On a muggy Saturday in a Tampa exurb, a retired country music host named Carol stood in a bedazzled visor, collecting signatures to ban data centers. The rally in Hernando County, one of nearly 150 affiliated with the conservative group Humans First, looked like a standard local zoning fight. But the grievances aired were a cocktail of the partisan and the paranoid, matching progressive environmental fears with warnings about Chinese-made chips and AI ruining friendships.
Carol, 71, rattled off a list of harms — from noise pollution she says hurts bees to stillborn calves on nearby ranches. She also told a story about a woman who cut off all her friends because ChatGPT told her to. “She consults with ChatGPT what time she should wake up in the morning,” Carol said. That mix of local quality-of-life anxiety and deep suspicion of the technology is precisely what Humans First, led by Tea Party co-founder Amy Kremer, is tapping into. Kremer is one of the key architects of the GOP’s populist shift, and her group is now giving conservative activists a home to fight against hyperscale facilities.
A recent Gallup poll backs up the bipartisan momentum: seven in 10 Americans oppose data center construction in their area, a figure that includes nearly two-thirds of Republicans and 75 percent of Democrats. The Hernando County commission already approved a one-year moratorium in June, but the organizers are pushing for a permanent ban, not a pause. A firefighter running for agricultural commissioner stopped by the rally, which ended with a land-use expert explaining to the mostly conservative crowd how to rewrite zoning codes to stop facilities drawing at least 100 megawatts of power.
The uncomfortable truth for the tech industry is that the NIMBY coalition is no longer just environmentalists. When a retired IT worker in the room recommends an article from the progressive outlet More Perfect Union to her conservative neighbors because it’s “very informative,” the usual political playbooks stop working. The only real question now is whether a temporary moratorium can contain a backlash built on such a potent, shared emotion: not wanting a massive, humming data center next door.
