Most of the arguments about AI happen in the abstract: superintelligence, extinction odds, the race with China. In Vineland, New Jersey, it happens at a distance of about a mile, which is how far Andrew Groetsch lives from the state's largest data centre. One night, reading his daughter a bedtime story, he noticed her bedroom windows vibrating with a mechanical hum. That facility, chronicled at length by The New Republic, has become a small, vivid case study in how the AI build-out actually lands on the people who live beside it, and why the backlash has become one of the few things Americans of every stripe seem to agree on.
The physical facts are their own kind of argument. The Vineland campus is 2.6 million square feet, wrapped in a 14-foot concrete wall dressed up to look like rustic stone. It is operated for a Dutch "neocloud" that installs and manages Nvidia chips, and its sole contracted customer is Microsoft, which reportedly wants at least 300 megawatts of power there, nearly double the entire city's generating capacity. The most striking detail is how that power is being made. Drone footage published in August showed the site running dozens of gas generators as primary power, not backup, none of them permitted by the state environmental department. Residents who were told they would live next to a quiet data centre discovered they were living next to an unpermitted gas power plant.
What makes the story more than a noise complaint is the money underneath it. The New Republic traces how the value of AI-linked companies has grown by roughly 27 trillion dollars since late 2022, with the gains flowing overwhelmingly to the wealthiest households, even as American workers took home their smallest share of GDP since 1947. The Vineland site sits, almost too neatly, beside an invitation-only luxury golf club built by the same local concrete magnate, both hidden behind identical walls. It is hard to invent a cleaner picture of a boom whose rewards are enclosed and whose costs, the noise, the emissions, the strain on water and the grid, are left outside the wall.
That is why the politics refuse to sort neatly. Polling cited in the piece found three-quarters of Americans oppose a data centre near their home, and more than half back a national moratorium; opposition runs across party lines. More than 500 counties and towns have blocked or restricted projects. In practice this puts members of the Democratic Socialists of America on the same side as right-wing activists who once fought offshore wind, and it has produced strange federal bedfellows: Republican Josh Hawley and Democrat Richard Blumenthal jointly proposed forcing data centres onto off-grid power so they do not raise consumers' bills.
Both parties are caught out by it. Trump has called data centres "liquid gold" and told communities they will "end up being backwards and poor" if they resist, a stance awkward for Republican candidates whose own voters are furious about local projects. Democrats, long funded by Silicon Valley, are watching insurgent candidates win primaries by running against the industry. Meanwhile an industry-funded political group backed by an OpenAI co-founder and a prominent venture capitalist has amassed a war chest of more than 75 million dollars to reward friendly candidates in both parties. As of July, only one of its picks had lost.
The lesson for anyone tracking AI is that the technology's political future may be decided less by essays about extinction than by zoning-board meetings that run past midnight. The people of Vineland are not, for the most part, frightened that Claude or ChatGPT will end humanity. They are frightened about their water, their air and whether they can sell a house next to a wall. As one resident put it, the technology might let him do in ten seconds what used to take ten minutes, "but it's really just gonna help my boss." That sentiment, unglamorous and local, is turning into a national force that Washington's grand debates have barely begun to reckon with.