ZeroHedge65%
The Data-Center Revolt Goes National: Tea Party Veteran Leads 142 Rallies Across 42 States 64%
By Tyler Durden61%
7/19/2026, 7:45:00 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 37 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Authority, Biased Writer Voice, and Availability Heuristic, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 32.2% saturation with 503 hits. Analysis detected 4,152 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,563 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 59.3% and a BS Rank of 64% (6,780 of 18,604 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 63.60% of the article peer group.
The backlash against the AI data-center build-out - which we've been tracking since it was a smattering of county fights across 28 states - staged its first coordinated day of action on Saturday: 142 protests across 42 states, from Wasilla, Alaska to Naples, Florida, organized by Humans First, the nonprofit that Tea Party veteran Amy Kremer co-founded and chairs.
The crowds spanned both sides of the aisle...uniting a MAGA stalwart in a 'faith, family, freedom' T-shirt in New Jersey, a first-time activist in Texas, and a left-leaning organizer in California's Imperial Valley.
The fight looked like Kenilworth, New Jersey.
Residents of the 8,500-person borough gathered outside the municipal court at mid-morning with drums, plastic horns, and sidewalk chalk to protest the $1.8 billion CoreWeave AI data center their planning board approved in May 2025 on the former Merck campus - a project that has since drawn more than 12,000 petition signatures against it, several thousand more names than the town has people.
The woman in the "faith, family, freedom" T-shirt marched beside neighbors holding "Build community, not data centers" signs.
When heavy rain arrived later in the day, they pulled on ponchos, shared umbrellas, and kept marching.
One sign, caught by Business Insider's photographer on the scene: "You think this is pressure?
Wait 'til there's no water pressure."
Texas, the country's hottest data-center market, hosted the most rallies - 18 - with Georgia at 11, California at eight, and Pennsylvania, Florida, and Indiana at seven apiece.
In Imperial Valley, where a proposed facility could pull 260 million gallons a year from the Colorado River, Ivan DelSol, 54, told Reuters that around 50 people turned out in 100-degree heat.
"It's dystopian that you would use this much fresh water for AI," he said.
Organizers released no headcounts; turnout ran below expectations in some rural areas and in Atlanta, where about a dozen showed - most of them, a volunteer there said, driving in from the smaller Georgia towns where the biggest data centers are going up.
Kremer is a founding figure of the Tea Party movement who went on to found Women for Trump, and an organizer of the January 6, 2021 rally that preceded the Capitol riot (she neither planned nor took part in the riot itself).
She has spent months calling data centers the defining fight of her lifetime, warning the technology could threaten humanity itself, and she is open about running the old playbook: grassroots pressure, town by town, aimed at both parties.
Her crowds bear that out.
One of Saturday's Texas rallies, in Tyler, was organized by Eva Cardona, a 31-year-old self-described political nomad and first-time activist who told Reuters she wanted something more hands-on than posting on Facebook; about a dozen people came.
And in Imperial Valley, the man who helped lead the rally leans left.
The polling explains why a coalition that broad holds.
A June Reuters/Ipsos survey found only 14 percent of Americans would support a data center in their own community.
Gallup polling fielded in March found 71 percent oppose building an AI data center in their area - 48 percent strongly - a worse number than a local nuclear plant gets.
And Morgan Stanley told clients in a July 14 note that support for local data-center bans runs strongest among Republican, higher-income, and urban voters, while Morning Consult's national tracker crossed a line of its own in May: "stop building" (about 45 percent) overtook "keep building while expanding energy supply" (about 38 percent) for the first time since last October.
For all the movement's reputation, Kremer's demands stop well short of a shutdown.
She opposes a national moratorium and statewide moratoriums alike, telling Business Insider that each community should choose what gets built inside it, and that too many of those choices are made behind closed doors.
Humans First's platform runs to transparent approval processes, environmental review before permits are granted, union construction jobs, and binding developer commitments of the kind lawyers call community benefits agreements.
She has aimed as much fire at her own side, accusing Republicans of giving Big Tech a free pass and predicting the industry will cozy up to Democrats the moment the majority flips.
The fix, she argues, belongs to Congress.
The organization is a narrower thing than the crowds it convened.
Humans First announced in April that its non-conservative team members would spin off into a separate group, with Kremer promising "a topflight team of conservatives" to fight Big AI and its lobbyists.
The banner over Saturday's rallies, in other words, was a conservative one - which makes the mix of people who marched beneath it all the more striking.
Official Backlash
The rallies capped a fast-moving week.
On Tuesday, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order imposing the nation's first statewide moratorium on new hyperscale data centers - an immediate pause of up to a year on state environmental permits for projects of 50 megawatts or more while regulators draft standards covering energy demand, water use, and air quality.
Her office promised localities community-benefit guidance within 60 days, and Hochul will pursue repeal of the state's sales-tax exemptions for massive data centers.
A tougher bill passed by the legislature, with a 20-megawatt threshold, remains unsigned on her desk; her office has called it complicated, and Hochul said the state wants to be "the first to get it right."
New York was not alone.
Virginia's new tax on data-center electricity - 1.1 cents per kilowatt-hour - took effect July 1.
Pennsylvania's House passed a ban on non-disclosure agreements in data-center deals by a 171-31 vote, and separately voted 197-5 to repeal the industry's sales-tax exemption, a break worth roughly $517 million a year by 2030.
Arizona's governor signed a three-year moratorium on new data-center tax breaks in June.
Legislators have filed more than 300 data-center bills this year; local pauses have passed at the county, city, and tribal level in at least 15 states.
Meanwhile In China
Nothing comparable is happening on the other side of the Pacific.
Two days before the marches, Beijing-based Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter system billed as the largest open-weight model ever built and claimed to perform level with America's best frontier models.
Bloomberg has reported that Beijing plans to spend roughly $295 billion over five years on a nationwide network of AI computing hubs - and none of it will face a zoning board.
Under the state's "Eastern Data, Western Computing" program, the buildout is steered into the arid, sparsely populated west; provincial governments compete to attract data centers with tax holidays, cheap land, and compute vouchers, and the state absorbs up to half of operators' energy costs, so the strain never shows up on a household bill.
No Chinese county has passed a moratorium, because no Chinese county gets a vote.
The financial toll is no longer hypothetical.
Third-party trackers cited by Morgan Stanley in its July 14 note put the value of cancelled or delayed projects at roughly $156 billion in 2025 and another $130 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone - about $286 billion in all - set against the bank's own estimate of $877 billion in AI capital spending this year.
The underlying quarterly count comes from Data Center Watch, a tracker run by 10a Labs, an intelligence firm whose client list includes AI companies, which logged at least 75 projects blocked or delayed from January through March - matching in one quarter the number of projects derailed in all of 2025 - as active opposition groups more than doubled from 396 to 833 and spread to 49 states.
Saturday itself stayed peaceful - chalk, chants, drums, umbrellas - though the wider fight has had harder edges: developers of the Piedmont transmission line into Northern Virginia's data-center corridor asked a federal court last summer for U.S.
Marshals to escort survey crews after landowners threatened workers, an episode we covered at the time.
The industry answered forcefully.
The Data Center Coalition warned that New York's moratorium tells investors the state is "closed for business" and will push jobs and tax revenue to neighboring states.
Seven major AI and cloud companies - Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI - point to the Ratepayer Protection Pledge they signed at the White House in March, a voluntary commitment to cover the grid costs their facilities create.
And White House AI czar David Sacks went after Hochul's case point by point on the All-In podcast, calling data centers "the scapegoat for all of the angst that people have about AI."
His answer to the utility-bill complaint: let developers build their own generation behind the meter instead of competing with households for grid power.
Some industry allies go further, pointing to OpenAI's June disclosure that it banned a China-linked network using ChatGPT to mass-produce comics and comments blaming data centers for rising power bills.
OpenAI itself found the operation gained almost no authentic traction - and the crowds in Kenilworth and Imperial County were unambiguously homegrown.
Kremer spent Saturday evening thanking volunteers and looking past the weekend.
"America is not for sale, and our communities are not collateral," she wrote on X.
She expects data centers on the ballot in November, and again in 2028.
The midterms are less than four months away.
Analysis
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