Concerned citizens crowding into a rec center to protest a proposed data center in El Paso, Texas. Suburban homeowners shouting down pro-data-center politicians in Festus, Missouri. Teenagers and their parents swamping a local zoning meeting to demand an end to data center construction in DeKalb County, Georgia. Conservative farmers rising up to block a data center in Howell Township, Michigan.

The grassroots resistance to artificial intelligence data centers that is springing up in communities across the country outlines the kind of working-class coalition many of us on the Left have always dreamed of — a diverse, nonpartisan, top-bottom movement against Big Tech billionaires that has the potential to reshape American politics in incredibly positive ways.

The most immediate, short-term policy demand driving this local organizing is a moratorium on new data centers. There are different versions of this policy — Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have introduced a national moratorium, statewide moratoria have been proposed in at least twelve states (and one passed in Maine, though the legislation was vetoed by Governor Janet Mills), and dozens of cities, towns, and counties have already enacted such laws.

This pushback has drawn its own pushback. In a recent Jacobin essay, Holly Buck argues that “a moratorium on AI data centers is a terrible idea” that “poses serious equity concerns.” Such a pause, she writes, “is not a substitute for actual AI governance.”

This argument — and Buck, of course, is far from the only person making it — seems to misunderstand the thrust of the data center moratorium effort, which is to stall the breakneck development of these projects so that we can enact “actual AI governance.” Buck complains that organizations supporting “data center blocking efforts should put their attention toward a broader set of solutions” — which is exactly what they have been doing. My organization, Public Citizen, developed a comprehensive suite of actionable steps to rein in Big Tech and make sure consumers, workers, and the climate are protected from the data center build-out. And we’re not alone; other organizations, like the NAACP, have also released guiding principles for equitable data center development.

The problem is not that we don’t have policy solutions to this crisis. The problem is that Big Tech’s private (and unpopular) investment in data centers is moving at an astounding pace and we don’t have the time or leverage to establish the regulatory framework necessary to make this system work for the public. In the words of Alex Bores, a candidate for Congress who worked in Big Tech and whom tech billionaires have spent millions of dollars attacking because of his support for AI regulation, moratoria proposals

are setting the terms of the debate, which is: Why are we going forward with this until we’ve done the real work? . . .  If I could wave a magic wand and pass any bill I want, it wouldn’t be the moratorium. It would be the regulations that the moratorium is calling for. But putting that as a negotiating tactic, I think, is meeting the moment.

The criticism that the push for a data center moratorium fails to resolve every issue of “actual AI governance” seems to rest on the idea that there is a magic wand we could wave to pass any bill we want. But there is no magic wand. And though moratorium opponents like Buck say that “the people should be driving this discussion, not companies like OpenAI,” they never offer alternative suggestions for how the people could overcome Big Tech billionaires that are putting hundreds of millions of dollars into super PACs to block any attempts at real regulation. The passage of data center moratoria is — as far as I can tell, and as far as anyone else out there seems to be able to tell — essentially the only tool available to us that could exert meaningful leverage over these companies, as is clearly necessary to rein in their dangerous practices.

These dangerous practices are as diverse as the constituencies mobilizing to oppose them. Many data center opponents are motivated by the impact of these projects on energy costs — electricity prices in some data center-dense areas have surged over 250 percent in recent years, and in 2024 customers of PJM paid $4.3 billion more in electricity costs to cover data centers’ new transmission infrastructure. Others rightly fear the environmental and climate harms of this build-out — data centers’ energy demand is actively extending the life of dirty coal plants and driving a massive expansion of new gas-fired power plants. Some harbor deeper concerns over the dangers this technology poses to our society and the way that AI currently serves powerful capitalist interests.

From discrimination in facial recognition systems, to disastrous attempts to integrate AI chatbots into public schools, to RealPage’s algorithmic facilitation of rental price-fixing, to Amazon’s AI-supported surveillance of warehouse workers, to the use of AI to justify benefit cuts and Medicaid coverage denials to low-income people, to the increasingly prevalent algorithmic wage exploitation of gig workers, to the growth of dystopian state surveillance, to the fact that I can’t ever find a goddamned customer service phone number anymore because they’ve all been replaced by AI chatbots, the actual evidence is clear that AI is not liberating us as individuals but rather concentrating power in the hands of those who already have far too much control over our lives.

Some moratorium opponents have framed the diversity of these coalitions as a deficit. As Buck wrote, “Part of why the moratorium push is such a dead end is because the disparate right-left coalitions that have emerged around stopping data centers have different interests when it comes to other issues.” But building coalitions among constituencies with “different interests when it comes to other issues” is the entire work of politics, and always has been. Talk to any on-the-ground organizers, and they will tell you that it is actually the diversity of data center opponents that makes this issue so politically potent.

I asked a colleague of mine, Kamil Cook, who has been supporting data center campaigns in Texas, to share some reflections on this organizing. “There are certainly some working-class groups with politics that are rife with contradictions,” he told me:

But I’ve seen how these fights are forcing communities to reckon with how power functions in places like rural Texas. They’re helping people realize that their politicians do not serve them and the only way that they can protect their community is by standing together and figuring out their own solutions. I’ve worked with some incredibly conservative Texans, and many of them have referenced Bernie’s policies on data centers and AI. Imagine if there was a real political current that was articulating their concerns.

Ben Inskeep, another organizer who’s been supporting these fights in Indiana, put it this way: “People from all walks of life are waking up to the broken system we have where both parties are exploiting us. Not a ‘dead end.’ An incredible opportunity for class consciousness!”

We should think of this fight as an opportunity. A genuinely nationwide coalition has organically formed in opposition to the greed and avarice of an industry that is endangering our democracy, undermining our labor, and enshittifying every aspect of our lives. That coalition has settled, for completely sound strategic reasons, on demands for national, state, and local moratoria on AI data centers. The Left should be uniformly on its side.