In the AI battle, David can beat Goliath 

UPHE’s cofounder and president, Dr. Brian Moench, had an op-ed in Utah News Dispatch about Utah residents’ battle against big AI industry invasion.

Artificial Intelligence and the data centers where those electrons buzz around are accomplishing remarkable national unity. Everyone hates them. Eighty percent of Americans want rules for AI safety and security even if it means developing AI more slowly. Seventy-six percent say AI information is not trustworthy. Seventy percent of Americans don’t want an AI data center constructed in their community; environmental and resource concerns, like water and electricity use, were the primary reasons. A majority of Americans believe AI will do more harm than good to their daily lives. During several recent commencement exercises, speakers lauding an AI future to young graduates have been lustily booed. 

AI is about as unpopular as President Donald Trump’s ballroom, and even touches on the same visceral anti-elitism. The Marie Antoinette-inspired condescension of “Let them eat large language models” is not exactly winning over the peasants. Pope Leo released a 42,000 word “papal encyclical” on AI, a general indictment of the damage of AI on humanity. 

This issue is not left versus right, but top versus. bottom, David versus Goliath. The world’s wealthiest individuals and corporations are trying to force their will upon communities with little regard for the broader consequences. Despite a clear lack of popular support, AI data center proposals are still popping up all over the country like the measles epidemic. Why is that?

First, the White House and their allies are playing the boogeyman card, making vague and unsupported claims that the American way of life is under existential threat if China summits the Mt. Everest of AI supremacy first, therefore tolerating your neighborhood data center is your patriotic duty. This straw man argument allows Big Tech to fight off substantive regulations, intimidate state officials, and receive lucrative tax breaks nationwide.

 In ridiculing Utahns who oppose Kevin O’Leary’s data center “Death Star,” Gov. Spencer Cox scolded Utahns, insisting it was our national security “obligation” to accept it because, “If China had gotten that piece of technology first — that could exploit the vulnerabilities of almost every major company, and government entity in our country — it’s over, we’re done folks.” O’Leary made the same argument to Tucker Carlson. Carlson didn’t buy it and neither should we. O’Leary went so far as to accuse his opponents of being Chinese spies.

We’ve been sold this vague national security threat many times before, and no state has suffered as much from this sales pitch as Utah. Utahns were lied to about the downwind radiation from Nevada nuclear weapons testing, sold to us as necessary to thwart the threat of communism. Hundreds of thousands of us became downwinder victims of that sales pitch. A similar rationale was used to sell the country on the Vietnam War. We were told we had to invade Iraq because an attack with “weapons of mass destruction” from Saddam Hussein was imminent. We are being sold the same paranoia now to justify attacking Iran. 

According to many AI experts, China is actually running a different AI race than American companies, with different goals and a different finish line. They say the AI race is between American corporations not between the U.S. and China. United Nations officials criticize the collusion between these corporations and the U.S. military as establishing an economy of genocide.

Beyond invoking the China straw man, Big Tech can also offset their unpopularity with their money. From the Oval Office to County Commissioners and everything in between, money is essential for American electoral success.

Utah Senate President Stuart Adams, “King MIDA” (the Military Installation Development Authority that approved Stratos), took in plenty of money from MIDA-connected donors after he approved the project. The king of Big Tech, Elon Musk, poured nearly $300 million into Trump’s coffers for the 2024 election. The next six largest billionaire donors also gifted Republicans a combined $700 million. Most of the money being assembled for Big Tech’s assault on this year’s midterms will also go to Republicans. 

Big Tech is also buying the silence of Democrats, but with pocket change. The Financial Times reports that the Democratic establishment is telling their Congressional wannabes to not upset the AI industry, hoping that with enough quiet groveling some of the scraps of the $300 million they plan to spend on the midterms will fall to them this year.

Public opposition to data centers is exploding nationwide. There are 78 state and local initiatives to enact a ban or moratorium and that number is growing daily. Protecting Utah from dozens of new AI data centers is a battle of Biblical proportions and importance. But David has taken down Goliath before, and sustained citizen opposition can do it again.