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Conservative group Humans First carries its data center revolt to five AI companies' doors
Humans First, Amy Kremer's conservative group, made more than 35 stops on a tour of over 8,000 miles against data center construction. It began this year as a left-right coalition; only the conservative wing is still touring.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
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What happened
- The tour ended on Monday with visits to Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta and Nvidia.
- The group's 13-point Data Center Policy calls for community control over planning, opposes data centers raising power prices and condemns their use for unconstitutional surveillance.
- Amy Kremer is a veteran conservative organiser who has led earlier cross-country bus tours promoting tea party positions and denying the 2020 election result.
- At rallies, Kremer said, growing numbers of people raised AI's wider risks to society, beyond the immediate local effects of data centers.
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Why it matters
- contradiction The group says it is "not even anti-data center" while its bus reads "AI Data Center Revolt", so a developer meeting its supporters cannot yet tell whether the charter is a list of terms or a case for refusal.
- constraint Because the charter opposes data centers pushing up electricity prices, an operator's power deal with a local utility becomes something residents expect to see and contest.
- exposure If rally talk keeps moving toward existential risk, a planning hearing can draw objections that no water-saving design at a single site can answer.
On this record, the cross-party reading of data center opposition has one organised campaign behind it. NBC News called anti-data-center sentiment "perhaps the most uniting theme today" [12], yet the group it followed now draws only from the right [4]. The coverage does not describe a left-leaning group running a comparable tour.
The campaign that is running moves quickly. More than 35 stops in five weeks is at least seven a week [18], under an organiser who has run national bus tours before [6]. Amy Kremer put the grievance in residents' terms. "This technology is being shoved down people's throats," she said [8]. AI companies assume they can build billions of dollars of infrastructure without residents' input, she said, and "That's not the American way" [16].
The obvious objection from an operator is about scale. A touring party of Kremer, her husband, her daughter, staffers, security guards and a dog does not stop a substation [7]. I think that is right about the bus. The charter is harder to dismiss. It asks for community control over data center planning [5], and in my view that pulls each dispute down to the site and to whoever represents it before residents. Kylie Jane Kremer, a senior adviser to the group, said: "I want Big Tech to actually include the American people and allow them to have a seat at the table" [9].
The tour's last stops were the AI companies themselves [3], and that frames the choice for the operators who host them. An operator that leaves consent to its tenants saves the cost of its own community programme this quarter. The cost shows up later, at a contested hearing, where the operator answers for a tenant's reputation it did not build. Running consent in-house costs staff and money now, and it gives the operator control over what residents are promised.
The objections are also widening. NBC reported that during the tour, talk about AI moved from data centers' water use toward fears that the technology could wipe out billions of people [14]. A warning on X from former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon helped set that off, according to NBC [14]. "People across the country are definitely paying attention to the existential risk and what is coming out about that," Amy Kremer said [17].
For this quarter, the record supports budgeting for local consent site by site. It does not yet support treating the tour as a cause of lost sites, because the reporting does not record any project delayed or cancelled after a stop. Anthropic did not immediately respond to NBC's request for comment [15].
What to watch
- A left-leaning group launching its own organised tour or rejoining Humans First, which would test the cross-party reading directly.
- Local planning decisions at sites on the tour's route that adopt the charter's language on community control or electricity prices.
- Responses from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta or Nvidia to the charter, and whether they pass consent commitments down to the operators that host them.