> No one ever cared about DCs before now.

This isn't true. People were starting to mobilize against crypto datacenters in the late 2010s and early 2020s^[1][2], long before the current AI-fueled building frenzy.

> I think there’s a lot of social media influence from nation state competitors going on to try and slow SOTA development in the US.

It's fairly well documented that this is happening to some degree, but as above, foreign agents didn't conjure the anti-datacenter movement out of nothing. It's a fact that if the average crypto or AI datacenter moves in next door to you, there's a good chance it's going to crash your quality of life and the value of your property, and all in service of making a few fantastically rich guys even richer. Also, they are the same guys building a machine that they claim is going to destroy your livelihood. You don't need foreign agents to engineer a backlash here.

[1] https://e360.yale.edu/features/bitcoins-intensive-energy-dem... [2] https://www.texastribune.org/2025/10/09/texas-hood-county-cr...