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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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1,000+ Experts Rip EPA for 'Reckless Dismissal of Established Climate Science'
Repealing the endangerment finding, they wrote, "is contrary to science and the public interest."
Sep 16, 2025
More than 1,000 scientists and other experts on Tuesday sent a letter to US Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin explaining why they "strenuously object" to his effort to repeal the EPA's 2009 "endangerment finding," which has enabled federal climate regulations over the past 15 years.
Amid mounting fears that he would take such action, Zeldin in late July unveiled the rule to rescind the landmark legal opinion that greenhouse gases endanger public health and the welfare of the American people—part of Republican President Donald Trump's broader pro-polluter agenda.
"As climate scientists, public health experts, and economists, we can attest to the indisputable scientific evidence of human-caused climate change, its harmful impacts on people’s health and well-being, and the devastating costs it is imposing on communities across the nation and around the world," states the new letter, organized by the Union of Concerned Scientists. "This explicit attempt to undermine or weaken these findings, as well as the critical regulations linked to them, is contrary to science and the public interest."
"We also strongly oppose the EPA’s reckless dismissal of established climate science as part of its proposal to repeal the endangerment finding, including the agency’s heavy reliance on an unscientific study commissioned by the Department of Energy. This report is rife with inaccuracies, deliberately cherry-picks and mischaracterizes data, and has not undergone a rigorous scientific review process," the letter continues, echoing an expert review of the government report from earlier this month.
🚨NEW: Scientists from nearly every state, DC, and Puerto Rico are calling out Trump's Environmental Protection Agency for failing to fulfill their core duties: protect the environment and public health.
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— Union of Concerned Scientists (@ucs.org) September 16, 2025 at 11:17 AM
Citing major US and global analyses, along with thousands of independent, peer-reviewed scientific studies, the letter stresses that "the scientific evidence on human-caused climate change and its consequences was unequivocal in 2009 and, since that time, has become even more dire and compelling."
It says that "based on the best available science," scientists know:
- Climate change poses severe harms to human health and well-being;
- Climate change is clearly increasing the likelihood of extreme events; and
- The economic toll of climate change is rising.
Harms to human health and well-being include higher rates of heat-related deaths, increased spread of some infectious diseases, and decreased food and water safety due to climate-fueled extreme weather events, the letter says. It also highlights that, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), "billion-dollar disasters in the United States are on the rise, driven by a combination of climate factors and increased development in disaster-prone areas."
Despite such findings, the Trump administration is making various moves to boost the planet-wrecking fossil fuel industry and the president withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement—again—when he returned to office in January. Parties to the 2015 climate agreement aim to limit global temperature rise this century to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels.
🌎🧪Over 1,000+ scientists joined together to defend the EPA's Endangerment Finding, and you have SIX DAYS to make your voice heard too.
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— Union of Concerned Scientists (@ucs.org) September 16, 2025 at 11:17 AM
"The world stands on the cusp of breaching the 1.5°C (2.7°F) mark on a long-term basis, the global average temperature increase above preindustrial levels that scientists have long warned about," the experts noted Tuesday. "Communities across the nation are already dealing with devastating and costly climate impacts, that are set to worsen as global warming accelerates. Humanity's window to act to stave off some of the worst impacts of climate change is fast closing; any further delay is harmful and costly."
"We urge you to stop dismantling critical climate regulations and evading EPA's responsibility by pushing disinformation about climate science and impacts," they concluded. "Instead, we call on you to act with urgency to help address this pressing challenge by limiting heat-trapping emissions. People across the nation are relying on the EPA to fulfill its mission to protect public health and the environment."
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'Dumbest People in History': Critics Shred Trump Energy Department Comments on Wind, Solar
"That such an obviously false and, frankly, asinine tweet was just issued by a federal government account is an insult to the American people," said one critic.
Sep 08, 2025
Critics over the weekend heaped scorn on the US Department of Energy after it made demonstrably false claims about renewable energy.
In a post on X late last week, the Department of Energy (DOE) argued that "wind and solar energy infrastructure is essentially worthless when it is dark outside, and the wind is not blowing," even though batteries allow the storage of energy from both sources that can be used long after its initial generation.
The post drew immediate ridicule from social media users who expressed astonishment that the people running America's energy policy seem to be woefully ignorant about renewable energy storage.
"We are governed by some of the dumbest people in the history of this country, proudly, unashamedly, openly moronic and ignorant, and I am genuinely not sure how the US ever recovers from this," commented Zeteo editor-in-chief Medhi Hassan. "These people make George W. Bush and Sarah Palin look like savants."
The press office for California Gov. Gavin Newsom sarcastically tried to educate the president's team about how energy storage works.
"We're excited for the Trump administration to learn about BATTERIES (we have them here in California, and they've helped the Golden State shift to green, clean energy AND keep the lights on)," they wrote.
Alex Stapp, the cofounder of the Institute for Progress, also touted California's embrace of renewable energy, and he pointed out that batteries on a given day provide more than a quarter of all energy in the state at peak hours.
Fossil fuel industry watchdog Oil PAC Tracker argued that this kind of ignorant rhetoric about renewable energy was part of a pattern from US Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who is the former CEO of onshore oilfield services company Liberty Energy.
"Secretary Wright should be fired for lying to American people," they wrote. "He profits off this kind of misinformation because he is a fossil fuel executive. Killing clean energy deployment also hurts our economy, makes electricity expensive and increases our power sector emissions."
Meteorologist Matthew Cappucci also leveled the administration for pushing misinformation about renewable energy.
"The fact that such an obviously false and, frankly, asinine tweet was just issued by a federal government account is an insult to the American people," he argued. "Renewables could make up the majority of our energy in a multi-layered system with better energy storage if we actually tried."
The DOE's post came at a time when the Trump administration is shutting down wind and solar power projects across the country and when American's energy bills are rising due in part to increased demands being placed on the electric grid by artificial intelligence data centers.
A report released earlier this month by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis declared that Trump's energy agenda "will fail... unless the White House stops issuing stop-work orders for offshore wind."
The report further added that "renewable energy and dispatchable storage are the only option for adding significant amounts of new generation capacity to the US grid for at least the next five years," while also detailing that there are simply no short-term alternatives for rapidly building up capacity.
Susan Muller, a senior energy analyst, similarly took aim late last month at the administration's order to stop work on the Revolution Wind project off the coast of New England, which she argued would have provided fast relief to people in the region struggling to pay their utility bills.
"This stop-work order from the Trump administration is a lose-lose for pretty much everyone except fossil gas corporations," she said. "Stopping the project could not only cost thousands of jobs and ratepayers real money but have life or death consequences if we lose power in the middle of a cold snap. New England needs homegrown offshore wind energy to keep the lights on and our electricity affordable."
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