Datacenters, AI and distaste for the billionaires developing it has soured Americans on big tech

The campaign ad begins with a clear, idyllic stream that suddenly turns sludge-brown as two concrete datacenters slam onto its banks. Another facility thuds down on a peaceful suburban park, and two more crush-green pastures as an ominous soundtrack to a disaster movie blares overtop.

“They’re coming for our rivers. Our neighborhoods. Our farmland,” a deep-voiced narrator says. “Because Brent Taylor wrote the law allowing datacenters to take over Tennessee.”

The attack ad, paid for by the Democrat-aligned Three Star Pac and targeting a Tennessee Republican congressional candidate, is one of more than 150 midterm election campaign commercials across the US focused on datacenters or the artificial intelligence industry. At debates and at rallies, in mailers and online ads, the burgeoning AI industry has taken center stage, as both Republican and Democratic candidates try to convince voters that their opponents will put the unpopular facilities in voters’ backyards.

And it’s not only datacenters – the public anxiety over AI and distaste for the billionaires developing it, as well as backlash over encroaching tech like surveillance cameras, has turned the tech industry into a ubiquitous villain this election cycle. As with big pharma before it, candidates are straining to distance themselves from big tech.

The stigma of the tech industry has even forced prominent Republicans to break with Donald Trump’s pro-AI party line, with candidates like Ken Paxton, campaigning for US Senate in Texas, calling for a slowdown.

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