 |
| The New Yorker Photo illustration by Cristiana Couceiro; Source photographs from Getty |
This summer, as the ideologically fractious Democratic primaries begin to recede and the politically pivotal midterm elections edge nearer, candidates and voters alike have had their attention drawn by vast, humming edifices newly constructed on the outskirts of towns. Abdul El-Sayed, an epidemiologist and former public-health official who finished a deft insurgent campaign by becoming Michigan’s Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, sounded a theme that helped decide primaries in his state and in Kansas last week. “People really effing hate data centers,” he said.
That kind of consensus is rare in politics right now. About seventy per cent of Americans, including sixty-three per cent of Republicans, oppose building the hyper-scale centers that power the A.I. boom in their area, according to Gallup, but more than four thousand centers have been built across the country, and about four thousand more are planned. Politicians, first from the left and then from the center and the right, have spent the past few months hastily distancing themselves from them. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposed a federal moratorium on new data centers in March, and the pragmatic governor Kathy Hochul enacted the first statewide one in New York in July. The rallying cries against A.I. can themselves sound a bit as if ChatGPT wrote them. “It’s time to press control-alt-delete to put a stop to this A.I.-data-center crisis,” a closing ad for Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist who is the front-runner in this Tuesday’s primary for Wisconsin governor, announced. Still, when something is this unpopular, blunt talk can work... READ MORE https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/08/17/ai-is-now-a-major-election-issue