Data Centers and the Emerging Contentious Politics of AI

Data centers are the physical substrate of the AI economy, and their siting decisions have begun to produce a recognizable contentious politics — zoning fights, water and energy disputes, local-coalition mobilization against tech firms. Data Centers and the Emerging Contentious Politics of AI catalogs that mobilization across U.S. localities, building a panel of siting proposals, community-board records, and protest events linked to underlying electricity and water draw. The project is being framed for a registered report and is positioned to feed back into broader work on how the political economy of AI infrastructure differs from earlier rounds of industrial siting.