Is Data Center Resistance a New Vehicle for Multiracial Democracy?

When it comes to data centers, Americans are increasingly polling like a Dr. Seuss book. We would not like them here or there. We would not like them anywhere.

Across partisan lines, politicians have gotten the message. Sure, Trump has called those who oppose data centers “backwards and poor.” Yet many other Republicans are warning that not taking a stronger stance against data centers will cost them the midterms. Meanwhile, leading voices suggest that opposing data center construction could be the issue that can salvage the Democratic party.

This is people power at its finest. By getting in the way of billions of dollars’ worth of data center construction, communities are demanding democracy from a political system that has long felt out of touch and unresponsive.

These grassroots efforts could be nurtured into something politically transformative that lasts long past this November – an oppositional force in the face of democratic backsliding. Doing so will require harnessing the resistance fomenting in predominantly white communities, particularly in conservative strongholds, such as rural communities and the U.S. south, a region that will likely determine the political future of the nation.

As is often the case in fights for multiracial democracy, Black, Indigenous and communities of color have been at the forefront of the data center opposition. Yet a diverse and often unlikely swathe of Americans have come together to keep data centers out. The tactics themselves lean conventional— with residents relying on petition drives and swarming municipal zoning meetings to force moratoriums. What is highly unconventional is the sheer level of shared outrage as well as the coalitions being forged.

At the border of Mississippi and Tennessee, historically Black neighborhoods in Memphis have joined forces with majority white communities in South-Haven, MS to fight the infrastructure required for Elon Musk’s AI. In swing states like Michigan, we see “Stop the Steal” activists working alongside the Democratic Socialists of America. Meanwhile, across the hundreds of communities standing up against data centers, it is low-income people, those who have increasingly withdrawn from traditional political activities, who are leading the charge.

At the same time, history teaches us that there is nothing inherent to the data center resistance that ensures it will remain a democratic force, capable of placing a check on the outsized power of the few and distributing such power instead across diverse majorities. Plenty of important efforts in this vein—from workers’ struggles to tenant organizing —have been thwarted when elites find ways to stoke internal factionalism, particularly by race-baiting white participants. 

Turning vulnerability into oppurtunity 

Extreme Right idealogues and tech investors are sowing racist narratives that the Chinese are behind U.S. data center opposition. Politicians that have made the regulation of data centers central to their campaigns—such as Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and Justin Pearson in Tennessee—have faced Islamophobic and anti-Black attacks. Other times, communities are pitted against each other. Last year, when a largely white community defeated Big Tech’s plan for a new data center in their area in the state of Georgia, the data center plan was moved to a Black community in South Carolina instead.

If left unaddressed, the data center resistance movement remains vulnerable to the powerful forces mobilizing against it. And we would lose a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bring a critical mass of white people into a multiracial movement of the many. 

But there are ways to hedge against these risks. For several years now, we, the authors, have been involved in efforts to bring more white people into multiracial struggles for real material change, one of us as a frontline participant, the other as a researcher. We have found a promising path forward: confronting the conditions of precarity created by the billionaire class and political elites and doing so by naming their reliance on racism.

Take, for example, Kentucky People’s Union (KPU), which has been at the helm of a housing justice campaign in Ashland, KY. Through this work, participants learn to build grassroots political power by knocking on doors, collecting signatures, showing up to offer testimony at various government bodies, and even running their own people for office. KPU also studies the history of how white racism has destroyed alliances between those who would otherwise hold common cause and shares this history with participants.

Ashland is an opportune place for such organizing. Once the home of a major steel plant with a proud union tradition, Ashland and the surrounding region have been economically and environmentally decimated by the coal industry alongside state abandonment begun in the 1970s, This, coupled with a decades-long attack on organized labor has left Ashland with few if any progressive groups and organizations. Communities like this across much of rural America and the U.S. south have long been written off, particularly by Democrats, dismissed as part of Hilary Clinton’s proverbial “basket of deplorables.” Like people living under increasing precarity everywhere, those in this region are certainly vulnerable to capture by extremist right forces. But most are likely to remain disengaged from politics altogether. 

KPU invites poor and working people in this region back into the political process. In so doing, they draw on a long tradition of Appalachians who have fought back against the powerful, building working people’s power across racial lines. And right now, that organizing is being channeled into a heated fight against a new data center.

In May 2026, people in Ashland and its surrounding area learned that the company TeraWulf’s hyperscale data center is in the works to become their new neighbor. One of the largest such facilities proposed to date, TeraWulf’s supercomputing facility would require one gigawatt of electricity per year, what would otherwise power 800,000 homes on an already overburdened grid. Meanwhile TeraWulf CEO Paul Prager, a billionaire from NYC, builds restaurants adorned with crystal chandeliers serving $100 meals. Prager does not need more wealth; this region sorely does.

Resistance to the TeraWulf data center is creating two interwoven opportunities. The first is to continue to build the infrastructure for democratic engagement in a poor, rural region of the U.S. south where it is sorely lacking. The second is to combat race-baiting and xenophobia head on. Indeed, TeraWulf is motivating poor and working people who have never attended a local council meeting, much less a political rally, to speak out against the extractive industries that have long used this region as a sacrifice zone. 

Inviting people in by telling the truth

While the resistance in Ashland has been organic, not led by any particular organization local or otherwise, it offers the perfect opportunity to help those in a predominantly white region get really clear about who is to blame for their suffering. KPU is joining this fight, and other local organizers, particularly white ones, can also get ahead of those who would cynically deploy racist tropes to keep working people divided and weak. That means being crystal clear: it is not immigrants that are taking jobs; it is billionaires, automation and AI. The racialized poor are not ruining the local tax-base; that destruction is in the hands of large corporations and their polluting industries. 

Data center resistance is winning many of its immediate fights. But it can accomplish something bigger. If we use this opportunity to talk about the political uses of racism, we can invite more white people living under conditions of increasing precarity into a multiracial movement that serves majorities. Imagine a new slate of local groups demanding poor and working people of all races have a voice in the decisions that impact their lives. This is not a radical concept; it is the practice of multiracial democracy.