Data centers are now a midterm issue, even in Brooklyn

On Thursday evening, I slipped on my neon yellow heels and a floral mini dress. It’s New York, so I can wear whatever I want to a midterm election event full of media types, techies, policy advocates, and, well, does anyone else even exist at these things? I walked into the dimly blue-lit Brooklyn warehouse and was surprised to see the room already filling up.

Newsreel, the media company founded by former Forbes and Newsweek reporter Jack Brewster, hosted the event, and the lineup was heavy-hitting. Kenneth Schlenker, co-founder of the focus app Opal, sat down for a fireside chat about “the state of attention,” and Aryan Ranjan, who built the campaign management software Baraza, gave a midterm forecast. I, meanwhile, was moderating a panel on data centers.

Brewster said the goal was for people to “put their phones away and talk to each other about the election, five days out.”

As the evening progressed, however, one topic consumed nearly every conversation: AI, data centers, and the backlash against the growing technocracy.

Lately, as a tech reporter, I’ve noticed a growing chasm between tech and everyone else. I spend most of my days talking to people who see the benefits of AI, who are so ambitious in building it and so optimistic that it will succeed that, when I talk to people beyond the tech world, I forget how ugly it all seems to them. Outside the tech bubble, data centers and AI have become such an intense ballot-box issue that they could sway some midterm races on November 3.