Finally, Something To Bring Americans Together - Pretty Much Everybody Hates Data Centers And Crypto Mines [View all]

It’s not a novel observation to say that supporters of President Donald Trump and supporters of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders find common ground on many issues. They often share a skepticism of entrenched power and a desire to dismantle systems that they think have ceased to serve everyday people.

In Indiana, this agreement includes a distrust of data centers. “The MAGA crowd and the Bernie bros have both figured out that they’ve been getting duped,” said Kerwin Olson, executive director of Citizens Action Coalition, an Indianapolis-based consumer and environmental advocacy nonprofit. “It was data centers that really brought it all together.” Olson’s organization is running a campaign to persuade Indiana lawmakers to place a moratorium on new data centers and to redesign electricity rates to protect residential consumers from rate increases related to data center development.

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Election results last week confirm a similar dynamic in much of the country. Democrats won races for governor in New Jersey and Virginia and for two open seats on the Georgia Public Service Commission, campaigns in which data centers and rising electricity costs were issues. Media outlets noted this pattern, including in an insightful report from Jael Holzman of Heatmap and a look ahead to next year’s elections from Marc Levy and Jesse Bedayn of the Associated Press.

Much of the discussion is about data centers, which are often large developments used to support cloud computing or artificial intelligence. But the underlying issues are broader, touching on the power of tech companies. For people who live near proposed data centers, there is an additional sense of powerlessness, which Inside Climate News has documented across the country, including the backlash to a plan for a huge data center in Bessemer, Alabama. “It’s about big tech,” Olson said. “To steal Bernie’s words, [it’s about] these big tech oligarchs that are calling all the shots at every single level of government right now.”

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/13112025/inside-clean-energy-just-about-everyone-hates-data-centers/