‘The fight over data centres is about top versus bottom’

The US public are resisting the construction of the vast data centres AI needs to achieve exponential growth. This is only the most visible sign of mounting opposition to the technology.

Did the Bob Dylan lyric about the times a-changin’ cross Eric Schmidt’s mind on 15 May when the former Google CEO and one-time Pentagon advisor, whose fortune exceeds $60bn, donned mortar board, gown and smug smile to address a hall full of graduating students at the University of Arizona? How often had he already cranked out this speech about how artificial intelligence would change everything? Suddenly, here he was being met with boos and heckles, which grew louder as soon as he uttered the words ‘artificial intelligence’. His smile froze awkwardly. ‘I know what many of you are feeling … I understand that fear,’ Schmidt told students burdened with average debts of $35,000 and facing a future in which AI threatens to eradicate many of the professions they had hoped to enter.

This wasn’t a one-off. Across the US, there’s a growing tide of opposition to the cult of automation, the damage caused by wholesale digitisation, the proliferation of data centres, the arrogance and power of the tech elite and the corruption of politicians who bend the knee to them. Proof that the public have had enough is mounting: a Molotov cocktail thrown at the home of OpenAI founder Sam Altman, shots fired at the house of an Indianapolis city councillor who supported the construction of a data centre, local demonstrations. At a time when the sector’s leading companies, OpenAI and Anthropic, are preparing for IPOs (initial public offerings), the Wall Street Journal wrote, ‘The only thing growing faster than the artificial intelligence industry may be Americans’ negative feelings about it’. Opinion polls suggest that is indeed true of a majority of them; more than two thirds believe the development of this technology is going too quickly, including 64% of those aged 18-29. <exergue|texte=Democratic societies should not have to depend on the moral restraint of corporate leaders when the stakes include the stability of our financial systems, power (…)

Full article: 2 346 words.

Pierre Rimbert

Pierre Rimbert is a member of Le Monde diplomatique’s editorial team.

(3) Ben Casselman, ‘Forget coders. The real AI threat is in the back office’, New York Times, 10 June 2026.

(5) Mariana Olaizola Rosenblat, ‘The governance gap Mythos exposed – And how to address it’, Just Security, 29 April 2026.

(7) Dario Amodei, ‘Policy on the AI exponential’, darioamodei.com, June 2026, and Jim Vandehei, ‘Axios interview: Reimagining government + business + AI’, Axios, 13 May 2026.

(8) Skyler Seets and Kaitlyn Radde, ‘Most new data centers in the US are coming to rural areas’, Pew Research Center, 13 April 2026. Other sources put the figure higher.

(9) Andrew Cockburn, ‘The data-center divide. Why politicians are squandering the anti-AI backlash’, Harper’s, New York, June 2026.