Here is a contradiction worth sitting with. Sam Altman spent this month in the Financial Times arguing, again, for something like an International Atomic Energy Agency for AI—an international body to govern safety, to keep power from becoming "too concentrated," to make sure the benefits are "democratized." He is trying to solve the problem at the level of governance frameworks and existential risk.
Meanwhile, in Abilene, Texas, an Air Force veteran named Omaira Garcia is looking out her kitchen window at the exhaust stacks of a gas plant roughly 500 yards away, built to feed OpenAI's flagship Stargate data center, which she learned about only when the construction dust started engulfing her home.
"We weren't given any time to understand what this impact was going to be on us," she says. "We're trapped here."
Two men, one company. One is drafting the treaty. The other is drafting the exhaust. And it is increasingly clear that the second thing is what people are actually mad about.
Two men, one company. One is drafting the treaty. The other is drafting the exhaust. And the second thing is what people are actually mad about.
Last week this newsletter's open thread asked whether institutional "friction"—the designed pauses meant to slow AI's cognitive reach—could hold. This week the answer arrives from an unexpected direction: the friction that is holding is not cognitive or institutional at all. It is physical. It is land, water, air, and the line item on an electricity bill.
There is an image going around, borrowed from the strange miracle of the Herculaneum scrolls: a papyrus carbonized by Vesuvius, unreadable for two thousand years, now virtually unrolled and read by a machine-learning tool. AI as the thing that reaches through the volcano's ash to open what was sealed.
But flip the metaphor. To the people living beside the buildout, AI is not the tool that reads the scroll. It is the volcano. It walks through a specific door—your door—before anyone asks whether you wanted it opened.
For a while, the argument against AI was epistemic and abstract: bias, hallucination, the corruption of knowledge, the fear that machines would think for us. Those fights happen in op-eds and safety labs, on terrain the industry knows how to contest. You can hire ethicists. You can publish a framework.
What you cannot do is abstract away 500 yards. And that is the migration underway: the backlash has moved from the moral to the material, and in doing so it has become far harder to manage.
Look at the numbers. A May Gallup survey found 71 percent of Americans are somewhat or strongly opposed to a data center being built in their area—more than the 53 percent who feel that way about a nearby nuclear plant. Americans are now warier of a server farm than of a reactor.
The opposition is not just sentiment. In the first quarter of 2026, an analysis by Data Center Watch found local opposition blocked or delayed at least 75 US data center projects worth $130 billion—roughly as many as in all twelve months of 2025. The number of organized groups fighting them doubled to 833, across 49 states.
Cities have moved from protest to policy: 141 moratoria proposed, temporary bans enacted in Birmingham, New Orleans, Tulsa. "Communities have internalized an opposition playbook," Data Center Watch writes. This is no longer a mood. It is infrastructure of its own.
It is tempting to file all this under NIMBYism, and part of it is. You may not be able to move your congressman, but you can almost certainly delay construction of almost anything in your town. Some of the early complaints—the water panic especially—were overstated.
But the externalities that remain are stubbornly real. Electricity bills that rise for local ratepayers. Tax breaks that starve other public services. Greenhouse gas. And the infrasonic hum of a facility that never sleeps, linked to chronic insomnia, headaches, ear pressure, anxiety.
The Texas story shows how the sausage gets made. Normally, a major new source of emissions requires a major air permit—environmental review, public engagement. But regulators there have let some data centers slip through on minor air permits, the kind rubber-stamped for dry cleaners and body shops.
"Those lower-level permits get granted very quickly and often without the public knowing," says Kathryn Guerra, who spent nearly four years at the Texas environmental agency before joining Public Citizen. "That feels pretty intentional." Layer in the nondisclosure agreements developers ask local governments to sign, and you have a machine engineered to arrive before consent can form.
That is why Garcia found out from the dust. It was not a failure of the process. It was the process.
Now watch what happens when the affected are given the ordinary tools of democracy. In rural southwest Ohio, a private-practice attorney named Nick Owens and a practicing lawyer named Austin Baurichter started drafting a constitutional amendment in March, at what amounts to a kitchen table, to ban data centers drawing more than 25 megawatts a month—enough to power 15,000 to 25,000 homes.
They did not expect to qualify for the ballot. In three months they gathered more than 105,000 signatures from all 88 Ohio counties.
The detail that gives the fight its moral clarity is a name. The developers call the proposed Adams County site "Buck Canyon." Residents know it as Carter's Holler—a place people were born in, a place people wrote poems about.
"I have a sneaking suspicion," Karley Baurichter says, "it might be because they might have to feel something about destroying a place if they get the name right."
That is the tell. Rename the holler and it becomes a site. Sign the NDA and the neighbors become surprised. The whole apparatus runs on abstraction, and the resistance runs on refusing it.
Here is where the politics get genuinely strange. In America the Polarized, data centers have become a rare point of agreement. In Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Texas, Republicans are breaking with Trump over the facilities. A conservative outfit called Humans First, pushing an "America First AI policy," planned a nationwide protest.
At a Pennsylvania Capitol demonstration, a protester named Megan McDonough named the whole thing: "We are anti–sacrifice zone. We are anti being told that billionaire tech bros deserve more protection than the people who drink the water, breathe the air, pay the taxes, and live with the consequences."
And at the Pasadena City Council, the comedian J.T. Parr, in a surfer persona: "Americans are united in our hatred of data centers. They're big, ugly water guzzlers." On the China argument that justifies the whole buildout: "Dude, where's China?"
The wise-child question, asked out loud. We are told to accept the sacrifice zone because we might lose a race to a rival nobody in the room can see.
This is why Altman's IAEA-for-AI addresses the wrong layer. An international safety body governs the abstraction—the model, the capability, the risk. It has nothing to say to Omaira Garcia's lungs or Carter's Holler's name. The buildout's cost is local, physical, and non-negotiable, and no treaty reaches it.
Which brings us to the genealogy underneath. As the industry pivots toward gas plants and a nuclear renaissance to feed its power hunger, researchers in Geoforum reportedly draw the obvious line back—to the uranium contamination of the Navajo Nation, a community left holding the waste of everyone else's electricity.
That is the older American pattern the data center fight is re-running: abundance for some, absorbed by the bodies and land of others. The techno-optimist manifesto reportedly promises the abundance. It is, per its critics, silent on who metabolizes the cost.
Call it what some scholars reportedly call it: digital technocracy, a fight over top versus bottom. Not machines versus humans—humans with capital versus humans with wells.
The lesson for anyone tracking whether friction can hold is this. The cognitive kind—the designed pause, the safety framework—bends to a sufficiently motivated industry. But you cannot code around 500 yards, or a bill, or a signature from all 88 counties.
The volcano walks through the door. It turns out the door was load-bearing.