It is the beginning of Ithaca’s long winter in 2025, a week before Christmas, and I find myself driving a group of students enrolled at State University of New York (SUNY), Cortland, to a zoning board meeting in the town of Lansing. The board is set to listen to testimonies for and against the TeraWulf data center setting up shop in this sleepy town in upstate New York that abuts Cayuga Lake, the longest of the eleven Finger Lakes of New York State. The particulars of the zoning board deliberation are worth going over; simply put, the billion-dollar hyperscaler TeraWulf was applying to classify itself as either i) a warehouse and storage facility, ii) a scientific research facility, or iii) a general processing facility.

In the course of what transpires to be a four-hour affair on a winter’s evening, the board will hear from TeraWulf, the residents of Lansing, and members of the wider general public on how the proposed data center campus fits or doesn’t at all fit into these three categories. Lansing’s Town Hall is more accustomed to quieter evenings, petty disputes over property and other ambient American small-town passions of a similar nature, but today the hall is packed to the rafters with townsfolk, environmental groups, an assortment of professors and staff from Cornell University, students from the region, and, interestingly, farmers and agriculturalists from the largely agrarian region- Lansing is a ‘right-to-farm’ town. The claims are heard separately, and as the company reps manage to get through a bit of folderol about how TeraWulf is a conventional warehouse, a center for pathbreaking scientific research (despite their own website listing two-bit bitcoin companies as their primary clientele) and a data processing center, the evening becomes a lot more about the townsfolk, activist and student testimonies on the dangers of unchecked AI rollout, concerns around electricity rates, and water usage delivered in the familiar American idiom of standpoint theory.

Lansing, and Upstate New York by and large, is no exception to the countrywide phenomenon of town hall agitations against data centers. In a sense, the anti-data center push might be witnessing the largest mobilizations of people in the United States outside the No Kings demonstrations (in Upstate New York at least, many No Kings organizers are a mainstay in the lobbies of these town hall meetings). Overall, 42 states have had protests of some sort, with the Southern and Midwestern states accounting for over 60% of recorded anti-data center protests. At the moment, there are 3000 existing data centers and more than 1,500 in development, according to Pew Research. With the midterms coming up, lines are drawn in the sand when it comes to political messaging, with the Democratic challenger for the competitive Ohio Senate race, Sherrod Brown, running ads berating incumbent Senator Jon Husted as the “face of data centers.” Some regions, like Endicott just 55 kilometres away from me as the crow flies, are no strangers to taking large, seemingly untouchable technology giants to task, as they demonstrated when a group of around 1,000 Endicott residents sued IBM for $100 million over increased occurrence of kidney cancer, heart defects in children, and lowered property values because of IBM tainting their groundwater over a 30-year free-for-all dumping extravaganza. Indeed, the opposition to data centers has even forged alliances between Republicans and Democrats around the country.

The common arguments trotted out against data centers see little variance across the country: we hear about how their energy demands increase already skyrocketing energy costs across the country; we hear about noise pollution, e-waste, and, of course, about how these data centers provide precious little to the residents of whichever town or city that it chooses to descend on.

The common arguments trotted out against data centers see little variance across the country: we hear about how their energy demands increase already skyrocketing energy costs across the country; we hear about noise pollution, e-waste, and, of course, about how these data centers provide precious little to the residents of whichever town or city that it chooses to descend on. Data centers are a reasonably unique confluence of different organizing streams in the American context, with battle-ready environmental groups (veterans of the anti-nuclear movement often finding themselves in familiar turf as data centers eye former nuclear facilities as real estate for their ‘campuses’), the outsized influence and relative wealth of NIMBYs, agrarian conservative blocs, and the patchwork of ‘grassroots’ community organizing that often gets conflated with the existence of an American ‘left’.

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as slop, as Micron and TeraWulf and many others eye the water-rich region to meet their massive cooling needs.

In all honesty, these were the factors that led me to organize students around the issue of data centers as I work for a non-partisan advocacy group in my day job and in a campus that veers towards conservative and apathetic political beliefs (it was a novelty for me to meet an eighteen-year-old who self-described as ‘conservative’ earlier in that semester). The only regional variance I observed in Upstate New York was the rather picturesque, 70mm elephant in the room — the presence of the Finger Lakes and the various waterways of the Southern Tier that once provided cheap freight, energy, and connected upstate New York to global circuits of capital. History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as slop, as Micron and TeraWulf and many others eye the water-rich region to meet their massive cooling needs.

Curiously absent from any of the town hall kerfuffles in Lansing is a mobilization around the nature of the beast. TeraWulf and its various operations are entirely Google-backed and funded, and they presently own a 14% equity stake in the company, a point only brought up by the company’s CEO as a point of reassurance to the local community.

Curiously absent from any of the town hall kerfuffles in Lansing is a mobilization around the nature of the beast. TeraWulf and its various operations are entirely Google-backed and funded, and they presently own a 14% equity stake in the company, a point only brought up by the company’s CEO as a point of reassurance to the local community. In Advait Arun’s ‘Bubble Or Nothing,’ these patterns of ownership are forensically laid out, and the “undertaking expensive long-term capital investment plays with fast-depreciating assets and minimal cash flow to show for them” are amply brought to bear. By and large, a huge part of the organizing thrust around these data center town halls remains in the realm of environmental concerns, personal property, energy rates, and little time is spent negotiating the more substantial questions of data ownership and sovereignty. The most common yard sign I witness on my daily commute is the ubiquitous ‘No Data Center on Cayuga Lake,’ and it leaves me wondering how much more generative a conversation on reclaiming compute infrastructure for the people might be. Dispiritingly, in a company town where the only game in town is academia — it is surprising that our brightest and best can’t articulate a serious fight against big tech monopolization. More challenging still is to draw out an organizing principle (or even a conversation) on the materiality of the AI build-up and its unfettered exploitation and extraction of the Global South and the need to frame the issue in internationalist terms.

In June, Governor Kathy Hochul announced a one-year moratorium on data center development in the state of New York, and I hope that this time provides organizers and activists the clarity they need on actually dealing with the issue of data centers. Till then, I will be attending the town halls, students in tow, in the hopes that someone talks to the guy blathering on about big tech and perhaps gets some of them to subscribe to DataSyn.