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Danny Caine: I feel like, two years ago, I hadn’t even heard the words “Data Center.” Now, these huge resource-gobbling buildings are in my backyard. Yours too.
Elena Schlossberg: I mean, I could take any right hand turn and, and you'd, you know, left hand turn doesn't really matter. They're just everywhere.
DC: This piece of technological infrastructure, once the domain of engineers and programmers, is all of a sudden central to countless American lives.
ES: And the cumulative impacts that all of this is having on everyone, whether you live next to it or not, um, you know, we're all gonna feel it one way or another. No, there's no peace for the living. There's no peace for the dead.
DC: But it’s not a new story. The data center story is as old or older than the 250 year history of America. It’s a story about repeating that history. It’s about land theft and corporate greed. It’s a story about why every data center construction site has a huge American flag. It’s a story that takes place in towns and state parks and historic neighborhoods and old cemeteries and crowded public meeting rooms, where history’s heroes are often found, if you look closely enough.
Chris, Tucker United: This is not an environmental fight. Okay. It includes aspects of environment, but this is a full out community organizing fight for our lives. Mm-hmm. This is, it touches on environmental, it's a public health fight. It's a jobs fight. It's an autonomy fight in a state that values and prioritizes autonomy. And we're losing it with this kind of, um, legislation that was passed and this kind of development. This is a fight for our future.
DC: I’m Danny Caine, host of Building Local Power and author of several books, one of which was used by Anthropic to train their AI models without permission from me or my publisher. So I have a deep connection to issues surrounding AI and data centers. This feels urgent to me. It feels personal. I know I’m not alone in that.
Linda Bilsens Brolis: You learn about these issues, but then until it's like actually happening in your community, you don't really totally, fully appreciate it. And maybe that's a luxury that I'm only kind of experiencing it now.
DC: So I hit the road to talk to people in the middle of the data center fight, from the mountains of West Virginia to the corporate wastelands of Data Center Alley. I heard from folks in one of the nation’s oldest Black neighborhoods in Memphis. I heard from activists and legislators and experts and fighters. I wanted to see how this story impacted people, and how people impacted this story. Believe it or not, what I learned gave me hope.
Greg Pirio: I'm that kind of person who says that every crisis is an opportunity. And so it's up to us to find that and to find our agency.
Danny: So what's the opportunity in this crisis?
Greg: Well, I think it is a revitalization of our democracy.
DC: This is a story about making technological progress that builds communities instead of draining them. It’s about how we defend our communities from corporate greed and extraction. It’s about how we can fight for the life we want to lead.
From the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, comes a new season of Building Local Power: The Data Centers Are Coming. New episodes start dropping April 30. Subscribe now on all major podcast platforms so you don’t miss it.