He Ran on Fighting Data Centers. Now, He’s Going to Congress

Save Story Save this story Save Story Save this story Welcome back to Power Play ! Senior writer Molly Taft has been tackling topics around this midterm season’s biggest issue: data centers. With the elections over, Power Play will be going on hiatus. But if you’ve got a question or thought for a story, feel free to shoot Molly an email at [email protected] or reach them securely on Signal at mollytaft.76. If there’s any incoming congressional freshman who understands how voter anger about data centers supercharged this week’s election, it’s Will Lawrence. A former member of the Democratic Socialists of America who helped found the Sunrise Movement, Lawrence centered his campaign on opposition to data centers from the beginning, months before many other candidates had caught on. It helped him win a challenging primary in Michigan’s 7th Congressional District against much-better-funded opponents, and this week, he defeated incumbent Republican Tom Barrett in one of the most expensive House races in the country. (Elon Musk’s America PAC chipped in $340,000 against Lawrence.) For this last edition of Power Play , I caught up with Lawrence about what the future holds for data center developers and for voters concerned about them, and what his plans are when he gets to Washington, DC, next year. MOLLY TAFT: I’ve seen some post-election takes that data centers weren’t as big of a factor for voters as media coverage may suggest. I’m curious as to what you heard from voters in the last weeks of the campaign about how data centers may be competing with other big issues in this election. WILL LAWRENCE: What are the two headlines on the election? It's been about costs, and it’s about corruption. Data centers speak directly to costs and to the legalized corruption that's become ordinary business in our rigged economy. They’re taking tax breaks, they’re sucking up water, they’re proposing to use double or triple the total capacity of the grid in Michigan, they’re threatening people’s home values. All of this is being done because the playing field is fundamentally slanted away from local communities and towards these mega corporations. People have attempted to exert community control and local oversight, and they've been challenged in court by these Silicon Valley companies. You see an economy and a political order that is favoring the wealthy few over the many. It really makes a mockery of democracy itself. Why is it that we keep having to play whack-a-mole against these individual projects? It shows that people in Silicon Valley and Wall Street and DC have made these decisions for us, and it speaks of the lack of economic democracy. There have been a lot of announcements from big tech companies in recent weeks, making promises to be more transparent, to use less water, to not use NDAs—OpenAI released a bunch of commitments the day after the election. Do you think these compromises are enough to sway people? I haven’t seen any of the specific proposals. But if they’re feeling the heat, that’s good. What they've offered so far has been completely inadequate, and it's going to take a lot to win back trust. There was just a new hyperscale data center proposed in the last week before the election in Delhi Township, south of Lansing, close to Mason. There was an announcement made by a local economic development agency and a would-be developer. They said, “This is going to be different. We're going to do a six-month community engagement process before we even decide if we are going to build a data center, but if we do, it's going to have all these protections. And we want to hear from you.” The township board scrambled [to put together] an emergency meeting. Two hundred fifty people showed up, probably more than that—it was overflowing. And people said, OK, the answer is still no. It’s going to take a lot of work [from the companies] to convince anybody that anything has actually changed. Have any tech companies reached out to you? I haven’t spoken to any of these companies. When you go to Washington in January, what are some of the first policies you’re going to try and work on around data centers? I'm going to fight for a federal data center moratorium, and along with it, a pause on advanced AI development. The risks simply do not match up to the benefits at this time. We've got to have a conversation across all of the different stakeholders to determine what an appropriate regulatory agenda looks like. Would that be a pause similar to what Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed , where it's contingent on AI safety regulations? Yes. Safety here also means making sure that we're not sacrificing people and the planet to build data centers. We need to have appropriate regulations on both of those aspects. What about using oversight or investigatory levers? Certainly—it makes sense. We build cars here in Michigan. If GM put a car on the market that had a 1 percent chance of exploding on the highway and killing everybody inside, it would never go to market. If it did, they would be sued out of existence. But these Silicon Valley companies, they tell us that they're actively developing a product that has a 10 percent chance of killing everybody on planet Earth. I mean, what are we talking about? This is obviously reckless endangerment, according to any existing standard of consumer protection law. There should be investigations into that, and there should be suits filed to provide a sanction against companies for engaging in unacceptable risks that are a public hazard. What We’re Writing It’s been a busy week for the WIRED newsroom! My colleague Tori Elliott and I tackled how data centers factored into the blue tsunami that swept the country on Tuesday. (Spoiler alert: Voters really, really want regulations on data centers.) Over on the Business desk, Caroline Haskins looked at how the election results are sending tech bros scrambling to find other locations to build data centers— including in space . And earlier this week, WIRED’s global editorial director, Katie Drummond, sat down with New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani to talk about his first year in office. He told her that the movement against data centers gives him “a real sense of hope.” Read more from Katie and the mayor here . What We’re Reading The Hill got a scoop that some environmental groups have begun to talk with tech companies about setting standards for data centers on everything from emissions to community engagement. ProPublica reports on how interior secretary Doug Burgum stands to gain from a possible data center build-out on public lands. Anti-data-center activists broke into a Microsoft data center construction site in Amsterdam on Friday as part of a wave of planned protests across Europe. Reuters has more .