(C) Common Dreams This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . How DSA Organizes Against Data Centers [1] [] Date: 2026-07-14 Data centers will need to make huge demands on water and power resources if Wall Street’s historic bet on artificial intelligence is ever going to pay off — demands with serious consequences for the communities hosting them. DSA organizers from chapters working against data centers and their ecological consequences around the country discussed their campaigns on a mass call hosted by the Ecosocialism Transition Committee on Sunday, June 21. The Right’s Data-Billionaire Alliance The call featured remarks by writer and Debt Collective co-founder Astra Taylor and New York State Senator Kristen Gonzalez (NYC-DSA), a tech worker who has become a leading legislator working on the regulation of big tech, AI, and data centers. Taylor’s remarks linked the all-gas, no-brakes approach to data center and AI development to a broader push by an empowered billionaire and trillionaire class for political and social retrogression on a whole range of issues. “They want a world right where trillionaires act with impunity and set the political agenda where there’s no democracy, where generative AI does the thinking and creating for us, where we’re constantly surveilled right where the climate is left to burn,” Taylor said. “This is not a future people want.” The alliance of data centers with the broader right-wing project is encapsulated in Memphis, which Taylor has visited as preparation for a book project. In Memphis, a huge, scofflaw data center owned by Elon Musk has begun operation just as the city’s Black population is being gerrymandered out of political existence. But the constellation of wealthy interests behind data centers also make them a potent point of resistance. “[Anti-data center campaigns] provide a real space in places for people to meet and to try to push back on the billionaire agenda. I listened to a lot of tech podcasts — I listened to a lot of CEOs chattering to themselves — and they’re very nervous about this, for good reason. I think we already see them scrambling to make some concessions, so there’s no doubt in my mind that this is an incredibly powerful site of engagement, of struggle,” Taylor said. The Pushback Several pieces of legislation written by Gonzalez related to data centers, including a one-year moratorium on the largest centers, have passed the State Assembly and Senate and are now before Gov. Kathy Hochul as the omnibus Responsible Data Center Development Act. In her remarks, Gonzalez stressed the huge demands data centers will make on the state’s climate goals, which were pushed back this year. Big tech, Gonzalez said, has historically been able to push through their agenda with relatively little resistance from legislators that were either unsophisticated or bought into hype around new technology — but the upswell against data centers has disrupted that pattern. “We have an opportunity, especially as the DSA, to continue leading in these spaces so that we can unite working people across a state like New York,” Gonzalez said. “The opportunity here is just how widely popular this conversation is, how electeds have become more and more informed, and how local communities are demanding real change to the current systems that have been allowing big tech to just basically build hyperscalers, wherever they want, whenever they want, and largely without major oversight and state regulations.” The balance of the call was sent with DSAers campaigning against data centers and other noxious polluters, including representatives from Ithaca (N.Y.), Tucson (Ariz.), Corpus Christi (Texas), Metro D.C., and Seattle DSA. Successes Set a Standard Tucson DSA, represented on the call by Lee Z., provides an object lesson on the potentially powerful role publicly-owned utilities can play in resisting data centers. Campaigners against a huge data center in Tucson thought they had successfully stalled a data center when they got their municipality-owned water system to deny it a permit. With the support of Tucson’s privately-owned electric utility, however, the data center has been able to move forward. The chapter has been organizing for municipalization for years — a measure that would have put the decision of whether to dedicate a chunk of their electrical supply to data centers into public control. While construction is now underway on the proposed data center, the campaign nonetheless proved generative for the chapter. “We built a lot of power specifically around the data center fight. We moved city council members, endorsed two city council members last year, and we got one elected, and one we lost by 19 votes. And anytime we went out and canvassed for them, we were also talking about public power and [electric utility] bills,” Lee Z. said. In the wake of these successes, Tucson — like other chapters present on the call — reported aggressive and well-funded push-back from wealthy interests supportive of data centers and other polluters. Seattle DSA copes with a distinctive political climate, given that its territory is home to the headquarters of some of the companies driving the demand for data centers. “I mean, we have Amazon and Microsoft in our backyard, and we’ve come to notice that the relationship that Washington state has to big tech is akin to the relationship that Texas has with oil and gas — it’s very, very embedded, and there are a lot of data center Democrats,” Seattle DSA’s Lauren R. said. A one-year moratorium on large data centers was passed in Seattle in June after a letter-writing campaign by DSA and its allies sent more than 96,000 expressions of support to the city council. Results have been harder to come by in the state capitol. A disappointing legislative session in terms of AI and data center regulation drove the strength of Washington’s tech lobby home to the chapter. To make progress, they concluded, the movement will need to pick up support outside Seattle and its blue environs — support that is beginning to build. Resistance is Felt Everywhere “We’ve seen that this is a nonpartisan issue. There have been folks that have shown up to our town halls wearing shirts saying ‘the second amendment is my gun permit.’ There’s people across the spectrum [opposed to data centers], and it’s really important to frame this as a nonpartisan issue so that we can build the people power needed to make the changes that we want to see,” Lauren R. said. Jenny E. reported similar signs of a broad appeal in her chapter’s environmental organizing in Corpus Christi. Rising energy demand is core to the challenges facing the Corpus Christi area, a major hub for exporting fossil fuels. Resistance to environmental threats has traditionally been focused along the “fence line” surrounding the city’s industrial district — in the most heavily impacted neighborhoods occupied by communities of color. But as the risk to the city’s water supply has grown, the base of support has widened, Jenny E. said. “The demand to not have corporate solutions to these problems, and the demand for us to not pay for problems that we didn’t create, and the demand for water for people, not polluters, is something that is felt across the political spectrum. But more than that, people are being moved from where they’re at. There’s a reason self-proclaimed ‘MAGA mommies’ are saying that ‘I’m not scared of the socialists, I have more in common with them than I do with any of the people making these decisions.’” The Ecosocialism Transition Committee is overseeing the transition from the Green New Deal Campaign Commission to a new Ecosocialist Commission as the home of DSA’s environmental campaigns. The committee is hosting another mass call on July 26 on “Ecosocialism from the Ground Up.” [END] --- [1] Url: https://democraticleft.dsausa.org/2026/07/14/how-dsa-organizes-against-data-centers/ Published and (C) by Common Dreams Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/commondreams/