Jasmine Sun on What the AI Industry Got Wrong About the Public Backlash

Jasmine Sun, reporting from a road trip through Michigan and Wisconsin data-center fights, argues the AI industry misjudged where public backlash would land: not white-collar job loss or existential risk, but the physical, local reality of data centers themselves — construction noise, property-tax deals gone sour, and distrust built up from prior corporate promises (Foxconn, GM Janesville) that were broken. Polling she cites shows roughly 70-30 opposition to data centers among both Democrats and Republicans, with data centers polling worse than solar farms, nuclear plants, or chip factories with similar footprints. No new market calls, but she flags that even pro-buildout construction contractors she interviewed think AI is probably a bubble, that domestic backlash is already pushing hyperscalers toward buildout in Australia, Canada and Europe, and that she's grown more sympathetic to state-level data center moratoriums (Hochul in New York, Abbott's recent Texas curbs) as a mechanism to fix the power imbalance between small towns and hyperscalers.