President Donald Trump loves a data center:\u00a0<\/strong>Last year, the president signed an executive order that “expedites federal permitting, facilitates construction on federal land and makes qualifying projects eligible for financial incentives,” notes<\/a>\u00a0The Washington Post.\u00a0<\/em>Trump is a huge fan, but much of the rest of his party reflects voters’ fears that data centers will burden residential areas.<\/p>\n

Data centers\u2014the huge warehouses needed to store all the specialized hardware that’s required to run AI models\u2014have grown in salience as a political problem in recent months.<\/p>\n

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Building out and using AI models at scale requires enormous computational demands; data centers, which consume large amounts of energy, are necessary to power these models. A huge data center could create demands that power grids weren’t built for and can’t effectively handle, leading to service outages for residential areas. It’s also possible that costs of improving grids\u2014to serve AI companies\u2014could be passed on to households via rate increases paid by all customers.<\/p>\n

That said, if we want more AI applications, and believe them to potentially be transformative, we’re going to need more computing power. And we’re going to need more data centers. (But you can perhaps understand why some people, when met with the “AI might render work as we know it obsolete” line, don’t feel especially accommodating.)<\/p>\n

“If I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big plant in an AI plant or a data center, I would absolutely want it because the jobs are enormous, and the money paid, the taxes paid are just enormous,” Trump said last week.<\/p>\n

Contrast this with how Republican politicians are talking about them. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced<\/a> a moratorium on data centers within his state earlier this month, saying his regulators need to determine whether the power grid can handle the new facilities. (Right now, Texas appears to have 335 data centers, second in number only to Virginia.) The Wisconsin gubernatorial race has featured Rep. Tom Tiffany, a Republican, repeatedly arguing that his opponent, Democrat David Crowley, is soft on data centers, and that Tiffany will protect residents of his state from the scourge. In Michigan, Mike Rogers\u2014who is running for Senate as the Republican against Democrat\/socialist Abdul El-Sayed\u2014has called for a moratorium on new data center construction (a reversal of how he had been talking about them). In Florida, Rep. Byron Donalds, who won the Republican primary for governor, says he’ll “protect” the state from data centers, also a reversal of how he had formerly approached the issue.<\/p>\n

“The Senate GOP campaign arm, in a private memo to top AI companies, warns that toxic views of U.S.\u00a0data centers<\/a> are killing the party’s chances of holding a vital seat in Ohio,” reported<\/a> Axios<\/em> last week. “In the memo, obtained by Axios, the National Republican Senatorial Committee says Democrats have made data centers a ‘centerpiece’ of their campaign to defeat Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio)\u2014and that it’s working. ‘If he loses and data centers get the blame, politicians across the country will take notice\u2014and they will not go near the next one,’ the memo says. ‘This has become a sleeper issue for the entire election cycle.'”<\/p>\n

So why are so many Republicans so willing to break with Trump on this issue, when fealty to El Jefe has for so long been table stakes?<\/p>\n

“Trump just personally cares about this topic,” an anonymous source familiar with his thinking told<\/a>\u00a0The Washington Post.<\/em> “You just can’t change his mind about it.” But polling data indicates other Republicans are doing a better job of reading the room: Per Pew data<\/a> back in March, “around one-in-five Americans or more say they aren’t sure of data centers’ impact in each of the five areas we asked about. Others say these facilities have neither a positive nor negative impact in each area or haven’t heard about data centers at all.” Now, voters seem to have heard an awful lot more about them, and made up their minds: An August poll<\/a> from The Economist<\/em>\/YouGov found that 61 percent of Americans would oppose a data center being built in their community, including 47 percent of Republicans. More than half of Americans disagree with Trump’s perspective on data centers when asked about it.<\/p>\n