Inside the Growing, Bizarre Coalition Against AI and Data Centers

Joe Allen wants to know what the robot’s name is. At first, I think the double whiskey we downed at the hotel bar must be getting to him, as he sprints like a kid at recess toward a delivery vehicle. I’m anxious about the time: I’m supposed to be driving Allen to the airport, my Hail Mary effort to get him alone for a proper conversation before he leaves Atlanta.

I’ve been back and forth with Allen, who rose to national prominence as the anti-tech prophet on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, for a few weeks now, seeking an entry into the growing movement against AI. I’d come down to Georgia, a hot spot of data center resistance, to hear one of Allen’s lectures, which he’s been giving at locations across the country. But when I got to the event, he told me he had to leave immediately after.

Fortunately, his flight keeps getting pushed back, which means I can follow him around on various side quests—like this one, to meet some friends at a nearby restaurant. He manages to evade most of my questions about their identities, changing the topic to more interesting things, like the “inverse singularity” (his idea that humanity will approach a point where our intellect and creativity collapse as we rely increasingly on AI for information). Allen’s friends at the restaurant have similarly little information about me, it seems. On our way, one of them calls Allen to ask for an ETA. “I’m bringing a friend—well, a frenemy,” he says, giving me a dramatic side-eye.

There are delivery robots all over downtown Atlanta, one of a handful of major metropolitan areas where they’re being rolled out to bring people burgers or tacos. Allen catches up to this one—which, I’m alarmed to see, has luminous white lights shaped like eyes on its front—and reads a name off the side: “CJ.” I think of the title of Allen’s recent book, Dark Aeon: Transhumanism and the War Against Humanity, and wonder what happened to the delivery worker that this robot replaced. Its eyes look pathetically, limply, past me.

When people ask what I’m doing in Georgia, I give them something easy. People hate data centers, I say, so I’m trying to figure out if they hate AI too. That’s all true. But the topic has also consumed me. In all my years of reporting on energy and the environment, I have never seen anything like the type of vitriol leveled at data centers, or the near-religious fury that has built up around their construction, or the way this resistance seems to be uniting people from the complete opposite ends of the political spectrum.

As I’m writing this piece, a friend sends me a post from a “white Christian nationalism” account on X: a seemingly AI-generated cartoon of Smokey Bear standing in front of a burning data-center-like structure, with the text “ONLY YOU CAN PREVENT DATA CENTERS.” What is happening? my friend asks. I’ll try to explain.

Once upon a time, you may have been living next to a data center and never heard anything about it.

For the past few decades, data centers have been quietly built all over the US, largely in areas with both fiber connectivity and proximity to power—Silicon Valley and the DC area were popular choices. They helped stream Netflix or store stuff in the cloud or do any one of the countless stupid and important things we all do constantly online.

Data center resistance certainly has some of its roots in classic NIMBYism: Lots of Americans simply don’t trust stuff being built, in their backyards, by powerful companies for mysterious purposes. But the pace of the outrage that’s built up around the country is shocking. A recent Gallup poll showed that 70 percent of Americans would somewhat oppose or strongly oppose data center construction in their area. In the past few months, we’ve seen an attack on a pro-data-center council member (Indianapolis’ Ron Gibson); an attack on a tech CEO (OpenAI’s Sam Altman); data center moratoriums introduced in at least a dozen states (including Georgia) and passed in one (New York); and countless cities and counties passing their own bans or moratoriums, including in deep-red places like Hill County, Texas. People have been either arrested, detained, or escorted out while protesting data centers at public meetings in New Jersey, California, Wisconsin, and Indiana.

When I started reporting on data centers last year, Washington was, seemingly, completely unprepared for the backlash. It was unprepared for anything AI-related, really—small wonder for a Congress full of folks so old they can barely work their phones. Two of the first national politicians who I saw call out data center development were the right-wing populists Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie, who worried about how a proposed 10-year ban on state-level AI regulations could be leveraged to build data centers on private property. “Forcing eminent domain on people’s private properties to link the future Skynet is not very Republican,” Greene tweeted in June 2025.

Meanwhile, Steve Bannon, Trump’s erstwhile former adviser and a longtime critic of technology, was regularly addressing AI on War Room under Allen’s guidance. At the end of 2025, when the Trump administration tried to re-up a ban on regulation, a MAGA coalition, led by Bannon, was the one to stop it. Bannon told ABC News last fall that Allen was a key part of his plan: “He’s going to every conference possible, meeting people ... and I told him, I want you to go to every church that asks you. I want you to go to MAGA, Tea Party meetings. I want to get the base in the loop on this at the ground floor.”

The world of AI safety and ethics is incestuous, almost completely inaccessible to normies, and full of people who live mostly in London or the Bay Area. (Many high-profile AI safety researchers, in fact, are headquartered in one office block in Berkeley.) They all argue with each other about whether we’re going to be annihilated by an all-knowing superintelligence and should therefore slow down or halt AI development, or whether that same superintelligence will lead us to Nirvana and should therefore be developed as fast as possible.

Allen arrived in this world as an outsider, able to speak its nerdy language with a mass-appeal, conspiracy-tinted flair. Since his book on transhumanism was published in 2023, Allen has interviewed AI critic Gary Marcus, debated futurist Max More and tech ethicist Nell Watson, and given a talk with a top official from the Golden Gate Institute for AI. The same day that Max Tegmark, an AI safety scholar and the leader of the Future of Life Institute, did an event with Bernie Sanders, he appeared on War Room with Allen and Bannon. The AI safety people began posting about Allen “in all their group chats,” one AI advocacy organization staffer told me. “Now everybody’s like, Joe! Joe! Joe!”

In late 2025, the Center for AI Safety recruited Allen to advise a bipartisan group on AI safety, dubbing it “Humans First,” a term Allen had been using as a kind of rallying cry. The organization’s goal was to figure out how to galvanize regular people around AI, to demand that politicians in Washington put guardrails on a technology that threatens to potentially upend the existence and purpose of humanity. (No pressure.) The event that brought me to Georgia was the second leg of Humans First’s maiden voyage, fresh off a few stops in Florida.

A motley audience filled about half a lecture hall at Georgia Tech that evening. Some were students, including members of a nascent AI safety club that had invited Allen. (Two told me they’d come only because of the posters put up around campus.) A camera guy from More Perfect Union, the leftist content channel that’s become a central hub for anti-data-center videos, hung around filming. Also in attendance was a well-heeled group of Atlantans in their thirties: two women with glossy, long hair and, seemingly, their partners.

Up front, Jeremy Ornstein, a slight Humans First staffer with wild hair, started us off. Like a surprising number of Humans First staffers, Ornstein has a background in climate organizing. It showed: “A tiny group of people in control are racing ahead faster than ever with power and profit,” he warned, in a familiar, almost Obama-style cadence.

Then Allen, sporting a belt with a big American flag buckle, strode up with a “Howdy, Georgia.” He stood before a whiteboard on which, earlier that day, he’d doodled a little Jetsons-style robot, a cheerful expression on its face as it aimed what looked like a ray gun at a group of stick figures with dazed expressions on their faces. “HUMANS FIRST,” Allen had written in big bubble letters, underlined four times.

Allen played clips of Sam Altman intercut with footage of Marshall Applewhite, the leader of Heaven’s Gate. He told us, in his booming east Tennessee dirge, that Heaven’s Gate believers are a good metaphor for what AI leaders believe: Humanity must leave behind our physical bodies to ascend to the heavens, to meet the superintelligent beings living on the other side of the Hale-Bopp Comet. Everyone laughed a little nervously.

Allen’s lectures follow a familiar pattern: jarringly right-wing talking points (at Georgia Tech, a Great Replacement joke!) smashed together with hallucinogenic nightmare descriptions of our future (the idea that a globalist cabal of tech oligarchs want to replace all of humanity with robots). A lot of it can sound completely insane, until you remember: Oh, right. Elon Musk does own a brain-chip implantation company. Sam Altman has blogged about how humans will “be the biological bootloader for digital intelligence and then fade into an evolutionary tree branch.”

“Even if they were to create machines that were smarter than you, even if they created machines more powerful than you, you would have to continue to fight, because if you don't, you're a weakling,” Allen told the room. “If you don’t, you lay down and let the machine roll over you like a monster truck in a white-trash arena, and no one, no one wants that. No one but the most masochistic person wants that.” I found myself, surprisingly, suddenly, on the same page. Yeah! Hell yeah!

Allen ended the speech with a cri de coeur: “To the greenies in the room, I say, Earth first! Right? Greenies?” (Not sure if that was directed at me.) “To the patriots in the room, I say, America first! And for anyone in the room with blood pulsing in their veins, anyone in the room with fire in their minds and hearts, you have to remember, in a machine age, humans first.” I nearly leaped to my feet.

The “friends” Allen is now dragging me to meet turn out to be the well-dressed Atlantans I spotted at the talk, whom Allen had also just met. As he and I chase robots and drink whiskey before joining them, I ask if he has any nice memories of technology. He rattles off a couple typical alt-Gen-X-kid experiences: looking at Jane’s Addiction and Marilyn Manson’s websites; visiting a nascent Rotten.com. But the real shining moment in his relationship with the internet, Allen says, was discovering Ted Kaczynski.

In his book, Allen vividly recalls coming across the Unabomber’s manifesto in the late 1990s while “surfing the web” at his community college writing lab. Kaczynski, a brilliant mathematician undone by the failings of the modern world, wrote “Industrial Society and Its Future” while mailing bombs to universities and business executives; The Washington Post and The New York Times were both encouraged to publish the manifesto as a way to make him stop. “Uncle Ted made more sense than any peacenik or techie cares to admit,” Allen writes.

The influence is apparent. On War Room, Allen acts the part of a preacher at the pulpit warning us all of the coming dystopian age. A lot of his work is somewhat adjacent to body horror: What happens to our souls, he wonders, when our bodies and environments are increasingly digitized? I ask him why he thinks people hate data centers. He says: “If you ever see a fetus growing, and you see the brain growing and the neurons forming—it's amazing. Data centers, if you think about them as neurons of the Antichrist, that’s what we’re witnessing. The false messiah.”

As we arrive at the restaurant, Allen’s new “friends” make space at their table and order some bread. One of them is Hannah Cox, a political influencer with more than 100,000 followers on X. Cox’s husband works in tech and, she tells me, has been “completely blackpilled” by the possibility of AI taking everyone’s jobs. Cox herself is “politically homeless” and came to Allen’s talk even though he’s not, she says, someone she’d usually listen to.

Cox and I have very different social media feeds. When I follow up with her later, as the data center furor in Georgia reaches new heights, she tells me that everyone on her timeline seems to have agreed that data centers are being installed to conduct surveillance on the population. “It’s, I feel like, a ubiquitous fear,” she says. “Like it’s almost a bygone conclusion.”

Two days after I drop Allen off at the airport, I drive out to Troup County, about an hour and a half south of Atlanta, to meet with a local activist named Gage Bailey. Although I arrive at the coffee shop 10 minutes early, Bailey is waiting for me. A stack of documents sits in front of him, color-coded in different highlighters, next to a massive iced drink with a bunch of whipped cream piled on top.

Bailey, a Democrat with a degree in environmental science, first heard about data centers coming to town in the spring of 2025, when an acquaintance told him about one that might pop up on land that was formerly used by an industrial plastics developer. There were, he says, next to no public details about the project—how much power it was going to use, how much water it might draw from the local aquifer. He started doing research, compiling a 13-page memo extensively footnoted with primary sources, about the environmental impacts of data centers.

Like many of the earliest folks involved in the movement, much of which has its origins in environmental concerns spread by groups like local Sierra Club chapters, Bailey began networking with fellow environmental advocates, learning to file public records requests by trial and error. Now, he manages a 4,000-person Facebook group and has helped with anti-data-center efforts in neighboring counties. His co-moderator is running for local office as a Democrat on an anti-data-center platform.

There are a surprising number of Gage Baileys across Georgia, and more are rising up each day. National membership in data center opposition groups on Facebook has exploded in recent months, from under 100,000 in December to more than 500,000 by July. They’re not all Earth-hugging lefties. Shortly after I have coffee with Bailey, a woman in nearby Coweta County goes viral on right-wing media sounding the alarm that Georgia Power, the state’s deeply unpopular utility, is using various tactics to destroy her home and set up transmission lines for a