The fight against AI data centers is important – but it’s just a starting point | Bruce Schneier and Nathan E Sanders

AI companies want to capture the value created by entire industries. That concentration of wealth and power is society’s greatest risk

Opposition to AI datacenters has emerged as a primary theme in US politics, one that – surprisingly – doesn’t party lines. We applaud people coming together for constructive debate on any issue, and agree that communities need to evaluate whether any economic benefits these datacenters bring is worth their costs. Still, we worry that a focus on datacenters obscures the larger impacts of AI on people’s lives: the concentration of power of AI companies, and their widespread political and financial influence.

Local datacenter opposition is grounded in legitimate concerns about misallocation of land resources when housing is at a premium, . The fact that US opposition to datacenters seems to be most in return. On a global scale, their