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I moved from Seattle to Chattanooga in 2021. My house in Seattle was less than a mile from the Microsoft campus. Whenever I went to an after-hours tech get-together or happy hour, everyone who attended worked at Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, or some other massive tech company. Everyone around me made tech wages and was on the cutting edge of their field. I really enjoyed living there. The people felt like my people; we were all tech-savvy, tech optimists, eager for work and building the latest of whatever we thought the world needed (or would make a lot of money). Politics aside, we shared a vision of technology and of the future that seemed filled with promise and potential.
A few months after I moved to Chattanooga, I was chatting with a young couple in the pew behind me at my church. I asked the gentleman where he worked, and he said he worked at Amazon. I lit up because I had several friends who worked at Amazon. He seemed confused at my eagerness and quickly changed the topic.
I didn’t realize until later that this was because we lived in very different worlds. In my world, a job at Amazon was a prestigious job. Amazon was infamous for a brutal working environment but rapid elevation and generous stock options. They have their 14 leadership principles that everyone knows and every new employee builds their first desk from a slab door, just like Jeff Bezos did when he founded the company. Everyone I knew who had been with Amazon for more than five years was very well off.
But in Chattanooga, Amazon is not a premier tech company that makes its employees millionaires. Here, Amazon is a warehouse owned by a stringent, wealthy task master who gets sued regularly for requiring unpaid wait times from their hourly employees. His Amazon job is not a prestigious job. It’s not going to make him generationally wealthy. It’s just a job. We know two different Amazons because we are in two different working cultures.
Despite moving to Chattanooga, I still mostly live in this tech culture. That’s why I was caught off guard by the raging debate around data centers. As a technologist, an optimist, and an AI enthusiast, I have long thought that the resentment against AI-centric infrastructure was more of a fringe position held largely by people who are instinctively anti-corporate or anti-technology. I assumed they would fail in their attempts to shoot down these very expensive, very lucrative infrastructure projects driven by the richest and most powerful companies in the world.
The last six months have convinced me otherwise. This week, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro signed an order demanding the strictest rules on data centers in the country. New York Governor Kathy Hochul ordered a statewide moratorium on hyperscale data centers and even Texas Governor Greg Abbott has ordered a pause on new approvals pending an audit on what this will mean for the Texas electrical grid.
There have been dozens of other examples of state and local efforts to restrict construction, and these efforts are not following a reliable partisan pattern. If there is any pattern at all, it is that the entire vibe over the last 12 months has become substantially more negative against new data centers. According to polling from HeatMap, public support for data centers has collapsed across the ideological spectrum.
Why is this? If you listened to the rhetoric from the people leading the anti-data center charge, you might think you know why they are anti-data-center. You would be wrong.
What They Say They Want
Cremieux wrote up a well researched overview of the reasons people give for hating data centers, why most of those reasons are false, and how learning the truth doesn’t seem to change people’s opinions. As for what to do about this, his conclusion was basically “do whatever it takes to placate the opposition and just build.”
I’m not sure that is going to work because I think the problems that opponents are citing aren’t really the thing that bothers them. Worries about water, energy, noise, aesthetics, and subsidies are not the root problem that people have with data centers.
The piece “No Data Centers In My Backyard” from Jasmine Sun cuts much closer to the heart of the issue. Sun writes from Wisconsin and Michigan about the tension between local leaders, who see that data centers are a natural fit for land that is otherwise undevelopable, and local residents, who fear that these big companies are making empty promises, manipulating local politicians, and planning to roll over the local community.
A core part of Sun’s reporting is that these residents have been made promises in the past by big corporations. She mentions a Foxconn deal in Wisconsin where the company was offered $4 billion in tax incentives for a plant that would have created 13,000 jobs. A decade later, only 1,000 jobs materialized.
The biggest difference between that deal and these data centers is that there are no promises for permanent jobs with data centers. After construction is complete, even a hyper-scale data center can be run with 100-200 employees, which is fewer employees than it takes to run a Buc-ee’s gas station. In 2025, a look at the permit filings across 17 data center projects showed plans for only 1,547 permanent operations employees.
In the meantime, the tech companies that are building these data centers have fired 170,000 of their own employees in the last year alone, claiming that these layoffs are due to AI. For computer science students ready to start their careers in this high-tech culture, the on-ramp to a lucrative career has been blocked off. The unemployment rates for new graduates in computer engineering and computer science are higher than for graduates in art history.
While previous industrial construction projects promised thousands of jobs and economic revitalization, this time the industry that wants more data centers is plainly telling people that more data centers mean fewer jobs.
Techies vs Normies
I consider myself a part of the tech industry. I am excited about AI and what we are going to build. This is a moment of tremendous opportunity. But I have also seen a very dark cloud rolling over our labor market. Most of my friends from Microsoft have been laid off or taken the “early retirement” buyout option. People in the industry that I’ve known for 15 years are writing LinkedIn posts about how excited they are for the future, but they have an undertone of despair. It’s bad out there. It’s bad for 20-year tech veterans and for newly minted junior developers.
While all this is happening, I see fountains of money gushing out of AI startups based in San Francisco and New York City. There is a hyper-optimism in my AI tech circles, but the optimism is mostly about how good things are for us, the builders. To the extent that the tech culture believes things will get good for those outside our orbit (the normies), we seem to think that they will benefit from our grand benevolence and that they will be lucky to get it. We seem to view people outside our tech sphere not as participants in the future but as recipients of whatever good things we create for them.
I don’t want to pick on Cremieux here, but when you click to his post about trying to persuade the data center skeptics, the first thing you see is an AI company sponsor offering $300K for junior software engineers. All the positions are in-person in San Francisco. That is what things look like from inside the tech cultural bubble.
But when I look outside my tech bubble, I don’t see that energy or optimism. Much of tech culture is not open to everyone. It is an elitist culture that looks down on those who don’t share its values. One of the values they have is that you have to physically live in their bubble. You can make $300K as a junior engineer but not if you need to stay in Indiana so your spouse can be available to help your aging parents. You can raise millions for your AI startup but not if you live in the South or Midwest.
Venture capital is pouring billions into these companies. It isn’t because they have the best ideas or the best people. It is because they exist within the right culture, within the right cities. This isn’t a merit-based proposition. It’s a social club.
A tech company will spend $10 billion building a data center outside of a Wisconsin town but they won’t sponsor a Little League team. They won’t support the local Girl Scouts. They won’t build a park. They want the land and space and they want to escape the burdensome regulations and insane anti-growth politics of California, but that doesn’t mean they actually like any of the people who live near their data centers.
