A divided US is uniting over one cause. The fight here is just beginning

Up in the Blue Mountains, the locals in Katoomba are angry. Sam Altman, the founder of Open AI, thinks Australia could become the data centre capital of the world one day, and the process is already well under way. These are the buildings that house all the IT equipment needed to make AI work, and Westpac estimates there’s $155 billion worth of investment in them in the pipeline. But that pipeline got plugged in Katoomba. A proposed data centre there would have brought noise to the area. If it’s anything like most data centres, it would have been a heroic drain on electricity and water. It would have employed five people. The Blue Mountains mayor called it a “pile of crap”. Now the company is about to withdraw.

You might think that’s a pretty normal story. But in this case that’s exactly the point. It’s extremely normal. In America, where just under half the world’s data centres are, it’s become normal enough to make your head spin. Residents in Georgia complain of having undrinkable water. In Arizona, they’ve been wearing noise-cancelling headphones and earplugs because of the relentless humming, and it hasn’t been enough. In Virginia, Maryland, Ohio and Illinois, the data centres use so much electricity the price of power has spiked. Backlash is stalling new developments in Kentucky and Texas. Voters in Festus, Missouri ejected city council members who supported a new data centre.

There is probably no issue in the country that energises more local activism, and unifies a more politically diverse cohort. A Gallup poll showed more than 70 per cent of Americans oppose having a data centre in their local area. That’s comfortably more than those who oppose hosting a nuclear power plant. In fact, at no point in the poll’s history were nuclear power plants as unpopular as that.

I suspect we’re looking at the next great political fault line – especially in the US where it seems the most likely thing to collapse the MAGA edifice. Here I mean more than just the building of data centres. I mean the whole AI project. Data centres are an especially potent issue because they are concrete and symbolic at once, enlivening every level of grievance. They are a direct assault on life at the local level, in the service of a behemoth people largely don’t trust.

If this is the age of anxiety, of deep social and economic insecurity, AI is its most powerful anxiety-inducing engine. People are watching companies slash hundreds of jobs at a time because of it. They’re hearing AI engineers seriously entertain the idea it will wipe out our species. No other technology has companies refusing to release their latest product because it’s too dangerous to be let loose. And no technology with all that devastating potential is developing too fast for us to comprehend. Now people are being asked to sacrifice their water for it.

Among Trump voters alone, 80 per cent want more AI regulation. On this they have champions as disparate as Steve Bannon and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And in the opposite corner, they have Donald Trump himself: backed by tech billionaires, advised by AI investors, trying to pass legislation that would ban states from regulating it. Here is Trump, hero of the working class, fighting for a technology they’re increasingly fearing in an epochal way.

The edifice is beginning to crack. A few weeks ago, Trump made the first, tiny gesture towards regulation, signing an executive order asking tech companies to share their new AI with the administration for security review for 30 days before releasing it to the public. To be clear, it’s voluntary. It doesn’t stop the AI being released, even if it’s dangerous. At most it allows the US government to prepare some defences against a new AI tool before it goes public, assuming it could do that within 30 days. In short, it’s almost nothing.

But almost nothing is a little something. And that’s big coming from a president who scrapped all of his predecessor’s AI-regulation with one of his first executive orders; a president who said, in his own inimitable style, “the AI industry is a beautiful baby, and you don’t want rules to get in the way of a beautiful baby when it’s taking its first steps”. Even if Trump’s latest executive order is mostly symbolic, it’s telling that it’s a symbol he thinks he needs to project.

Australians share a similar anxiety. This week’s Lowy poll showed 64 per cent of us think the risks of AI outweigh the benefit. That’s quite a statement given AI is promising us everything from winning wars and rescuing the economy to curing cancer. It’s a 12 percentage point increase in just two years, and that’s before the data centre boom has hit our local communities in earnest. We’re a long way from the American experience, but our anxieties are beginning to align.

Tellingly, though, the politics are not. Here, the Trump role is being played by the Albanese government, whose official position is that AI will be a boon for productivity, and that it requires no specific regulation. It insists the policy question isn’t about whether AI is good or bad, but rather who owns and benefits from it. Its most recent economic growth figures owed most of what’s good in them to the data centre investment boom. We’re along for the ride because we can’t control it anyway, so we might as well take the benefit.

Now, here’s Pauline Hanson at the National Press Club last week: “AI bids to transform the global economy. It will affect everyone’s lives, including their daily lives, their relationships, indeed their environment. It has the potential to dramatically affect the lives of human beings, the consequences of which may be still unknown. Therefore, AI should not be left entirely to self-regulation. Public trust is essential for widespread adoption. The Albanese government’s response to the coming of AI is largely to leave it in the hands of corporations with little regulation to ensure that the industry operates in the public interest.”

The Greens and teals agree. But among those laying claim to the crown, Hanson is alone. If populist politics is chiefly about giving expression to people’s anxieties, and if we’re in a populist age, you tell me who has the better pitch.

Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author, academic and regular columnist.

The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up here.