The Republican Party was not the only group to take a hammering in last week’s U.S. midterm elections. Data centres, the gleaming air-conditioned behemoths powering the AI race around the world, fared spectacularly poorly: across 10 states and 41 ballots, voters backed restrictions or rejected pro-development proposals in all but one, and typically by a substantial margin.
The results sent a tremor through an industry already in turmoil after a series of company financial results indicated a profound shift in the U.S. political landscape: a growing movement of resistance that spans the political spectrum, uniting communities otherwise staunchly opposed on many of the issues within which data centres are entangled, from taxation and corporate regulation to, perhaps most divisive of all, energy and climate policy.
For the industry, it is a dangerous situation – one that has not gone unrecognised. A report into the future of AI in the UK published by the Sovereign AI Leadership (SAIL) taskforce, to which representatives from major companies including Nvidia and Microsoft contributed, looked at the situation across the Atlantic and concluded that “Britain has a window – we think of roughly 12 months – to build a compact that earns public consent before [the same] pattern takes hold.”
While it was issued as a warning to the sector, the rest of us might instead receive it as an open challenge.