Over the last few weeks, the normally quiet and lightly-attended Port Washington Common Council meetings have been turned into an all-out battleground, sometimes with hundreds in attendance. The working people of Port Washington, Wisconsin and surrounding areas have faced down the full might of their local government, navigating the bureaucratic maze and enduring arrests of multiple activists who turned out to speak. The source of this outraged rebellion is the proposed construction of a massive new AI data center for Vantage Data Centers, backed fully by the mayor, and one of five data centers being planned across Wisconsin.
The grassroots opposition by the locals, increasingly common across the country, isn’t surprising when considering the impact these data centers will have on their homes and communities. These massive data centers will span thousands of square acres and damage the local water supply by guzzling drinking water and poisoning the water table. They’ll drive electric bills through the roof, create risks of rolling blackouts, and the industry openly admits their 24/7 operation means they can’t even consider using renewables as a primary energy source. Unsurprisingly, this attitude seems to be typical among the titans of the AI industry. It seems nothing is off the table in the search for huge amounts of constant power. The infamous power plant at Three Mile Island, once the site of a partial nuclear meltdown, is even being fast-tracked for reopening in 2027 to meet the energy demands of Microsoft’s data centers!
The Battle Of Port Washington
Port Washington residents and local climate activists are understandably outraged at the reception they got from the mayor and his cronies. Socialist Alternative in Milwaukee recently attended a Common Council meeting, which featured some extremely fiery and inspiring public comments. One resident submitted a resolution to be voted on, which would have held the officials present personally financially responsible for any damages created by the data center. The resident told them that since officials were promising there would be no negative environmental impacts, they should put their money where their mouths are. Another resident said that the issue of the data center should be put to a public referendum, and that the people of Port Washington should be allowed a direct decision about whether or not construction would proceed. A local high school student spoke with passion and emotion about the impact AI was already having on the job market: their father was just laid off weeks prior after his job was made redundant by AI.
The mayor then steamrolled over two dozen public comments speaking against the data center (there was only one speaker all night who spoke in favor) and invited a representative of Vantage Corp up to speak about all the wonderful jobs the data center would bring to Port Washington. For many, this was a rude awakening about the nature of capitalist democracy, which is not very democratic at all when capitalist interests are threatened. Following this, a small group gathered outside to discuss ways forward—from pursuing a referendum vote to even recalling the mayor himself!
The resistance to the data center has continued over the past several weeks. In early December, Great Lakes Neighbors United activist Christine Le Jeune was violently ripped from her seat immediately after giving testimony against the data center. This undemocratic act of violent state repression demonstrates clearly what both the police and local politicians from both establishment parties are really there to do: protect the interests of the capitalist class and sell Port Washington’s land and natural resources to the highest bidder.
Unite With Labor & Fight The Billionaires
During these Common Council meetings, the room has been noticeably divided. On one side, opposed to the data center, were the concerned working-class residents of Port Washington and local climate activists. The other side were people mobilized by the local building trades unions, who were quietly in favor. At the meeting described above, the one person who spoke in favor was a member of a building trades union, who argued that working people need the data center, to provide new jobs in construction. This is an understandable sentiment, given the scarcity of good-paying jobs in this disastrous capitalist economy.
However, this logic actually comes from the bosses and is accepted wholesale by most of the building trade union tops, who often spend more time thinking about how they can cut a deal and work with the bosses instead of fighting back with their most powerful weapon—their members. Instead of allowing the workers in the building trades to be pitted against the rest of their community (which weakens the unions), the unions should play a powerful and even decisive role as part of a united working-class campaign to tax the rich to fund well-paid union jobs in the construction of social housing, green infrastructure, and sustainable energy projects. These kinds of projects would create more jobs for the building trades workers long term without destroying other jobs through AI redundancies, and would be infinitely more socially useful given the massive affordable housing crisis, crumbling infrastructure, and climate catastrophes. Activists across the US opposing these data centers need to make direct political appeals to the rank and file of the building trades unions and build a coalition rooted in the power of the working class and organized labor movement.
AI itself certainly does have socially useful applications—for example AI has been useful in detecting cancer cells in blood samples where the signs are so tiny they are easy for humans to miss. But under capitalism, AI is not going to be used to automate drudgery and give people more free time, but to eliminate jobs, leaving people with no social safety net and nowhere to go. AI, as it’s currently being developed, is an environmental catastrophe. The only way to ensure that AI is implemented to the benefit of workers is for the big tech companies as a whole to be brought under public ownership and placed under the democratic control of the working class, which will only be possible if we do away with the rotten capitalist system and replace it with socialism.