Throughout the last few decades of cinema, data centers have mostly appeared as “server rooms,” or occasionally “server farms” when that room was exceptionally big. For the bulk of their early film appearances, these rows of server racks functioned more or less as plot device/set piece hybrids wherein the protagonists could hack, steal, bypass, or reroute some technobabble MacGuffin while surrounded by rows of blinking boxes. These onscreen centers of yesteryear offered (now quaintly) “futuristic” heist moments, like in Mission: Impossible or Entrapment. These locations were opportunities for product placement, like in Iron Man 2, which gave the Oracle logo (and Larry Ellison) ample screen time and positive PR as friends of Tony Stark. More often, they were sinister extensions of the antagonist’s master plan, like in Hackers or Skyfall.
A quarter of the way through the 21st century, the cinematic data center itself finally became a villain in 2025’s Eddington. Set in the throes of the 2020’s early pandemic collective insanity, Eddington’s data center is depicted as a job-creating inevitability with bipartisan support that the audience shudders at from their future vantage point. Thankfully, today’s real-world small-town citizens are better informed than those in Ari Aster’s dark comedy. Increasingly aware of the myriad threats data centers pose to their community, people from all around the country, from across the political spectrum, are banding together to stop these scourges from entering their communities.
The data center development boom of the past few years has been a top-down effort from Silicon Valley and its vassal politicians to undergird the coming “AI revolution.” But now, a few years into that brave new world, the output of these models is increasingly seen as brain-breaking sycophantic chatbots, slop animation of cucked fruits, or deeply evil weapons of war and surveillance, rather than the cancer-curing, work week-shortening bill of goods AI boosters have been trying to sell. Accordingly, the small towns slated to take on the energy-hogging, environment-polluting, and incessantly buzzing centers that make this all possible are starting to fight back.
Historically, corporations were able to get facilities with similarly harmful tradeoffs approved and built by waving the carrot of “jobs” in front of politicians and voters. Data centers, however, don’t even offer that sort of Faustian value proposition. Not only do they exist to serve the technology being developed to replace jobs elsewhere, but these centers also provide vanishingly few real jobs. While their construction creates some temporary contract jobs, only a few dozen permanent positions materialize per center built.
Research recently published by Food and Water Watch found that, as of 2024, fewer than 23,000 people across the U.S. had permanent positions at these centers. Their findings also showed that in Virginia, the “data center capital of the world,” with hundreds already built and hundreds more in the pipeline, “data centers generate just 1 permanent job for every $13 million invested”—100 times more costly than in other sectors.
But this godawful value proposition seems downright prudent when compared to a JPMorganChase center deal recently exposed in New York Focus. Approved in a sparsely attended 2024 public hearing, New York’s Rockland County gave the country’s largest bank $77 million in tax subsidies to build its data center in the hamlet of Orangeburg, which has a population of under 5,000. In return, the center would provide one permanent job.
In the Focus article, the head of Rockland’s Industrial Development Agency (IDA), Steven Porath, pooh-poohed the notion of assessing the deal’s merits in cost-per-job as “outdated” and claimed such a narrow assessment “doesn’t take into account all the other economic factors of that data center sitting in our community.”
But the optimistic cost-benefit analysis Porath shared highlighted the proposed boons for private individuals’ wallets and public coffers while failing to account for any of the known downsides that they would also be the ones to shoulder: increased utility bills and potentially contaminated drinking water, for example. This and Porath and the Rockland IDA’s back-to-back multi-million-dollar data center subsidy deals in mostly empty public hearings have resulted in Orangeburg turning into something of an overnight data center hub. But with the long-term environmental impacts of these facilities still indeterminate, policymakers are now proposing halts on further development at the state and federal levels until proper testing can be done.
In other parts of the country, some governments and constituents at the local level have already deemed data centers existential threats and are moving rapidly to stave them off rather than sitting around waiting for a slow, uncertain rescue from on high. The small town of Festus, Missouri, just removed half its city council (and is still calling for the mayor’s head) after the council ignored the public’s concerns and ram through approval for a $6 billion center. The Oklahoma City Council unanimously approved a moratorium on data center construction through the rest of the year. One California city just east of LA has taken an even more proactive approach to dealing with the problem.
On Monday, Monterey Park became the first city in California to permanently ban data center construction within its borders, as first reported over at Brian Merchant’s Substack. Voting unanimously on three ordinances, the council designated centers as public nuisances that will not be allowed to poison the community. The Council’s decision came after hours of public comment filled with residents speaking out (and weeks of activist pushback) against the 247,000-square-foot AI data center proposed and soon after abandoned by Australian asset manager HMC StratCap.
Monterey Park’s victory, while a heartening underdog story, also provides a blueprint for any other cities and towns across the nation wishing to prevent Big Tech and Wall Street from dropping vampiric buildings into their neighborhoods. When citizens are informed and organized, corporatist agency heads and councilpersons have a much harder time sneaking in detrimental sweetheart deals. If enough people go NIMBY mode on data centers, this AI bubble might just finally burst.
Sure, future cinematic depictions of this anti-data center moment might not be as action-packed as Tom Cruise hacking while hanging from a wire, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be compelling. After all, the idea of a movie about the foundation of Facebook was once a punchline, and now the sequel is about to drop.
