A quiet war is playing out in rural communities across the country.
City council meetings are bursting into conflict as local residents try to keep AI data centers out of their backyards. Americans are starting to see through the promises of tech companies and the local politicians they’ve wooed, realizing that the advantages of hosting a resource-hogging data center in the neighborhood are slim.
Yet tech giants are finding creative — and sometimes startlingly dirty — new ways to circumvent local opposition in their quest to build out these sprawling facilities. As the Wall Street Journal reports, Amazon exploited 45-year-old zoning laws in Gilroy, California, to start construction on a data center without any residents knowing for five entire years.
“Many if not most residents first learned about this project after construction had already begun,” local elementary-school teacher Coleen Crew told the town’s recent council meeting, as quoted by the WSJ.
