trip. That as often is the case, this country looks a bit more reasonable when you talk to people offline. That what voters are saying they want is not exactly brakes they can smash to stop this technology. They want a better, fairer process around these data center deals. They've learned the hard way that industry can burn them and they want their politicians to make deals they can trust. As for Jasmine, you can find her ongoing, very excellent coverage of AI San Francisco and the technological and political currents shooting through our culture at her substack, Jasmine Sun. We'll have a link in our show notes. I do not miss a post and neither should you. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Notability. Back to school season always brings a flood of new tech tools, but Notability's newest release actually delivers on its promise. Their new feature Learn acts like an instant study assistant by turning your typed or handwritten notes into flashcards, practice quizzes, and organized study guides instantly. It eliminates the hassle of copying information back and forth between different study apps, making it a favorite for students juggling packed schedules and parents investing in their education. But here's what makes this announcement Notability is offering a real guarantee. If you use Learn throughout this semester and decide it didn't help you study, they'll cover the cost for the rest of your semester. And you rarely see a company stand behind their features like this, which makes this the ideal time to test it out and streamline your routine. Try Learn Guarantee and Notability today by going to notability.comlearn-guarantee and use code search 25 at checkout to get 25% off this episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Square, the ultimate platform for running and growing your business. Honestly, I always notice when a business uses Square because the whole experience is just so easy. For instance, at Enoki Catskill, my favorite place to get kimchi in Socrates, New York, they use Square at the register, and it just moves so sleek and easily. And I get loyalty rewards with a quick tap. But Square is so much more than a great register. Whether you're running a cafe, detailing cars, managing a boutique, or booking client appointments, Square helps you sell everywhere your customers are are online, in store, or on the go. The software is so simple and intuitive that you can set it up in minutes without any complicated training, saving business owners dozens of hours every single month. With Square, you get all the tools to run your business with none of the contracts or complexity. And why wait? Right now, you can get up to $200 off square hardware at square.com go engine. That's S Q U-A-R-E.com geoengine run your business smarter with Square get started today. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Snapple. Hey, before we jump back into the show, let's take a quick break. But not just any break. This is a refreshing break with Snapple. We all know about Snapple's iconic real facts, so let's take a moment to go over some of my faves. Snapple Real Fact 1361 A nun held one of the first PhDs to in computer science. Snapple RealFact 1643 the first search engine's name is Archie Snapple RealFact 1517 In New York, it is illegal to sell a haunted house without telling the buyer. Snapple RealFact 1228 Chimps can develop their own fashion trends. So grab a Snapple, take a second, enjoy the moment because let's be honest, this might be the most refreshing part of your day. Snapple, make your break more interesting. All right, now let's get back to the show. Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vogt and Shruti Pinamani. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. Emily Maltaire is our associate producer. Our production intern is Piper Dumont, who also fact checked this week's episode theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Our executive producer is Leah Rees Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey, Rob Mirandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Moore Curran, Josefina Francis, Kirk Courtney, Vanessa Tincati and Hilary Schaff. If you have a business and would like to advertise on our show, please send us an email. Pjvote85mail.com subject line advertising. You can also send your questions there if you have a question you'd like the show to answer. If you're a listener and would like to not hear ads on the show, you can sign up for Incognito Mode. It's our paid feedback. You also get bonus episodes. You can find that at Search Engine Show. Your contributions there are what help us keep this project running. Thank you as always for listening. We'll see you in a couple weeks. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Vuori. You know that feeling when you put on a new piece of clothing and just keep wearing it? That has happened to me with Vuori the first time I put on their hoodies. I am a hoodie connoisseur. I was struck by how soft the fabric is, how perfectly it fits and how it actually moves with you like it was made for real life, not just the gym. I got compliments on this hoodie. I don't get compliments on my hoodies. Compared to other workout or loungewear I've tried, Fiori really nails that rare combination of comfort and style. Vuori is an investment in your happiness for our listeners. They are offering 20% off your first purchase. Get yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile clothing on the [e-mail] PJ that's V-U-O-R-I.com PJ exclusions apply. Visit the website for full terms and conditions. Not only will you receive 20% off your first purchase, but enjoy free shipping on US orders over $75 in free returns. 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