Two days after I drop Allen off at the airport, I drive out to Troup County, about an hour and a half south of Atlanta, to meet with a local activist named Gage Bailey. Although I arrive at the coffee shop 10 minutes early, Bailey is waiting for me. A stack of documents sits in front of him, color-coded in different highlighters, next to a massive iced drink with a bunch of whipped cream piled on top.
Bailey, a Democrat with a degree in environmental science, first heard about data centers coming to town in the spring of 2025, when an acquaintance told him about one that might pop up on land that was formerly used by an industrial plastics developer. There were, he says, next to no public details about the project—how much power it was going to use, how much water it might draw from the local aquifer. He started doing research, compiling a 13-page memo extensively footnoted with primary sources, about the environmental impacts of data centers.
Like many of the earliest folks involved in the movement, much of which has its origins in environmental concerns spread by groups like local Sierra Club chapters, Bailey began networking with fellow environmental advocates, learning to file public records requests by trial and error. Now, he manages a 4,000-person Facebook group and has helped with anti-data-center efforts in neighboring counties. His co-moderator is running for local office as a Democrat on an anti-data-center platform.
There are a surprising number of Gage Baileys across Georgia, and more are rising up each day. National membership in data center opposition groups on Facebook has exploded in recent months, from under 100,000 in December to more than 500,000 by July. They’re not all Earth-hugging lefties. Shortly after I have coffee with Bailey, a woman in nearby Coweta County goes viral on right-wing media sounding the alarm that Georgia Power, the state’s deeply unpopular utility, is using various tactics to destroy her home and set up transmission lines for a data center—seemingly fulfilling Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Skynet prophecy.
Bailey is hardly the type to watch War Room—he’s focused more on the slog of passing local ordinances than on Allen’s nightmarish visions of our robotic future. But as we talk, I wonder how Allen’s statements about tech oligarchs might land with him. Bailey learned last year that Google was the eventual tenant of the nearby data center project. He and some other environmental advocates had one meeting with Google in November, but afterward the tech giant ghosted them. Working with the company is “not going well,” he tells me. (In a statement to WIRED, Jamal Jessie, an Atlanta-based manager of community and workforce development at Google, said the company was focused on “direct, collaborative engagement with local schools, nonprofits, and civic organizations to deliver tangible regional benefits” and had formed a “$1 million partnership” with a local group helping people with their energy bills.) Bailey, who hasn’t been able to find a job in environmental science and works full-time at a convenience store, has a lot of ire for the world’s most powerful corporations trying to build AI in his backyard. “I don’t see a scenario, at least in the immediate future, in which we’re going to be able to trust these tech companies,” he says.
Bailey’s Facebook group is still growing, and there’s been minimal political unrest so far, he says: Right or left, all members are opposed to data centers, and most of them are deeply skeptical of AI. These unlikely coalitions seem to be holding strong outside of Troup County, too. At a recent anti-data-center demonstration in New Jersey, I asked one mask-wearing protester—who told me they use “any” pronouns and are deeply concerned about the “ethics” of AI—about the right-wing influence on the movement. They shrugged uneasily. “Any enemy of my enemy is, at least, my temporary ally,” they said.