Saline Township, Michigan has just a few thousand residents, most of whom were extremely concerned when OpenAI and Oracle announced plans to build a massive $16 billion Stargate data center right next door. So residents got organized, packed town hall meetings to protest the project, and successfully forced the township board to revoke the data center’s zoning request. 

Theirs is just one of hundreds of similar fights taking place across the country.

More than 1,500 new data centers are proposed or currently being constructed across the US. Riding a speculative bubble on which the capitalist economy seemingly depends, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Alphabet are set to spend over $600 billion on the AI arms race in 2026, funneling most of that into the data center buildout in a massive industrial boom. 

But the AI billionaires have a problem on their hands. Local backlash has disrupted an estimated $130 billion worth of AI data center projects in the first quarter of 2026, halting roughly 75 individual projects. As of March, there were 833 recorded anti-data center activist coalitions across 49 states. Pro-data center politicians are losing their seats, while others have been hard-pressed to support moratoriums.

The battle over data centers cuts to the heart of some very important questions: Who controls society’s resources? Who gets to decide the fate of our communities: the working-class people who live in them, or unhinged AI billionaires? 

In Saline Township, they thought the behemoth Stargate project had been stopped. But then the data center developer sued, the township settled, and construction began anyway. Similarly, under pressure from the AI lobby, many state-level moratoriums are being quietly killed.

The billionaires aren’t going to let ordinary people undermine their reckless AI gamble without a fight. If we want to win, the movements fighting data centers across the country will need to cohere into a nationwide fightback that channels the widespread anger at AI into a mass struggle for working-class, democratic control over our cities and towns, and our own lives. 

A High-Stakes Project For The Billionaire Class

Technological advancements often face resistance, but AI and its resource-guzzling data centers are easily one of the most widely opposed in modern history. A whopping 71% of people oppose building data centers in their local area, including 46% who worry “a great deal” about the environmental impacts. That’s more than the opposition to nuclear power, which faced global backlash after the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979. 

But it’s become glaringly obvious that the will of the vast majority matters very little to the ruling class and their political servants, especially when their profits are on the line. 

By some measures, AI has fueled upwards of 75% of US economic growth this year. Elon Musk’s company SpaceX just debuted on the stock market with the highest initial public offering of any company in history, temporarily making him the world’s first trillionaire. Trump’s former AI advisor David Sacks concluded, “Stopping progress in AI would be equivalent to halting the U.S. economy.” Whatever it takes, they need this boom to last as long as it possibly can. 

The AI industry currently accounts for 2% to 2.5% of the entire US gross domestic product (GDP)—an amount equivalent to the entire higher education sector, and almost as big as the entire national “defense” budget. By comparison, the most the dot-com bubble ever accounted for was roughly 1-2% of GDP. Some economists say the AI buildout is (theoretically) on track to become the biggest infrastructure project in US history, surpassing even the frenzied drive to build hundreds of thousands of miles of railroads.

It’s not only because the billionaires really like getting richer and richer. US imperialism is in a race against Chinese imperialism to build out AI capacity because AI has become a crucial component of modern warfare, surveillance, and could become a key driver of higher economic productivity. Each superpower regime wants to gain an advantage over the other to cement their dominance over the global economic system. 

Trump and the US ruling class desperately need the AI buildout to succeed, not just to beat China, but to stave off the existential crises that threaten their system. They’ve been caught on the backfoot by the grassroots movements that have sprung up recently against data centers. But that’s already starting to change, and they’re going to fight back hard. 

An Even Higher-Stakes Fight For Us

A single hyperscale data center can use as much as five million gallons of water per day, or as much water as 50,000 people. Roughly two-thirds of the data centers built since 2022 are in water-stressed regions—a catastrophe waiting to happen as cities like Corpus Christi, Texas are already running out of water. By 2030, the current rate of AI growth would annually put 24 to 44 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the emissions equivalent of adding five to ten million cars to US roadways.

To meet the demand of hyperscale data centers, utility companies across the country are racing to repair and expand their infrastructure, and they’re sending working-class people the bill. In regions like northern Virginia, where the most data centers are being built, electricity prices have surged by as much as 267% compared to five years ago. Even if you aren’t in direct proximity to a data center, if you’re on the same power grid, you’re paying the price. 

Our rapidly shrinking water supply cannot sustain the speculative greed of the ultra-wealthy and the basic water needs of hundreds of millions of people at the same time. Earth’s climate certainly cannot sustain hundreds of hyperscale data centers powered by fossil fuels. The AI billionaires are happy to put millions and even billions of lives at stake through worsening climate disaster, just to win their sick little stock market games. We can’t afford to let them. We need a nationwide ban on hyperscale data center construction, full stop. 

Mass anti-AI sentiment is being harnessed by some politicians who are putting forward populist demands to regulate or block data centers, but actually winning those demands comes down to whether they’re willing to put up the fight that’s necessary. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have introduced a national data center moratorium, which if passed would stay in place until more regulations have been developed to make AI safer and less resource-intensive. AOC and Bernie should call rallies across the country and meetings to link up the many data center struggles into a nationwide fightback. 

But as long as control of AI and all technology remains in the hands of the capitalists, we’ll never be truly safe. We need to fight for the working class to have democratic public ownership over not just the AI industry, but all the biggest sectors of the economy, so that we control how our finite resources are used and what the impacts are.

Escalate The Revolt

The battle over data center construction has drawn in working-class people across the political spectrum, so Republican and Democratic politicians are scrambling to do the impossible: appease their angry constituents and the AI billionaires at the same time. The two corporate parties know who pays for their campaigns—super PACs funded by the likes of Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. While the residents of Saline Township were fighting for their community, their governor, Democrat Gretchen Whitmer, was posing for photos with Altman at the data center’s groundbreaking ceremony. 

Establishment politicians can sometimes be forced to concede to our demands when our movements are strong enough, but we have to escalate the struggle or watch our victories be clawed back when the capitalist class ramps up the pressure. Many of the moratoriums that have so far passed are temporary, and they can be quickly lifted or overturned. Corporate politicians everywhere are hoping that the movement will be satisfied, lose steam, and move on to caring about something else by the time the moratoriums expire or are revoked.

That’s why the data center revolt needs to become a coordinated nationwide movement. The hundreds of coalitions and thousands of people across the country fighting local data centers should start sharing lessons about how we can strengthen our fights and win state and federal bans, which is clearly going to take a serious escalation in the fightback.

The labor movement has a key role to play in this struggle. In many unions, workers are fighting back against AI-related threats to their jobs. When it comes to data centers, the leadership of the building trades unions are largely repeating the bosses’ talking points, hitching their unions to the boom in an unholy alliance with the AI billionaires. But if given a real choice between building data centers against the will of their communities or building things like public transit, affordable housing, or clean energy grids that won’t poison the planet, many construction workers would choose the job that is actually socially useful.

US data center construction spending topped $50 billion in April of this year, more than total public spending on transportation projects like airports and subways. Despite thousands of crumbling roads and bridges and the desperate need for more affordable housing nationwide, AI is sucking up all of society’s resources, in more ways than one. The billions of dollars in subsidies being forked over to data center projects, should instead be put toward a multibillion-dollar public jobs program to construct the things we need, based on a clean energy system. 

The two corporate parties will not allow anti-AI politics to supersede the interests of their billionaire donors. Clearly, we need a new, working-class party that could organize a national struggle against data centers—this would be a crucial opportunity to win over workers and young people across the political spectrum to the methods and ideas of working-class, socialist politics. National meetings would likely attract hundreds if not thousands of people, where we could come together to discuss the way forward and how to get better organized to win our demands. 

The anti-AI mood shows how millions of workers around the world instinctively understand that the system is completely rotten, and that for all their prophecies about the future of humanity, the billionaires really only care about their own interests. If that understanding is channeled into a strong enough fightback, we have the power to not just stop AI data centers everywhere, but claim control of our society.