Ezra Klein, The A.I. Giants Weren’t Prepared for This, NYTimes, Aug 4. 2026
What is big, ugly and has united Republicans and Democrats at a time when it has felt like nothing else could? A.I. data centers.
Last August, a Heatmap News poll found that approximately four in 10 voters would oppose a data center being built where they live. By May of this year, opposition grew to seven in 10. Gov. Ron DeSantis, of Florida — a Republican, of course — proposed legislation that was known as an A.I. Bill of Rights.
Senator Bernie Sanders called for a national data center moratorium — one of more than 100 local or statewide moratorium proposals across the country. And here in New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul, not usually thought of as a hard-core populist, just imposed a one-year moratorium on data center construction.
So I wanted to get into the fight over data centers. How much of this is really about water or electricity or aesthetics, and how much is about A.I. and the companies that are behind it?
My guest is Jasmine Sun. Jasmine has been doing excellent coverage of both the culture inside the A.I. companies — an unusual culture — and the anger that is building against them in the rest of the country.
Here's one excerpt from a much longer interview:
You have a very influential definition of A.I. populism where you call it a worldview in which A.I. is viewed not only as a normal technology but as an elite political project to be resisted.
The phrase that you hear a lot from A.I. critics is: Why is this being shoved down our throats? Or with ChatGPT, it’s not that people are saying there is literally no use for ChatGPT, it’s people are saying: Why are you forcing me, at my job, to use A.I. to do something worse when I could do it better?
And so I think that a lot of the public backlash to A.I. that has arisen over the past six months is not explained by people thinking that the technology has no use at all. It’s not explained by their being worried about specific technical properties of large language models that might lead to rogue A.I. or misalignment or whatever, which are the safetyist arguments.
It’s A.I. as sort of an avatar for a small group of Silicon Valley billionaires’ ability to impose their vision of the world onto everybody else without their consent.
And I think that’s also what I hear echoed in these data center debates. It’s not just: It’s going to use this much water or that much water. I frankly think that even if there was no misinformation about water use, people would be just as angry about the data centers. [...]
Maybe it will make things better, but I really don’t know. I think that the costs are going to be very, very high for us relationally and economically. And so I’m very conflicted.
But do I want to live next to a data center? Yeah, no. [Laughs.]
Yeah. It’s totally different.
That’s easier — somebody is just making you do that.
I mean, one of the most interesting things — back to back, I went to this Abdul-Bernie-A.O.C. rally in Lansing, Mich., and then I went and saw the Saline activists the next day, and I was researching how the Saline Stargate project happened. And it was really interesting to see these echoes of the populist message manifest in this specific project.
When I’m at this rally, people are talking about the oligarchy. They’re talking about corporate billionaires, whether it’s Big Tech or Big Pharma or DTE — the utility companies — paying off politicians in order to screw the people over. And that’s why you need the people to come together and to get money out of politics, to prevent DTE from donating to these super PACs and paying off Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, or whatever.
And then when I learned how the Saline data center saga played out, what happened was the Saline Township board, unlike a lot of boards, actually voted 4 to 1 against rezoning their land for the data center. So this was a case where local government said: This is not our vision for our community. It’s not worth it to us.
And what happened? The data center developers sued Saline Township, a town of, again, a few thousand people, saying: Wait, no, this is exclusionary zoning. You can’t have no industrial use in your entire township. And when a town of that size is getting sued by a giant A.I. data center developer, they just settled.
They were just like: Fine, give us a few million for the fire department and for some schools, and this fight is not worth it to us. But that, to people, felt like a profound violation of little-D democracy.
It felt like the dark money in politics story, which is: You have some very rich companies show up with a bag of money to your politicians. They don’t tell anybody else what’s happening. The politicians aren’t allowed to tell their citizens and involve them in the decision-making process, and they themselves work out a deal — a deal that is fundamentally asymmetric because of the amount of money on one side — that will then transform the image of your community, your lived reality, into the world that these tech companies have decided for you.
And so I think that the data centers, in that sense, are a very visceral microcosm of the way that a lot of people feel that A.I. is showing up in their lives.
I would also maybe even take that a little bit further.
I think the way that, not all of the A.I. companies — and I think Anthropic has largely been a good actor here — but the way many of them have acted has opened up such a chasm between what they say and then how they act under pressure, so that one should be incredibly, incredibly skeptical of them.
And what I mean by this is, Sam Altman and all these different people, in front of congressional testimony and in interviews, will say: It should not just be us making these decisions. There should be a real, deep, small-D democratic role here in how A.I. rolls out, in what effects it has on communities and how it is governed.
And then when a community, or a politician who’s representing a community, tries to say: Well, we don’t want this data center here. Or: We want to impose these regulations — we have watched, repeatedly, these companies turn tremendous amounts of financial artillery against whoever is standing in their way. And use the expertise and the money and the power they are amassing to short-circuit that democratic voice.
Yeah. I mean, a couple things. I think one big gap I noticed between Silicon Valley and the folks in these communities I was talking to is: Silicon Valley does tend to think that money solves all problems — that if you just make the check bigger, everything is going to be OK.
And I think people have a sense for: I’m being bribed. This corporation is not offering me a free lunch or whatever. There is going to be something that I’m losing here.
And, in fact, sometimes the fact that the data center deals were bigger, or the amount of political spending was bigger, actually just makes people more suspicious. In the Abdul El-Sayed Senate race in Michigan, his No. 1 hit on opponent Haley Stevens is how much money she is getting from AIPAC, from DTE, from Big Pharma or whatever.
And so I think we’re in a political environment where making the numbers bigger and the amounts of money bigger makes people more suspicious, not less.
Another one I’ll just quickly mention is, I don’t even think Anthropic should be let off the hook for things like the labor market impacts. They are the ones simultaneously warning that we might see 50 percent of white-collar jobs lost by 2030. They’re saying: This is really important to us, we’re freaking out about it.
Anthropic C.E.O. Dario Amodei has written in his essays that we might see an underclass of people of lower intellectual ability. And Anthropic is building the agents — they are building the coding agents, the banking agents, the design agents — that they know are going to displace jobs, or they believe, at least, are going to displace jobs.
And I think that people feel that hypocrisy, as well, which is: If you are so worried about the inequality, why are you building the agents to do it? And when I ask executives and researchers and whomever at Anthropic this question, they don’t really have a good answer. Because it is true that their business model is fundamentally premised on the disruption that they say they are causing.
You did a big piece for The Times on the very widespread belief in Silicon Valley that they will create this underclass.
Yeah.
What does the underclass mean to them?
The idea of a permanent underclass caused by A.I. is basically a world where any job a person can do, either A.I. or a robot can do it for them. Which means that workers lose all the economic leverage they have, and capital owners — people with money — can simply pay machine labor to do all the work instead of paying workers.
What that means is anyone who earned their living by working is no longer able to do that. You end up with a world of runaway inequality, where the rich get richer and the working class gets poorer. Maybe they get some welfare checks, but fundamentally, it’s a loss of economic mobility in a society.
And when I ask folks in Silicon Valley: Do you think by default A.I. is going to increase or decrease inequality? I have not yet heard anyone say it will decrease inequality or keep it the same.
They might say the floor will get really high. They might say A.I. will bring the cost of consumer goods down, and so people’s lives are going to get cheaper, and everyone will be superhealthy, so it’s OK. But I have not heard a single person in the tech industry tell me that they believe that A.I. is going to decrease inequality.
In fact, many people are very worried that instead, most workers will lose their leverage and be on a kind of permanent welfare in the far-off future.
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