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He Ran on Fighting Data Centers. Now, He’s Going to Congress
Welcome back to Power Play! Senior writer Molly Taft has been tackling topics around this midterm season’s biggest issue: data centers. With the elections over, Power Play will be going on hiatus. But if you’ve got a question or thought for a story, feel free to shoot Molly an email at [email protected] or reach them securely on Signal at mollytaft.76.
If there’s any incoming congressional freshman who understands how voter anger about data centers supercharged this week’s election, it’s Will Lawrence.
A former member of the Democratic Socialists of America who helped found the Sunrise Movement, Lawrence centered his campaign on opposition to data centers from the beginning, months before many other candidates had caught on. It helped him win a challenging primary in Michigan’s 7th Congressional District against much-better-funded opponents, and this week, he defeated incumbent Republican Tom Barrett in one of the most expensive House races in the country. (Elon Musk’s America PAC chipped in $340,000 against Lawrence.)
For this last edition of Power Play, I caught up with Lawrence about what the future holds for data center developers and for voters concerned about them, and what his plans are when he gets to Washington, DC, next year.
MOLLY TAFT: I’ve seen some post-election takes that data centers weren’t as big of a factor for voters as media coverage may suggest. I’m curious as to what you heard from voters in the last weeks of the campaign about how data centers may be competing with other big issues in this election.
WILL LAWRENCE: What are the two headlines on the election? It's been about costs, and it’s about corruption. Data centers speak directly to costs and to the legalized corruption that's become ordinary business in our rigged economy. They’re taking tax breaks, they’re sucking up water, they’re proposing to use double or triple the total capacity of the grid in Michigan, they’re threatening people’s home values.
All of this is being done because the playing field is fundamentally slanted away from local communities and towards these mega corporations. People have attempted to exert community control and local oversight, and they've been challenged in court by these Silicon Valley companies.
You see an economy and a political order that is favoring the wealthy few over the many. It really makes a mockery of democracy itself. Why is it that we keep having to play whack-a-mole against these individual projects? It shows that people in Silicon Valley and Wall Street and DC have made these decisions for us, and it speaks of the lack of economic democracy.
There have been a lot of announcements from big tech companies in recent weeks, making promises to be more transparent, to use less water, to not use NDAs—OpenAI released a bunch of commitments the day after the election. Do you think these compromises are enough to sway people?
I haven’t seen any of the specific proposals. But if they’re feeling the heat, that’s good. What they've offered so far has been completely inadequate, and it's going to take a lot to win back trust.