The righteous outrage that Americans across the political spectrum feel toward Big Tech oligarchs coming in and draining crucial water supplies in their communities, polluting their air and driving up the costs of basic necessities — like electricity — was overwhelmingly apparent at the voting booth. Voters rejected data centers both literally and figuratively in dozens of races across the nation.
Meta warns that growing political opposition to data centers could threaten future AI investments, as communities push back against massive infrastructure projects.
WASHINGTON — Tech billionaire and Republican megadonor Elon Musk was among the biggest losers of election night, after spending hundreds of millions to boost candidates that failed to win their races.
He doled out around $446 million — the most a non-candidate has ever spent on an election, including over $200 million on Texas-related efforts. Musk’s preferred candidates across the country were swamped, losing almost everywhere, including Ken Paxton in the Texas Senate race and Vivek Ramaswamy in the Ohio gubernatorial race.
“Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now,” Musk wrote on X on Wednesday morning, jumping off the results to boost an idea he’s trying to pursue.
He quickly followed that with a joke about election interference, writing, “Guess my election-interfering space lasers didn’t work this time.”
Musk’s adopted home of Texas has been a hot spot for data centers and data center construction over the last couple of years, with Abbott a strong ally of both tech leaders and Wall Street.
“Amid data center backlash all across the country, Texas was supposed to be an AI oasis, where people would be able to build data centers no matter what was happening in the rest of America,” said Sam Koppelman, the publisher of Hunterbrook Media — an investigative journalism outlet connected to a hedge fund. “This election totally changed that.”
“Voters rejected Republicans in part because they were bought and paid for by AI billionaires,” Democratic Representative Greg Casar of Texas said in a statement on Tuesday evening. “Democrats must hold them accountable instead of cashing their checks.”
The years-long wait for access to the grid and new turbines is causing data center builders to turn to an unusual, less-efficient and less environmentally friendly solution: once-discarded jet engines.
At a Brooklyn midterm party five days before Election Day, every conversation, from a council member’s fireside chat to a debate about the Democratic Party, kept circling back to AI and data centers.
Runware is building a factory to turn out prefabricated AI data centers on an assembly line. The real test will be whether it can deliver at that scale.
BRUSSELS— The European Union and Canada are teaming up on compute power — a key element for training artificial intelligence models — with Canada set to join the EU’s supercomputer network.
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said on Thursday Canada “will now become part of this network”, confirming a POLITICO report from earlier this week that both sides were discussing the country’s entry into the European supercomputing network.
Canada joining “enables Canadian industry, startups and researchers to access European supercomputing,” von der Leyen said. “Paired with Canada’s pioneering AI industry, this would allow us to develop highly competitive, innovative and safe AI systems.”
The EU’s supercomputing network is run by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, an EU public-private vehicle with an €8.2 billion budget. The network consists of 14 supercomputers (some ranked in the global top 10), 19 AI-focused AI factories and 10 quantum computers.
The vehicle will also run seven massive AI data center hubs, known as AI gigafactories, set to be built next year with a total investment cost of €30 billion.
Experts praised a possible EU-Canadian compute power team-up, but warned it’s only the start.
“Compute cooperation is one of the most obvious short-term ‘middle power’ cooperation plays in AI,” said Anton Leicht, technology and international affairs fellow at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
But he added that for now “it doesn’t put a dent into the actual dependence” on the U.S.
“As long as the U.S. builds gigawatt-scale clusters, no amount of cooperation that doesn’t result in massive buildouts will help,” he said.
Canada’s engagement in the EU’s supercomputer network builds further on Canada’s previous partial involvement in the EU’s flagship research and development program, Horizon Europe.
Horizon Europe partially funds EuroHPC.
To date, 38 countries have participated in the EU’s supercomputing network: 27 EU member countries plus non-EU countries including Norway, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Israel and Turkey.
LONDON — Andy Burnham became Britain’s prime minister 100 days ago on a pledge to end 40 years of neoliberalism. His first budget announced he wouldn’t do that on the front page.
Wednesday’s 150-page red book was titled “breathing space for today, fresh hope for the future”, a confession, with true British modesty, that it was a stepping stone to bigger pledges downstream.
Burnham’s top finance minister, Chancellor John Healey, unveiled 98 changes, including help for most households’ energy bills, which are due to spike this winter because of Donald Trump’s war with Iran, and a £10 billion defense package to support Ukraine.
Many of the tax tweaks were limited and technical, including an 8% cut to tariffs on soy milk. Healey’s ambition was reined in by surging global oil prices and a political choice by his boss not to blow the doors off yet.
Burnham has reviews on the creaking welfare system, devolving power to the regions and a “10-year plan” all coming before Christmas. Only then can he grind out the numbers for next year’s spending review.
The Labour MP Darren Jones, who served in the Treasury until Burnham arrived in July, called it a “steady-as-she-goes budget” that was to be expected. Many Labour MPs were happy, cheering measures for their area and pointing toward a bigger bang later on. Industry lobby groups could grasp onto something in their area of expertise.
Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister, Darren Jones, arrives at Downing Street for Keir Starmer’s final cabinet meeting on July 15, 2026 in London. | Carl Court/Getty Images
But with U.K. growth struggling, others were less generous. Joe Shalam of the center-right Centre for Social Justice think tank called it the “fudge-it budget.” Tory leader Kemi Badenoch asked: “Is that it?”
Perhaps the trickiest response for Burnham was from Mainstream, the left-wing campaign group that helped propel him to the Labour leadership this year. “Ending 40 years of neoliberalism can only be delivered by radical action,” read a statement by the group’s interim council.
POLITICO looks at five other takeaways from Wednesday’s budget.
1) We’re in the holding pen
The chancellor’s big bazooka was to slap a much-anticipated tax rise on banks — but he surprised many by saying it will last only 15 months. It will raise less than £1 billion in its peak year.
It wasn’t the only temporary measure Healey unveiled on Wednesday. He extended existing cuts to fuel duty, a tax cut on household energy bills and a £2 cap on bus fares, but only until 2027. They will all need to be reviewed again before his next annual budget.
Likewise, some of Healey’s spending plans thin out after a few years, which suggests they may need topping up later. This applies even to the areas closest to Burnham’s heart. Budget documents suggest support to end rough sleeping will total £1.1 billion in the two years from April 2027 but only £270 million in the three years after that.
People pass through the Bank area of the City of London on May 29, 2024 in London. | Carl Court/Getty Images
There were plenty of changes, of course, such as to writing-down allowances, property income taxes and tax on savings. Whitehall will have to find more administration cuts while tax inspectors hunt down another £3.2 billion a year. But the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a non-partisan economic think tank, called it all a “hodgepodge” of “fiddly measures” that would do little to affect growth.
Many of the more fundamental decisions were kicked down the road. Healey has committed to spending 3.5% of GDP on defense by 2035, but will only spell out how to fund it in a spending review at some point in 2027. Major reforms to the welfare system — spending on which is still rocketing — will only be decided after two reports by the Labour grandees Stephen Timms and Alan Milburn are published in November.
Healey published a “fiscal devolution roadmap” that spelled out a path to handing regional mayors full control of the business rates raised in their areas by the end of the decade, but this has an element of wait-and-see too.
Healey had a narrative for his cautious approach. “I decided on an early budget to give the country a bit of breathing space and to provide stability and direction in the face of speculation,” he told MPs Wednesday. “We’ll continue to map out that direction for Britain through the prime minister’s 10-year plan and the spending review.”
This is not the Burnham who complained Britain was “in hock to the bond markets” last year.
2) Everything is terrible, so blame the White House.
Burnham and Healey can blame Trump — up to a point.
The chancellor said the headwinds that once faced Britain are now “global economic storms,” fueled above all by the U.S. conflict with Iran. “We did not want this war,” Healey told MPs.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to members of the media after disembarking from Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland on October 28, 2026. | Kent Nishimura/AFP via Getty Images
Journalists spent Wednesday trawling through the usual gloomy parade of numbers about the U.K. economy produced by the independent Office for Budget Responsibility. Britain’s projected growth in 2027 was cut from 1.6% to 1% (though Treasury officials insisted GDP per person will rise overall by the end of the decade).
Healey chose to leave himself with a smaller fiscal buffer than his predecessor Rachel Reeves, telling MPs he had used it to “absorb the impact of the Iran war.” He also raised net taxes by £7 billion a year, though this was far less than the £26 billion in Reeves’ last budget.
But the situation is so volatile that these numbers, based on market energy prices in mid-August, are probably already out of date. The OBR’s “severe shock scenario” had oil prices peaking at around $115 a barrel in the first half of 2027. They already hit that level this week.
Healey insisted that Britain is doing well in the circumstances; his ministers all point to an International Monetary Fund prediction that the U.K.’s deficit will be the lowest in the G7 by 2029.
Opposition parties, however, paint a picture of a nation where everything is just getting gloomier. The tax take was already on course to rise to a record high; Healey broke that record again on Wednesday. (It is now due to reach 38.6% of GDP.) Britain’s spending on debt interest has almost tripled since 2020.
3) Defense spending is still a big, big headache
Healey resigned as defense secretary under former Prime Minister Keir Starmer in June to protest the lack of military spending — but now faces mounting unanswered questions about his own plans.
Healey did two big new things on defense spending on Wednesday. First, he confirmed an open secret in Westminster: he plans to reach 3% of GDP by 2030 — on a path to NATO’s 3.5% by 2035 — but repeated that the details of how he’ll pay for it will only be spelled out in next year’s spending review.
Secondly and more significantly, he outlined his plan to plug a £1.8 billion-a-year gap in Starmer’s defense investment plan — but provided only scant details.
The Treasury said it will be paid for by shaving 1% off each Whitehall department’s capital budget in the coming years. However, those departments have not yet worked out what they will cut; that is a problem for another day. These questions will dog Healey for the next year.
At least one person was delighted: Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The Ukrainian president said the chancellor “made my day” with a £10 billion package of economic and military support to Kyiv. Part of the package needed special sign-off by ministers because civil servants warned they could not guarantee it would provide value for money.
4) There was something to make Labour MPs happy
Much of what Healey did unveil appeared to be aimed at preserving the “Burnham bounce” in the polls and with his own MPs.
The chancellor called it a “budget for the working people of Britain” and Treasury analysis says it was redistributive, handing the biggest boost to the poorest households (albeit only raising their incomes by 0.6%).
A woman makes her way through a snow flurry, the first significant snow fall in Cheshire this Winter on December 10, 2022 in Northwich. | Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
Central to this was Healey’s closest thing to a “rabbit out of the hat” — a £100-per-household cash payment to people living in homes below a certain value this winter. One Labour MP enthused that the criteria for the payment (which Treasury officials say will capture 88% of the poorest households) was “absolutely brilliant” because it will capture working households and those on benefits at the same time.
There was another £1.5 billion for social and affordable housing, a “covenant” to govern new AI data centers and changes to mileage rates for self-employed workers. Burnham has prided himself on being a grassroots politician; it was a grassroots package.
How much voters will notice is another question. The IFS warned the package of “breathing space” measures was still “relatively small.” It could be swallowed by a rise in annual energy bills in January — predictions of which have recently ranged from £276 to £469.
The OBR warned there has been “virtually no growth” in real household disposable income per person over the last decade or so, and predicted “no real earnings growth in 2027” despite Burnham and Healey’s efforts to help.
5) MPs won’t stop chattering about an election
Burnham only has to call an election by mid-2029 and keeps trying to snuff out talk of going earlier — but every prime minister does this until they don’t.
His MPs were studying the budget Wednesday to work out if it makes an early general election more or less likely. It’s fair to say they couldn’t agree.
On the one hand, this cautious budget of temporary measures might suggest Burnham — who needs his own mandate for more radical changes to the electoral system or Britain’s relationship with the EU — is holding out for the country’s backing.
Others would say a cautious stepping-stone budget is hardly the eye-catching approach you would take if you were about to sell yourself to voters. Growth is set to be slow next year; Burnham needs time to turn the economy round and show he can change things.
Burnham told journalists on Wednesday: “I don’t know how many times I’ve done this now, but yes, I can rule out calling a general election in the next 12 months.” The speculation will continue anyway.
Esther Webber, Emilio Casalicchio, Sam Blewett and Charlie Cooper contributed reporting.
CORRECTION: This article was updated on Oct. 29 to better reflect the Centre for Social Justice’s ideological stance.
As the AI boom stresses the existing power grid, all sorts of new opportunities for grid modernization are also emerging as a result, industry insiders say.
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes is making the waning days of her campaign for reelection all about the widespread backlash to data center construction in her state — and the ways in which she has worked to try to limit an explosion of artificial intelligence infrastructure in Arizona that drains the state’s already-low water supply. If she can harness bipartisan and pervasive public outrage on the issue, she may be able to not only boost her own reelection prospects, but also help Democrats down ballot who may be on the verge of taking back one chamber of the state legislature for the first time in 60 years.
Republican incumbents and candidates facing data center outrage back home have been trying to get President Trump to land where he just landed on data centers for months, as the party works to develop some sort of concrete campaign position for candidates on an issue that has sparked ubiquitous backlash across the nation.
Republican leadership and Trump’s allies, for their part, attempted to carve out a compromise lane for candidates to operate within on the campaign trail, as Trump made his position on the matter clear: he’s in bed with Big Tech and, thus, entertaining no nuance. Both Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) and Vice President JD Vance tried to obscure Trump’s obstinance on data centers by suggesting in August and September that the tech companies expanding and building them need to cover their electric costs, either by “putting power back into the grid,” as Vance suggested, or by finding ways to make the data centers “self-sufficient.”
“They ought to be able to take care of their own utilities, their own power, and that ought to be a given any place they go in the country. But they shouldn’t be going places where there isn’t support for them at the local level,” Thune told a local South Dakota TV station in September.
Another Senate Republican, Jon Husted, is locked in a heated campaign in Ohio that is also foundering under the weight of the data-center backlash. I’ve written before about the data center skeletons in Sen. Jon Husted’s (R-OH) closet, left over from his time as lieutenant governor. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) has skillfully spun this baggage into a pretty compelling attack operation. Husted then mounted an ultimately unsuccessful gambit to try to get Senate Dems to help him pass legislation that would help him on the campaign trail, which I wrote about here.
But the crux of the matter is this: Husted was pushing to pass a bill, the Ratepayer Protection Act, that would direct state utility regulators to consider implementing new standards that ask Big Tech companies to cover the cost of electric bills and the grid updates needed to run their data centers.
Officials in the Trump administration in August were even working to convince tech and utility companies to sign a pledge to prevent AI model-driven electricity cost hikes.
This is all to say, Republicans have been trying to stand in this lame space between support for Big Tech and its wild enthusiasm for data centers and AI, and Americans’ bipartisan outrage about the risks to their communities and their finances that come along with the facilities. And Trump has not let them, determining a few months back that anyone who is against data centers — and the strain they place on local resources — is “backwards and poor.”
Now, just shy of two weeks from Election Day, he’s come around to other Republicans’ position. In a Truth Social post this morning, Trump “mandated” (whatever that means) that tech companies “make their own electricity” and pay communities that host the facilities “dividends” (he also put this term in quotes, so unclear if he or anyone knows what that means):
As the President of the United States, I have been watching Data Centers very closely, and have come to a very strong conclusion. New and large, in some cases gigantic, Data Centers are mandated by me to make their own electricity, and give or sell any excess back to the local community, or grid, and therefore there is electric price increase. In fact, there could be a substantial decrease. Other elements likewise! If companies want to make their Data Centers popular, pay the community, and/or individuals within the community, a “dividend.” I have watched the process closely, and Data Centers that were highly unpopular in a certain area, have become extremely popular when a financial deal is struck. MAKE DEALS, and get them built!!! GREAT FOR THE U.S.A. President DJT
Republicans have done this to themselves by advocating against AI regulation (state level anti-regulation measures were ultimately stripped from the Big Beautiful Bill before passage, however) and getting in bed with the tech oligarchs gunning to buy off politicians for years. And Democrats struggled with how to message on the matter until the American public invited them to seize on their indignation.
There are a few key races that will reveal whether Trump’s last ditch data center pivot was effective this cycle.
Earlier this month, three data centers in western Russia suddenly went dark due to a “rapid unplanned disassembly,” to use euphemistic engineering parlance. They exploded, in other words. Operated by Yandex, a Russian technology company often compared to Google that offers many similar services — a search engine, online shopping, cloud computing and the like — the centers were heavily damaged in a series of coordinated drone strikes over four days by Ukraine, which saw them as a valuable target in the country’s military campaign against Russian infrastructure.
As Russia’s war against Ukraine slogs on, both sides are increasingly adopting this strategy. While power plants and oil refineries have been hit, data centers and internet facilities are becoming the latest quarry for drone and missile strikes — and not just in Europe. Data centers operated by Amazon in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates have also been targeted in the ongoing Iran war.
Few Americans have probably heard of Yandex, let alone use its services, and most likely didn’t notice when many of its hosted websites became inaccessible. But after Ukraine’s attacks, many people started to claim that social media was seemingly different. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was quick to suggest his country had dealt a massive blow to Russia’s online disinformation machine, saying, “It suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social platforms. There was less hate, less division and fewer provocations.” Several reports seemed to support his claims, citing data from internet monitoring service Cloudflare, that allegedly showed “Russia’s Yandex bot traffic nearly eliminated overnight.”
But the truth is far more complicated, as some experts have noted. Yandex did experience a crash in bot activity, but at least some of that traffic seems to be legitimate. “When Cloudflare data shows a precipitous drop in ‘bot’ traffic, that does not mean ‘automated social media troll accounts’, it means ‘software that makes automated web requests on a large scale,’” Michał ‘Rysiek’ Woźniak, an internet infrastructure expert, told The Guardian. Others noted that they haven’t seen an actual drop in online disinformation. “Our platforms are still monitoring Russian social networks across the world and there is no discernible change in their posting patterns,” said Amil Khan, the chief executive of Valent, a tech startup that tracks disinformation.
None of that has stopped Reddit and other corners of the web from celebrating and memeing the issue. If those celebrations aren’t quite justified, there’s still something to be learned from the ordeal, which digs into the so-called dead internet theory. The basic premise is that almost nothing we see online is human-generated anymore. In his 2025 book “Market-Oriented Disinformation Research,” business academic Carlos Diaz Ruiz, who has studied how disinformation spreads in social media echo chambers, describes what many of us experience online on a daily basis: “an eerie feeling that the Internet is made up of bots talking to bots, following and liking bots, and posting AI-generated content designed for machine consumption, the algorithm, not humans.”
Indeed, bot traffic makes up an increasingly large share of the internet, surpassing human traffic for the first time in history over the summer, according to a June Cloudflare report. No doubt the surge in generative artificial intelligence use is what tipped the scales, but of course, not all bots are created equal. Many have legitimate, beneficial uses, like archiving web data.
Some people have wedged dead internet theory into a conspiracy theory that Diaz Ruiz divides into “weak” and “strong.” The weak version of the theory is that the internet is now little more than a hall of mirrors used to manipulate the masses into fighting a culture war instead of a class war. “The Internet drama keeps the population occupied and distracted, preventing them from resisting the elites secretly controlling the world,” as Diaz Ruiz says. “The ‘strong’ version of the dead internet conspiracy theory claims that online activity is entirely disconnected from human activity because our society ceased to exist some time ago. In some versions, a catastrophic event occurred in the past, triggering society’s collapse.”
OK, so we’re basically talking the plot of “The Matrix” here. The argument that humanity peaked in 1999 may be compelling, and I won’t argue against it. If reality truly is nothing more than a hallucination, dream or computer screensaver in the brain, why should we waste time disputing it? Proving a negative with such a lack of evidence is fruitless. The point is, some people may be taking dead internet theory a little too far, but that doesn’t change the fact that within the last week people felt like they got a taste of some version of it.
If we lift the hood on some of these conspiracies, we can understand what people are really afraid of. Last December in the journal Computer, Hal Berghel, a computer science professor at the University of Nevada, argued the dead internet is more than a conspiracy and should not be dismissed, writing, “There’s certainly evidence of the distortion of the internet from the original concept as a liberating, self-healing, packetized purveyor of useful and important information: the original commitment to net neutrality is on life support, the goal of a shared public information repository is constantly compromised by paywalls, the content has moved from valuable scholarship to a sub-cerebral landfill, and the users are subjected to a mind-numbing cacophony of digital threats: spam, phish bait, spyware, malware, online bullying, online fraud, extortion, hacking, VoIP 911-swatting, doxing, slander, pretexting, etc.”
In other words, there’s a good reason so many people find dead internet theory attractive. Once a zone of promise and connection, the web has not only rotted and enshittified, it’s turned into a literal warzone. There really are algorithms out there, unleashed by governments actively dropping bombs on one another, that are designed to infect our minds and prejudice our ability to perceive the truth. It’s one of the many ways modern warfare has become invisible, pervasive and endless. No wonder social media is making so many people depressed — it can be a form of assault.
“In tandem with proxy warfare, cyber operations have become a central pillar of modern statecraft. Cyber warfare enables states to conduct aggressive acts; espionage, sabotage, infrastructure disruption without engaging in kinetic violence,” philosophers Oluyemi Opeoluwa Adisa and Kareem Shwan Adham wrote last year in a study published in the International Journal of Scientific Research and Management. “The strategic advantage of cyber warfare lies in its stealth and ambiguity. Because it blurs the line between war and crime, attribution becomes difficult, enabling perpetrators to operate with minimal consequences.”
How do we even tell how much of the dead internet theory is true? Perhaps through that old tech-support adage: Turn it off and back on again. And no, I don’t mean bombing more data centers, though we’re likely to see more of that, for better or worse. If everything feels fake, maybe we’re better off getting outside and experiencing something real for a minute. Yeah, yeah, we’ve all been told to touch grass so much that such advice is routinely mocked, and anyway, not everyone can easily do that.
But here’s your daily reminder that humans are primates whose still-evolving brains are exponentially outpaced by technological advancement. Being in nature is essential because we are nature. There’s a certain reset available in the presence of trees, birds and clouds. Even more important is connecting with real humans: family, friends, neighbors. Socialization is the essence of the primate brain too. You don’t have to uninstall any apps or delete Facebook, though you could try it too. Off, on again.
And when you are online, which is unavoidable for many of us, try to remember that you are probably interacting with fewer humans than you might think. So don’t take it so seriously. Temper those outrageous emotions, the ones the algorithms have gotten so good at teasing out of us. Maybe instead we can fortify them into weapons to attack the real problems we face, like widening wealth gaps, destruction of the environment and the rise of authoritarianism.
Before it became reality, the biggest fear around a second Donald Trump administration was an increased level of competence. The candidate and his team displayed shocking measures of discipline and consistent messaging throughout the 2024 race, with much of the credit going to campaign manager Susie Wiles, who became his White House chief of staff. As a result, some feared that the shambling jankiness of his first term would be replaced by an efficient, experienced administration that would carry out a ruthless, quasi-fascist platform with few hiccups.
That hasn’t happened. Once in office, Trump replaced the GOP’s establishment scolds who curtailed his worst impulses in his first term with loyalists who were just as green as him. The result has been constant outrage over blatant graft and executive overreach, as Trump is unable to stop blabbing about his — possibly illegal — dealmaking and unconstitutional policy goals. But look to the Republican Party’s backbenchers: You’ll see what MAGA could do with a figurehead who can keep their trap shut.
A loyal Trump acolyte, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry has happily deployed bored-looking National Guard troops to New Orleans and the U.S.-Mexico border for little more reason than pleasing the president. He has successfully pushed a law to require the display of the Ten Commandments in schools, and he rarely shies away from red meat conflicts with his state’s few Democratic strongholds. Little surprise, then, that Landry was hailed as MAGA’s next-generation hero by Rolling Stone in 2024.
Unlike Trump’s premature crowing over his massive ballroom or countless would-be Iran ceasefires, the governor has a tendency to let his work speak for itself.
But when the time comes to pass Republican policies he truly cares about, or to hand out contracts and favors to his preferred businesses, Landry goes eerily quiet. Unlike Trump’s premature crowing over his massive ballroom or countless would-be Iran ceasefires, the governor has a tendency to let his work speak for itself.
When it was published, Landry’s profile in Rolling Stone made hay out of his ability to go dark. Lately, though, when he gets quiet, it’s out of legal necessity. His administration has proven remarkably open to signing non-disclosure agreements while working out public deals with megacorporations.
According to a report from the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Landry administration has signed nearly 300 NDAs since he took office in 2024. The Gulf States Newsroom uncovered a further 100 NDAs between the governor’s office and its employees, restricting what they can share about their time on the job. Reporter Drew Hawkins, who spoke to employees of former Louisiana gubernatorial administrations, said the broad gag orders on public employees was unprecedented.
“[T]hey’ve never seen anything like this,” Hawkins told New Orleans television station WWL. “They don’t know about anybody else signing them. They never signed them, and then you know one of them reviewed it and went through it point by point and talked about just how wild this would be to enforce.”
The result of all these hush-hush agreements is most noticeable in recent headline deals with SpaceX and Meta. The former was given the OK to build a massive spaceport in coastal Louisiana in between two wildlife refuges. While the under-wraps deal was being worked out, Landry signed laws exempting aerospace operations from property taxes, nuisance liabilities and public records requests. The final deal, approved in a public meeting of a new development board announced just 24 hours before, granted SpaceX more than $24 billion in tax breaks to build a rocket-launching facility no locals had even heard about.
A similarly tight-lipped dealmaking process led to Meta’s announcement of its largest data center to date in rural Northeast Louisiana. The project, dubbed Hyperion, will cover six square miles of Richland Parish. The tax breaks granted to Meta, again without public input, total more than $3 billion.
For his part, Landry kept quiet about the agreements until the last possible moment. But once the ink was dry, he was downright boastful about them. “I have no problem letting the people in the state of Louisiana decide whether what we put together was worth it,” he said, telling the Times-Picayune that he was motivated by pragmatism and a desire to drag his economically underperforming state into the future. “You don’t do these deals in the public,. At some point, you have to give the people elected to lead this state the opportunity to lead.”
Since Louisiana’s have a habit of ending up in prison, some level of backroom chicanery is to be expected in the Bayou State. At the moment, Landry’s NDA-heavy approach is largely a Louisiana phenomenon. But the ethically dubious practice of burying public-private deals under NDAs could be put to use elsewhere.
Landry’s down-low dealmaking offers a blueprint for post-Trump Republicans looking to push through potentially unpopular agreements and policies, including those involving data centers and artificial intelligence. While the president may no longer be able to harness the support he enjoyed by virtue of being loud-mouthed himself, his followers can work quietly to carry on his project under a blanket of keep-quiet agreements — springing them on the public when the deals have already been made.
Fox News is confronting an awkward problem of its own making. Conservative media has spent years teaching its audience to distrust the institutions building artificial intelligence, but now those same institutions are working with Donald Trump and Republicans nationwide to secure billions of dollars in public infrastructure, regulatory favors and political protection to build the physical machinery that makes AI possible. So the network is now trying to discipline a conservative backlash it helped build by recasting public anger as a threat to Trump’s economic agenda and America’s rivalry with China.
The shift was gradual. The network did not simply move from being skeptical of AI to becoming enthusiastic about it. Instead, it changed the question. What began as a story about whether AI was “woke” became a story about whether the U.S. could afford to not dominate its development.
Over the past three years, as Trump’s alliance with tech oligarchs deepened, network hosts have seemingly dropped their culture war suspicion of AI, which at first centered on ChatGPT and accusations that the chatbot, produced by OpenAI, was “woke” and exhibited an “anti-Trump bias.” They have now adopted an aggressive defense of the industrial buildout behind the technology. What began as a moral panic over Silicon Valley chatbots and censorship has turned into a desperate campaign to douse the flames of a conservative grassroots rebellion against AI data centers.
What began as a moral panic over Silicon Valley chatbots and censorship has turned into a desperate campaign to douse the flames of a conservative grassroots rebellion against AI data centers.
When ChatGPT exploded into public consciousness in early 2023, network hosts used its standard culture war playbook to raise the alarm against generative AI. Jesse Watters complained on “The Five” that AI would discriminate against conservatives and said he feared machines would become another mechanism for censorship. Laura Ingraham held up the news that Vanderbilt administrators had used the chatbot to draft a message after the Michigan State shooting as proof that intellectual standards were collapsing. Tucker Carlson, then still on the air, gave Elon Musk a platform to voice apocalyptic warnings about where the field was heading.
For a moment, the right-wing media apparatus seemed positioned to critique AI as an anti-human concentration of corporate power. But when Carlson was ousted only days after the April 2023 interview, he took that strain of populism with him to the political periphery, joining voices like former Trump adviser and podcast host Steve Bannon in expressing sustained alarm over AI from the right.
But as Salon’s Amanda Marcotte has documented, the politics surrounding the technology changed as the money got bigger. Tech companies began pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into data centers. After the federal government’s own assessment estimated that data centers consumed about 4.4% of total U.S. electricity in 2023, and could consume between 6.7% and 12% by 2028, conservative voters who distrust Silicon Valley and resent rising utility bills collided with Trump-aligned officials who want to build the technology and its data centers at breakneck speed. A July Fox News poll found that 70% of Americans opposed data centers being built in their communities. Faced with a genuine populist uprising against corporate extraction, the network seems to have stepped in to perform damage control for Big Tech and the Trump administration.
By August 2026, “Fox & Friends” began reassuring viewers that local opposition was not an authentic community defense but rather a deceptive plot orchestrated by the “far left.” Host Brian Kilmeade suggested that calls to slow down AI expansion could “tank” the economy ahead of the midterms, effectively warning viewers that defending their local water source was an act of economic sabotage. On “The Five,” Greg Gutfeld picked up the same talking point, arguing that Democrats were weaponizing local opposition to AI development as a sneaky way to undermine Trump’s economic numbers. Will Cain’s program has similarly cast local opposition as a Democratic weapon for stirring outrage in swing districts.
Fox reached for establishment gravitas and deployed heavyweights from the national security state like former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to sell the data centers buildout under the banner of “techno-optimism.” Dismissing concerns over sweeping job losses on Monday, Rice framed the issue around international competition. On Fox Business, Larry Kudlow has argued that opposing data centers amounts to promoting China, and Charles Payne has described a New York moratorium as part of a Democratic war on AI. In May, Payne went further on “Jesse Watters Primetime” when he accused Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., of working with the Chinese to kill the American AI industry.
An incident involving businessman and television personality Kevin O’Leary is the classic cautionary tale taught in journalism schools. In May, the “Shark Tank” investor appeared on former Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo’s show promoting his proposed Utah data center when he claimed that local groups and residents opposing it were proxies for the Chinese government. The allegation was subsequently repeated across Fox programming. O’Leary later acknowledged that he had no evidence that the organizations or individuals he identified were funded by China or the Chinese Communist Party. Fox News Media eventually issued an on-air apology.
This campaign to pacify the conservative base culminated in Trump’s direct intervention. Characterizing fears of existential risk from AI as a “hoax,” Trump made it clear that corporate expansion would take priority over local or environmental concerns. After returning from a golf tournament in Illinois over the weekend, Trump openly boasted to reporters at Joint Base Andrews about his late-night dinner with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, illustrating the strange politics of this moment. Anthropic has become one of the most prominent companies arguing that powerful AI systems require safety measures and public oversight. Amodei himself has warned that AI could pose a risk to humanity if developed badly.
On Tuesday, ahead of a scheduled lunch with industry executives to discuss the technology, Trump announced the launch of America.gov, a government chatbot billed as a research tool for public services. “We do not surrender to fears about what technologies will do to us,” he said. “We decide that those technologies will do for us some very, very incredible things.” Using his preferred moniker for AI, the president added. “This kind of innovation in government is just a preview of what is possible with super intelligence.”
Trump’s rhetoric and actions underscore that his role in selling AI to a skeptical public is central. He has dismissed existential AI fears as a “hoax” and made expanding data centers a centerpiece of his agenda. That is why Fox was so quick to abandon the rural and suburban communities facing the real-world fallout from data centers, choosing instead to lecture its audience on the national security duty of surrendering their power grids and backyards to Big Tech.
UPDATE: This column has been updated to include President Donald Trump’s announcement that the government is launching its own chatbot, America.gov.
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