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Nationwide Backlash Brewing Against Big Tech's Energy-Devouring AI Data Centers
"For any Democrat who wants to think politically, what an opportunity,” said Faiz Shakir, a longtime adviser to US Sen. Bernie Sanders. “The people are way ahead of the politicians.”
Oct 14, 2025
America's biggest tech firms are facing an increasing backlash over the energy-devouring data centers they are building to power artificial intelligence.
Semafor reported on Monday that opposition to data center construction has been bubbling up in communities across the US, as both Republican and Democratic local officials have been campaigning on promises to clamp down on Silicon Valley's most expensive and ambitious projects.
In Virginia's 30th House of Delegates district, for example, both Republican incumbent Geary Higgins and Democratic challenger John McAuliff have been battling over which one of them is most opposed to AI data center construction in their region.
In an interview with Semafor, McAuliff said that opposition to data centers in the district has swelled up organically, as voters recoil at both the massive amount of resources they consume and the impact that consumption is having on both the environment and their electric bills.
"We’re dealing with the biggest companies on the planet,” he explained. “So we need to make sure Virginians are benefiting off of what they do here, not just paying for it.”
NPR on Tuesday similarly reported that fights over data center construction are happening nationwide, as residents who live near proposed construction sites have expressed concerns about the amount of water and electricity they will consume at the expense of local communities.
"A typical AI data center uses as much electricity as 100,000 households, and the largest under development will consume 20 times more," NPR explained, citing a report from the International Energy Agency. "They also suck up billions of gallons of water for systems to keep all that computer hardware cool."
Data centers' massive water use has been a consistent concern across the US. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on Monday that residents of the township of East Vincent, Pennsylvania have seen their wells dry up recently, and they are worried that a proposed data center would significantly exacerbate water shortages.
This is what has been happening in Mansfield, Georgia, a community that for years has experienced problems with its water supply ever since tech giant Meta began building a data center there in 2018.
As BBC reported back in August, residents in Mansfield have resorted to buying bottled water because their wells have been delivering murky water, which they said wasn't a problem before the Meta data center came online. Although Meta has commissioned a study that claims to show its data center hasn't affected local groundwater quality, Mansfield resident Beverly Morris told BBC she isn't buying the company's findings.
"My everyday life, everything has been affected," she said, in reference to the presence of the data center. "I've lived through this for eight years. This is not just today, but it is affecting me from now on."
Anxieties about massive power consumption are also spurring the backlash against data centers, and recent research shows these fears could be well founded.
Mike Jacobs, a senior energy manager at the Union of Concerned Scientists, last month released an analysis estimating that data centers had added billions of dollars to Americans' electric bills across seven different states in recent years. In Virginia alone, for instance, Jacobs found that household electric bills had subsidized data center transmission costs to the tune of $1.9 billion in 2024.
"The big tech companies rushing to build out massive data centers are worth trillions of dollars, yet they’re successfully exploiting an outdated regulatory process to pawn billions of dollars of costs off on families who may never even use their products," Jacobs explained. "People deserve to understand the full extent of how data centers in their communities may affect their lives and wallets. This is a clear case of the public unknowingly subsidizing private companies' profits."
While the backlash to data centers hasn't yet become a national issue, Faiz Shakir, a longtime adviser to US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), predicted in an interview with Semafor that opposition to their construction would be a winning political issue for any politician savvy enough to get ahead of it.
“For any Democrat who wants to think politically, what an opportunity,” he said. “The people are way ahead of the politicians.”
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Renewables Surging Worldwide—But Going Backward in US Under Trump
Despite US backsliding, solar and wind generated more electricity than coal worldwide for the first time this year.
Oct 07, 2025
Led by Chinese expansion, global adoption of renewable energy is accelerating, with the world’s wind and solar farms generating more electricity than coal for the first time this year—however, the US embrace of fossil fuels under President Donald Trump is proving a drag on humanity's transition to clean power.
The climate think tank Ember on Tuesday published its Global Electricity Mid-Year Insights report, which found that solar and wind outpaced demand growth in the first half of 2025. Solar generation grew by a record 306 terawatt-hours (TWh)—a 31% increase—with China accounting for more than half the world's increase.
In a major milestone, solar and wind overtook coal electricity generation for the first time ever, as renewables grew by 363 TWh (+7.7%) to reach 5,072 TWh, while coal generation decreased by 31 TWh to 4,896 TWh.
"This analysis confirms what we are witnessing on the ground: Solar and wind are no longer marginal technologies—they are driving the global power system forward," Global Solar Council CEO Sonia Dunlop said in a statement Tuesday.
"The fact that renewables have overtaken coal for the first time marks a historic shift," Dunlop added. "But to lock in this progress, governments and industry must accelerate investment in solar, wind, and battery storage, ensuring that clean, affordable, and reliable electricity reaches communities everywhere."
NEW | Solar and wind OUTPACED global electricity demand growth in the first half of 2025, leading to a fall in fossil fuels compared to this time last year ☀️🌪️Record solar and steady wind growth is reshaping global power as renewables OVERTAKE coal for the first time.https://loom.ly/c-MNZSk
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— Ember (@ember-energy.org) October 7, 2025 at 1:01 AM
Two years after agreeing at the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP28, in Dubai to triple global renewable energy capacity by 2030, many key nations have failed to make significant progress toward that goal. Chief among these countries is the United States, where the return of Trump and his "drill, baby, drill" policies has resulted in the International Energy Agency (IEA) revising the country's renewables growth outlook for 2030 downward by a staggering 45%.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed into law by Trump on July 4 includes billions of dollars in handouts for the fossil fuel industry, boosts drilling on millions of acres of public lands, mandates oil and gas lease sales, and imposes new fees on renewable development.
Additionally, the US Department of Energy recently announced a $625 million investment “to expand and reinvigorate America’s coal industry." This, as the DOE dramatically slashes funding for clean energy projects. Other federal agencies have similarly turned their backs on renewable development under Trump.
The good news is that despite backsliding by countries including the US and Japan, the IEA says that global renewable generation could double by the end of the decade, with 80% of new clean energy capacity expected to come from the sun.
Even in the United States, the combination of all renewables—wind, solar, hydropower, biomass, and geothermal—produced 9.9% more electricity during the first half of 2025 than it did a year ago, providing more than a quarter of all US electricity generation.
"Notwithstanding enactment of the anti-renewables provisions in the Trump megabill, solar and wind continue to power ahead," noted SUN DAY Campaign executive director Ken Bossong. "Meanwhile the electrical output [year-to-date] by the Republicans' preferred technologies—nuclear power and natural gas—has actually fallen."
Climate campaigners hailed the continued growth of clean energy.
“Renewables overtaking coal for the very first time is a sign of how the economics of power generation have been transformed," Julia Skorupska, head of secretariat at the Powering Past Coal Alliance, said in a statement Monday.
"There is a clear economic case for replacing coal with renewables, which are now the cheapest forms of energy in most of the world," Skorupska continued. "The transition from coal to renewables underpins competitiveness, enables energy security, creates good jobs, and lowers electricity prices and air pollution risks for citizens."
“With COP30 around the corner, countries have the opportunity to work together to accelerate this shift," she added, referring to next month's UN climate summit in Belém, Brazil. "We need genuine partnerships that enable coal-dependent countries to speed up their coal-to-clean transition, placing them right at the cutting edge of the energy revolution."
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IEA Report Underscores Urgency of Fossil Fuel Phaseout as Electricity Demand Surges
"The world has the need and the capacity to go much faster."
Oct 16, 2024
The International Energy Agency on Wednesday released a major report showing that the world's nations are not on track to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in line with 2030 targets and doing so will be made more difficult by growing demand for electricity.
The 398-page report, World Energy Outlook (WEO) 2024, is the latest in the IEA's flagship annual series, which is heavily cited by stakeholders across the world.
The report found that while renewables are entering the energy mix at an "unprecedented" rate—a record 560 gigawatts came online globally in 2023—the world's nations are on track to reduce emissions only by 3% from 2023 levels by 2030, rather than the 33% needed to meet agreed-upon targets. It also finds that the path to net zero by 2050 is "increasingly narrow."
"The world has the need and the capacity to go much faster," the report says.
The challenges to decarbonization include an increase in demand in electricity, especially in China and India.
This year's WEO projects a 6% higher rate in global electricity demand by 2035 than did last year's, with the surge "driven by light industrial consumption, electric mobility, cooling, and data centers and [artificial intelligence]."
While renewable development and electrification generally help bend down the emissions curve, experts warn that renewables only do so if they replace fossil fuel use, and the electricity needs to be powered cleanly.
"What the WEO is showing is that a market-led approach is leading to renewable energy being added on top of fossil fuels, rather than driving a rapid transition away from them," Collin Rees, U.S. program manager at Oil Change International (OCI), told Common Dreams. "That's why we need more direct intervention to actually phase down the fossils and boost renewables to make up the difference."
The growth in electricity demand raises the bar for climate action. Dave Jones, a director at Ember, an energy think tank, told The New York Times that "with higher energy use, even fast renewables growth doesn't translate to fast falls in carbon dioxide emissions."
The new WEO projects coal to decline more gradually than had been previously expected due to the rising electricity demand. This is true not only in China and India but also the United States, thanks partly to the inordinate amounts of energy used by AI data centers.
"With established technology companies and AI startups making major investments, a sharp rise in electricity consumption by data centers looks inevitable," the WEO says.
Still, Fatih Birol, the IEA's executive director, celebrated the overall move toward electrification and drew attention to the WEO finding that solar and wind would power far more of the world's electricity by 2035.
Electricity's growing role in the energy mix makes it vital to ensure as much of it as possible is generated from clean sources
The rapid growth of solar & wind means they are both set to overtake power generation from coal by 2035
More in #WEO24 ➡️ https://t.co/SiR6lGAAPw pic.twitter.com/zkNeRtbkG7
— Fatih Birol (@fbirol) October 16, 2024
The key problem highlighted by the new WEO is the continued reliance on fossil fuels, according to an OCI statement: "The WEO lays bare how much work is left to do for governments to follow through with the policies and funding needed for a livable planet."
OCI calls for stop to all oil, gas, and coal extraction beyond existing fields and mines. The group also opposes liquefied natural gas (LNG) export projects, which the IEA authors raised as a point of concern in the WEO.
The report says that "an unprecedented volume of LNG is due to come online in the second-half of the 2020s, led by a near-doubling of export capacity in the United States and Qatar."
The WEO authors project that a surplus of LNG will depress gas prices internationally, which could affect the uptake of renewables.
"Clean technology costs are coming down, but maintaining and accelerating momentum behind their deployment in a lower fuel-price world is a different proposition," they wrote.
Rees of OCI said the LNG glut could lead to "displacement of renewable solutions like wind, solar, and heat pumps" and condemned U.S. policymakers for pushing LNG exports "when there's no room for it in a livable climate, and no need for it even in scenarios far off track from climate safety."
Though the IEA's projections show that the world is not doing enough to tackle climate change, there is no guarantee that even the modest progress assumed in the projections will come to pass. Big Oil executives have cast doubt on the idea that fossil fuel use and climate emissions will peak by the end of the decade, as the IEA projects.
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