America is hopelessly divided along party lines. That’s a stubborn fact, we’re told, and the polling bears it out: Democrats dislike Republicans and Republicans dislike Democrats, in almost precisely the same proportions.
But every election produces surprising coalitions that defy entrenched partisanship. In these midterms, left and right have found something so commonly loathed that politicians across the country are flip-flopping in real time.
Mother Jones has been tracking the backlash to data centers on the ground long before the water-guzzling behemoths became the country’s bête noire. The AI boom, with its insatiable need for computing, has unleashed a power grab by tech billionaires. “Data centers have replaced megayachts as the preferred theater of oligarchic status signaling,” national correspondent Tim Murphy wrote in his big Mother Jones investigation into hyperscale data centers and the communities they land on. “Oligarchy is now more than an idea; it is a place.”
On today’s episode of Stress Test, Tim joins host Garrison Hayes to discuss how data centers—and other AI-boom technologies, like Flock cameras—have upended political fortunes and ripped up the partisan playbook ahead of November’s vote.
“Nobody wants data centers. Everybody’s fired up about it.”
“It’s maybe the single most toxic issue in the midterms this side of, you know, gas prices,” Tim tells Garrison. “It’s like a three-to-one opposition among voters. Nobody wants data centers. Everybody’s fired up about it.”
Take Texas. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott promoted the state as a place where companies could build almost anything. Then rural and suburban communities got the facilities, and the gas plants that power them, in their backyards, along with strained water supplies, pollution, and rising utility bills. “People are complaining about what they have to live next to,” Tim says. “And it just builds and builds and builds.” Under pressure (and running for reelection), Abbott made a stunning reversal, announcing steps that amount to a moratorium. And he’s not the only one feeling the heat.
So what changed? Data centers used to be half the size of an Amazon warehouse; now they’re measured in “multiples of Manhattan,” says Tim, who explains how we got here and what to expect next. He heads back to Texas in the coming weeks, and we’ll follow what he learns right up to Election Day.
For more, read Tim Murphy’s road trip through the towns living in the shadow of the AI boom: “How the American Oligarchy Went Hyperscale,” from our May+June issue.
Subscribe to Stress Test at youtube.com/motherjones, and read the full transcript bellow.
This transcript was generated with automated tools and may contain errors.
Garrison Hayes: Hello, hello, everyone. This is Stress Test from Mother Jones. I’m Garrison Hayes. Welcome to the second episode of this show. If you didn’t catch the first episode, I really think you should go back and listen to it. It was me and David Corn and our colleague Ari Berman, where we talked a little bit about this upcoming election and all of the Trump administration’s efforts to subvert the election, to strike fear into your heart. But this is the thing: If you go back and watch it—or listen—I actually think that we came away from it, at least I did, little less stressed than going into it. We were really able to pull it apart, the efforts that they are making and where they are failing.
It’s a really, really good, informative listen. So make sure you go back and listen to that. It’s just right behind this one in the feed, or you can go check it out on YouTube. Maybe you’re on YouTube, youtube.com/motherjones.
Okay, I am really excited to get into today’s conversation because there are these strange moments in the American political arena where oddly, people across both the left and the right, across the political spectrum, come together in some weird, kind of bizarro-world way. And we’re talking about exactly one of those topics today with data centers and Flock cameras and AI. And so today I am joined by my colleague, Tim Murphy. Tim is a national correspondent here at Mother Jones. I’m so excited to be talking to you, Tim. Thanks for being here.
Tim Murphy: Hey, thanks for having me. This is great.
GH: Tim, I have to tell you, whenever I read your reporting, which is always so smart and so in-depth, I always, like, laugh a little bit. And I don’t know if that’s a bad read, but there’s always, like, a little bit of humor kind of infused into the really often kind of grim things that you cover. You bring a really fresh perspective. Am I misreading that? Are you trying to be funny?
TM: A hundred percent. My entire life I’ve just wanted to be taken seriously, Garrison.
GH: [Laughs.]
TM: No, you know, I mean, I like to try and kind of keep things a little entertaining, you know, when the story kind of calls for it.
GH: I love that. Okay, so we’re bringing you on to talk about the rare bipartisan voter issue that we are seeing this election cycle, specifically data centers. But before we kind of dig into that, I feel like it’s important that we get a better idea, not only of, like, terms, but the way it’s kind of related to the news in general. We’ll get to all of that, but before we get to that, I’d love to hear, like, what’s stressing you out—something that we’re asking all of our guests.
TM: Well, I think probably germane to the topic at hand, I just looked at the calendar ’cause I was planning out, you know, what I have to do over the next, turns out, like, five weeks and realized that there’s absolutely no way that I’m gonna get to every single thing that I need to file. I always think of the election as God’s deadline. Like, there’s no fudging it. Anything that you didn’t finish before the election immediately becomes irrelevant, and so you just have to get it done. So I’m kind of mapping out my caffeine intake and just trying to kinda get through it.
GH: Amazing. Amazing. I mean, you could always do the postelection “Stop the Steal” effort that we saw in 2020. Okay, let’s dig into—
TM: Right, if Mike Pence has the courage.
GH: Yeah, right. Exact. Let’s dig into this. Okay, but everyone’s kind of talking about and certainly hating on data centers right now. But as I understand it, Tim, it wasn’t always this way. What have you seen on the ground and how things have shifted over the last year or so?
TM: It’s one of the more kind of stunning about-faces that I’ve seen in national politics. You know, I was in Texas last year and last summer, and I actually went to the site of one of the largest data centers being built in the world. It’s Sam Altman and Larry Ellison’s Stargate complex in Abilene. This was a project that passed, that was created almost, like, virtually unnoticed when it was first kind of developed. You know, I went and I went back and looked at, like, the community meeting, the various government agencies that approved this thing. Basically nobody showed up. Very little debate about this, and it just kind of went into play. And then Donald Trump talked about it at the White House with Sam Altman and Larry Ellison, and it started to blow up into a bigger thing.
But even as recently as last summer, this was an issue that not even the people talking the loudest about oligarchs, and tech oligarchs specifically, were necessarily, like, beating the drum about. This was something that in fact data center supporters were playing offense on. You had, you know, in the state of Texas, Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, proudly an advocate for making Texas the epicenter of the data center boom. You know, people were talking about this as, like, this massive job creation construction strategy. It was kind of the getting in early on the future by—you know, flash forward to where we are now, and I’d say it’s maybe the single most toxic issue in the midterms, like, this side of, you know, gas prices.
It’s like a 3-to-1 opposition among voters. Nobody wants data centers. Everybody’s fired up about it. And candidates who were for them are hastily beating a retreat, like Greg Abbott, and people who didn’t stake out that position are throwing millions of dollars into kind of brutal attack ads on the subject.
GH: What do you think it is that has led to that kind of 180, that big switch? I guess the more specific question is: What seems to be the issue here for voters that’s turning them against data centers?
TM: One of the things with data centers is there’s so many ways that it can kind of reach you, that it can connect to your life. And so I think different people are engaging with it in different ways. Certainly over the last year and a half, AI oligarchs, and data centers as their No. 1 project, have become kind of like one of the main kind of features of the Trump administration. And so a lot of people are just straight up negatively polarized against those.
But if you’re living in a lot of states, you know, the rising utility costs are often associated with data centers. The pollution effects are associated with data centers. A lot of these are being built in rural and exurban areas where people do not expect to have, like, an Air Force engine and a diesel turbine as their neighbors. And they’re really, really, really fired up about that.
These projects are invariably kind of done kind of on the sly. They’re sort of pushed through anonymously. People don’t really know who they’re dealing with. And so it sort of brings all these different kind of things, from affordability to straight-up NIMBY complaints to political distrust, and gives kind of something for everyone. And what they see on the political side is that a lot of people who were supposed to sort of have their back and be their advocate let this happen or openly kind of brought it to pass.
GH: One of the really interesting things about your reporting is that you’ve actually seen data centers—like, a data center—in person. You’ve actually visited one. Many people, I imagine, haven’t been inside of one of these, kind of, these hyperscaler facilities. And so can you tell us what do they look like on the inside? What is it like being inside of one?
TM: I’ve not—I should clarify, I’ve not been inside. I’ve been outside, and like an increasing number of Americans, I’ve been able to kind of go right up to one and just hear what it sounds like. And you know, it really does, it sounds like an aircraft engine. I mean, if you go to one of these big hyperscale sites—so for instance, I went and, you know, drove down a cul-de-sac in Memphis, Tennessee, to see Colossus II, which is one of Elon Musk’s xAI, you know, Grok-powering engines. It’s burning gas on what they say are temporary generators. It’s, you know, pissing off a lot of neighbors, and it’s, you know, officially, like, a US Army contractor.
So these things, I mean, they’re enormous. And here’s, like, one of the main things that’s driving this shift, I think, when we talk about this 180: It’s that 10 years ago, five years ago, the data centers that they were building were, like, maybe half the size of an Amazon warehouse or something like that. They were kind of in the terrestrial building space. Now they’re measuring them out in, like, you know, multiples of Manhattan. Like, these are—they’re absolutely enormous.
And, you know, they’re not just many, many, many, many football fields, but they all come with natural gas power plants, you know, to go with them. They come with maybe solar power plants to go with them, which has also, you know, driven a little bit of unrest in some areas. You know, they require transmission lines, they require kind of a whole rebooting of everything, you know, depending on where you live. And so they’re incredibly intrusive spaces. It’s no longer just your kind of casual neighborhood server farm.
GH: Hmm. Interesting. I want to come back to what you were talking about with Texas. You mentioned Gov. Greg Abbott and his kind of big switch on this. Can you say a little bit more about that? But then also talk about some of the other politicians and efforts happening in the state of Texas.
TM: Yeah, I mean, Texas is a good way of looking at it because for a very long time the pitch for Texas to the rest of the world, and particularly to corporate America, has been that you can come here and build anything and do anything. And we basically don’t care—like, give us some revenues, let us, you know, have a big press conference about it. But you can do carte blanche. They lured, you know, Elon Musk to Texas and basically let him make his own town. Data centers were one feature of that.
So, like, in the Texas Panhandle outside of Amarillo, there’s something called Project Matador, which purports to be one of the world’s largest data centers. It’s complete with, like, a nuclear reactor. They’re gonna call the—final data center is, like, the Donald J. Trump Center for Intelligence or something like that. It’s—the company is called Fermi USA, and one of the guys leading it is Rick Perry. Like, all these things are things that should not go together, but in Texas, they just kind of can, and they’re gonna build this.
You know, we talked about the Stargate project in Abilene. You can go to, like, a town, you know, outside of Dallas, and there’s just, like, seven new data centers outside of town. So it was the face of this giant, giant building boom. And it’s this building boom that, like, has very few parallels in modern history. It’s almost, like, up there, you know, you have to go back to the railroads of the 19th century to find this much investment in a private business, in a private enterprise.
So Texas was the face of this. But you’re doing all this development in rural areas. You’re taking people’s water, you’re taking people’s power, or you’re just building your own, you know, fossil fuel–polluting power plant in their backyard. And you start to get this backlash. People are complaining about what they have to live next to. People are complaining about what’s happening to their water, to their utility bills, and it just builds and builds and builds. And recently Abbott announced a series of steps, like, basically a moratorium, until we can figure out what’s going on. It’s kind of a stunning thing to see from somebody like Greg Abbott, who’s made that his entire M.O.
GH: Yeah, yeah. So now Greg Abbott, governor of Texas, is on the same kind of political, you know, march as the governor of, let’s say, New York or Massachusetts, who are also, you know, leading these moratoriums.
TM: Yeah, it’s that kind of Kathy Hochul–Greg Abbott policy consensus we’ve always talked about.
GH: The one that we’ve always been going for. My question is, like, who is this appealing to? I mean, obviously we know that folks across the political spectrum are against data centers, but are voters actually responding to, say, a Greg Abbott moratorium in a positive way?
TM: Yeah, the jury’s still out. You know, Abbott is in a really surprisingly close race with the Democrat Gina Hinojosa, who has been pushing data centers really hard. I mean, she went out to Project Matador in Amarillo and walked the grounds that it’s going to be on. She went out, you know, to these Dallas suburbs and talked to the people who were organizing against it and really, I think, probably forced Abbott’s hand on this issue, and he’s very belatedly trying to kind of co-opt it and salvage, you know, a five-point win or whatever.
So I think there’s definitely a lot of evidence that it’s working in ways that maybe conventional, like, anti-corporate, anti-billionaire, even anti-tech attacks aren’t working. One of the races that I’ve been looking at, that’s, like, kind of a really funny example of this, is in Ohio. Marcy Kaptur, the Democratic congresswoman who was kind of miraculously held on during the Trump era, she’s in a rematch with the same guy she ran against in 2025. For is former state Rep. Derek Merrin. And in 2024, all the attacks are like, Dirty Derek is in the hands of, you know, big corporate America or whatever, and she won by about 2,300 votes. This year, running against the exact same guy, every single ad is about Data Center Derek. It’s about Dirty Derek, Data Center Derek, and how he sold out Ohioans for $2 billion of incentives for building data centers.
Even when you’re facing the same candidate that you beat last time, it’s a radically new message because data centers have come on and become this huge issue.
GH: Okay, so Dirty Derek—we’re talking about big money and the oligarchs and the folks who are funneling money into their big project with data centers and all of the people who are against it. But we know there’s one person who really marches to the beat of their own drum, for better or for worse. There’s one person who is maintaining that he loves this widely unpopular technology, and that’s President Donald Trump. He called data center opponents backwards and poor, which is a choice. And so Tim, I want you to listen to what he has to say about Flock cameras here.
[Clip plays.]
What do you make of that reaction from the president?
TM: I think he’s sort of starting to slip a little bit in, you know, his finger on the pulse of the American electorate, and Flock cameras are a good example of this in the same way that I think his general approach to the data centers has been. You know, there might be an environment in which there’s a huge anti-crime panic like we’ve had in a few recent election cycles, where suddenly this thing that a lot of police departments are adopting becomes maybe more favorable terrain. But right now people hate Flock cameras, and I think they hate them for some of the related reasons to data centers, right? I mean, it’s kind of this AI-powered, all-seeing thing that we don’t really trust the people who are in charge of it. You know, it seems like it’s often just being deployed as a way of, like, surveilling cops, ex-wives, and things like that.
And one of the things that you’ve seen in a lot of races around the country is candidates literally taking aim at Flock cameras. So, like, there’s a guy, Seth Bodnar, who’s an independent candidate for Senate in Montana, kind of the de facto Democrat, even though there’s a Democrat in the race. And he literally just takes a gun and blows up a Flock camera as a way of signifying, like, well, one, that he’s a gun owner. But two, I’m not gonna have it with this kind of government surveillance state. So Flock cameras have really become such a—in part because they are so pervasive, because they’re kind of everywhere—you know, they’ve become this thing that, you know, people can kind of use as a symbol of what they’re against.
GH: Yeah, you know, we were saying Flock cameras. I think people understand that to mean, like, these kind of surveillance cameras that are often used by local governments. But is there a tidier definition that we should kind of understand Flock to mean? Like, what is a Flock camera?
TM: Yeah, what makes it different from, like, the camera outside your bodega or subway station or whatever is that it’s all tied into a vast national network, and that anybody who has access to this thing can just look up anything happening in this kind of all-seeing eye. I mean, it’s not literally everywhere, but that’s the kind of crux of it. It’s the kind of—it’s what the security camera network looks like in the movie.
And so you’ve seen a lot of pushback. And again, this is something that in a place with sometimes libertarian leanings like Montana, like Texas, where James Talarico has talked a lot about Flock cameras, it’s something that’s a way to kind of—it’s kind of a—not necessarily a crossover issue, but it’s an issue that is not strictly partisan, that people in kind of whatever place on the political spectrum can feel the same way about.
GH: And we’ve been talking a lot about Texas specifically. But to zoom out a bit, is this an issue that is bigger than just that one state?
TM: Yeah, I think so. And I think this is, like, the type of thing that you’re gonna see more and more people talk about because it is such a potent symbol. Because this is a way of connecting, you know, how people feel, you know, to some extent how people feel about policing, but also how people feel about, you know, tech and government. And at a moment where there is this conversation about how much power is being, you know, accumulated in the hands of a few people in government, Flock cameras are kind of a way of really drilling down on that and picking a villain.
GH: Yeah, if I were to kind of maybe give my take here, I think that Flock cameras and data centers are both a part of this kind of anti-establishment, you know, instinct that’s in the American public right now in the electorate. You know, one, it feels as though the United States government and corporations are more or less one and the same, you know, corporate interests. And so people are certainly bucking against the corporate interests and in turn bucking against, you know, our government establishment. That’s my take. Is that the sense you’re getting when you report on this from the ground.
TM: Yeah, and I mean, I think—and you see that in these campaigns, right? Like, the villains have shifted. You know, to take on Data Center Derek for a second, you know, two years ago it was, like, the corporate boardroom kind of rich dudes, and now he’s depicted as a puppet, and it’s, like, a guy in a gray hoodie like Sam Altman holding one thing, and it’s a guy in kind of, like, a black shirt like Mark Zuckerberg, you know, holding the other end of the puppet. I mean, Trump has deliberately kind of fused the highest echelons of Silicon Valley with his administration.
And so people, I think, rightly see kind of pervasive surveillance tech as kind of connected to this broader, unchecked corporate and government power. And I think, you know, there’s like—we’re at a real kind of nadir of trust in politics, like, at the moment, and that’s driven a lot—I think that’s probably driven Trump’s success in a lot of ways, is a bottoming out of trust. But now that’s kind of bottomed out even further, and Trump is sort of one of the people that people distrust even more so. It’s—the corporations he’s allied with are things that people trust. And so, you know, I think people maybe aren’t as worried about the security—the surveillance state maybe when they feel a little bit more trustworthy about the system. But right now people are just done.
GH: Bottomed out even further is so hard to believe. But here we are. So I want to ask about what’s being built down there at the bottom. It feels like the anti–data center coalition could be a new coalition. Should we be stressed out about this coalition? And what do you think this kind of coalition may build?
TM: It’s tough to say. I mean, right now we’re at a moment where just no one has an incentive to take the data center side in public. Even if you are kind of looking at it and saying, well, you know, we gotta build some of these, maybe we can make these different exceptions, nobody really has an incentive to come out and say, like, you guys are going too far, no more moratoriums, things like that, at least not for another five weeks. I’ve only seen one candidate kind of saying, like, vote for me so I can, you know, stop the Democrats from ruining AI. That’s Roger Marshall of Kansas, and he’s probably running one of the worst campaigns of the cycle.
So I think right now a lot of people are kind of saying a lot of the same things. Some of that is just very defensive. Some of that is just to kind of get through the next five weeks so that they can kind of go back to setting AI policy with the Trump administration and Big Tech, you know, kind of on their minds. So I’m not sure a lot of people are mad at the same thing, but I don’t think they’re all mad in the same way. So it’s not necessarily to me a coalition, you know, that can take landowners and ranchers and everything and necessarily, you know, fuse that with, like, a progressive criticism of Big Tech in a way that, like, leads to the sweeping, you know, perfect AI legislation of 2027.
I think what you’re gonna get is a real fight in the next few years about what this, you know, next step is gonna be. I mean, I had a chance to talk with Greg Casar, the congressman from Texas, from Austin, recently about this. And he’s, like, really interesting because when I talked to him last year, AI didn’t come up. Which is not, you know, not a knock on him, but you know, he had other things on his mind. He had immigration on his mind, he had redistricting on his mind. He is in Austin and it just was not, like, something he was banging the drum about. Now he is all in on this stuff. It’s, like, the thing that he wants to talk about is introducing bills on this, he’s talking to everybody about this. He is obsessed with AI right now. So I think there has been a real kind of learning curve for a lot of people over the last year, and that’s really kind of only the beginning right now.
GH: Well, one thing that I’ve seen online as we kind of come to a close here—I’ve seen this conversation online, particularly on Twitter or X. They’re basically saying if you’re anti–data center, you’re anti-masculine, and you’re pro-China. Is there a risk—which I think is the question underneath it—is there a real risk that our, you know, the folks that we’re in competition with—you know, America’s constantly in competition with China over, you know, technological advancement. Is there a risk that if we do continue to fight against data centers as a country, if voters do choose anti–data center candidates, that America may fall behind in the tech, I don’t know, space race of its—if you could even call it that?
TM: Yeah, that’s certainly one of the major arguments that you get from the tech industry. And of course, loaded into that is, like, you know, this idea that we can’t let China have this technology. We need to let Donald Trump have this technology, which doesn’t necessarily track. And I think what you would hear from somebody like Casar is, like, actually, like, you know, again, thinking about this like bioweapons or nuclear weapons at its most extreme lens, like, treaties exist, you know, diplomacy exists. You should be able to kind of work with your competitors to set constraints by which you can compete. And so I think that’s one of the arguments that I think you would hear on the other side of that.
But it’s so interesting that you talk about the Chinese narrative because that’s one of the things that we’ve seen a lot of with the data center opposition, is this accusation from people like, you know, Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, Kevin O’Leary, the guy from Fox News or Fox Business, you know, that data center opposition is actually, like, this astroturfed Chinese propaganda psyop. And, like, you hear enough of it that I think some people actually do believe this. I don’t think that they spent enough time in their districts or in these places talking to the people, because it’s just like a—there is just a very inherent organic opposition coming out of there. But that’s certainly the line that you’re hearing a lot.
GH: Wow. Okay. Well, Tim, the good thing is that we have you actually on the ground talking to people, and your reporting is so important. I hear that you’re headed back to Texas for another reporting trip very soon. What kind of stories can you expect to kind of gather while you’re there?
TM: Yeah, Texas has emerged as, you know, one of the, you know, tipping point states for the midterms, right? So I’m gonna be looking at, you know, the Texas Senate race, trying to track down Ken Paxton and James Talarico. And then, you know, I mentioned the governor’s race. This is not a race we expected to be close heading into the cycle. But Gina Hinojosa has run a really impressive campaign and again has really emphasized, you know, data centers and sort of tried to tell this story of a kind of a low-key corruption from the Abbott campaign and—or the Abbott administration, I should say. So I’m gonna be looking at those two top races, but also just kind of broadly taking the temperature of what is kind of the ultimate 2026 battleground.
GH: Well, we will be paying very close attention to your reporting and excited to have you on the show today. For everyone watching, make sure you follow Tim’s great reporting over on MotherJones.com and catch him on our Instagram account as well. Tim Murphy, national correspondent. Thank you so much for being here.
TM: Thanks for having me.
GH: Okay, that’s it for this one. Great conversation with Tim. Again, you can go back and check out my conversation with David Corn and Ari Berman in our last episode. Our great journalism work, like Tim’s reporting and this show, is only possible because of your support. Your views and subscriptions keep us going. So don’t forget to like this video, this piece of content, share it and subscribe to our YouTube channel, and let us know what you think of this episode in the comments down below. Our producers are eager to know your thoughts on this show, Stress Test. We will be back in just a couple of days with another edition of Stress Test from Mother Jones. Thanks for being here.
