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A year or so ago, many Americans had never heard of a data center. Today, these massive warehouse-type structures with an insatiable thirst for electricity and water are fast becoming the new “third rail” of U.S. politics. Sarah Longwell, the focus-group guru and TV pundit who writes for the “Never Trumper” site the Bulwark, said what she’s hearing from everyday voters is stunning.

“I’m in the middle of a huge countywide fight against data centers,” one small-town Georgia woman told a focus group, in a tape that Longwell played on a podcast. “People are showing up about their water already, and about 40 people are being pushed out of their homes. It’s just very personal.”

It’s the same here in Pennsylvania, where leaders in both parties, including Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, see data centers as an economic savior much as oil was in the 1860s. “We don’t want them!” exclaimed a Pittsburgh voter at the notion of these tech sites replacing shuttered steel mills. “It doesn’t matter who the governor is, who the mayor is. They’re all on board because it’s job creation.”

Not on board? The average American. As recently as last September, a poll conducted for the environmental site Heatmap found voters evenly divided on whether they’d support a data center built near their home. Just nine months later, its newest survey finds about seven in 10 people would now strongly oppose one — a steep and shockingly rapid decline in public support for the infrastructure of artificial intelligence, or AI.

Indeed, the trouble in the heartland for data centers has come so quickly it’s hard to say how much is driven by environmental complaints — such as noise and vibrations from data centers already up and running — or rising electric bills, and how much is simply white-hot rage at the tech billionaires getting even richer from AI, or the compliant politicians who’ve jumped on the bandwagon of their biggest donors.

Fortunately, we live in a thriving, well-oiled democracy in which our elected officials have their fingers on the pulse of the people and have rapidly shifted gears — to grab a pitchfork and join their furious constituents on the front lines of the war against data centers. Right …?

OK, you probably saw right through my lame sarcasm there. Instead, America’s elites, and their beat cops who exist less to enforce laws than to uphold the social order that’s made their bosses so powerful, refuse to believe that regular folks have rationally decided that new data centers are unwanted scars upon the land.

If you oppose data centers, they’ve decided, you must have been brainwashed by Chinese communist spies.

Or worse. You may even be a terrorist.

Last Thursday, the Republicans on Capitol Hill who lead the House Energy and Commerce Committee sent a letter to Trump regime officials urging an investigation into whether China — as part of a 21st-century nuclear arms race to become the planet’s dominant AI force — is secretly funding all these farmers and suburban moms fighting data centers.

It’s an outlandish and unsubstantiated claim. Indeed, some of the GOP’s supporting evidence comes from a “think tank” called — and you cannot make this stuff up — the Bitcoin Policy Institute. Yet, anti-left conspiracy theories are sure to find a sympathetic ear in Donald Trump’s rabidly pro-AI government.

“It’s not organic and local, some of this is foreign-sourced dark money coming in,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum — formerly the governor of oil-drenched North Dakota — said at a May event hosted by the right-wing site Breitbart News. “The people who used to fight on climate change have shifted.”

That shift would have to be the result of Manchurian Candidate-level brainwashing from Beijing, and not because studies have shown that at least 56% of the massive amounts of new energy needed to run these data centers comes from fossil fuels — oil, gas, and coal — right when the global climate crisis is accelerating. Last week, the World Meteorological Organization warned the planet should expect record heat through 2030.

Dang, those Chinese spies are good.

At least we can take comfort in the fact that the nation’s leading law enforcement organizations are working hard to respect the all-American First Amendment rights to free speech and dissent of these data center activists, much as they did for the civil rights marchers and anti-war protesters of the 1960s and ‘70s.

LOL.

Also last week, the Intercept reported on a document — later confirmed by The Inquirer — from the Delaware Valley Intelligence Center, which is hosted by the Philadelphia Police Department, that revealed that cops are sifting through social media posts by anti-data center activists, convinced they pose a newfangled terror threat.

“Domestic violent extremists (DVEs) are likely interested in targeting artificial intelligence (AI) data centers, posing a physical and cyber threat to infrastructure in the Philadelphia regional area,” stated a December alert from the intelligence fusion center, which coordinates local, state, and national law enforcement.

These fusion centers, you may recall, were established after the 9/11 attacks to prevent another World Trade Center-level incident. Today, “the terrorists” are apparently folks in places like East Whiteland Township or Vineland, N.J., who, in the immortal words of David Byrne, dress like students, or dress like housewives, or in a coat and a tie. Philly cops said in the report they are on the lookout for potential acts of vandalism and something they called “more disruptive First Amendment activity.”

I’m pretty sure your right to be nonviolently disruptive in America — without the government working to suppress those rights — is exactly why James Madison wrote up the First Amendment back in 1789.

To be clear, vandalism or arson or other destruction at data centers would be wrong — but I’m struggling to find many examples of this. There have been a couple of reports of shots being fired at the homes of a pro-data center politician and AI impresario Sam Altman, which is deplorable. But the anti-data center movement is, overall, remarkably nonviolent. The threat to the system isn’t the bullet but the ballot, and they know it.

“The more they try to silence us, the louder we’ll get,” Karen Feridun, the veteran environmental activist from Berks County, Pa., who founded the Pennsylvania Data Center Resistance group on Facebook, told me on Sunday. She noted that law enforcement also spied on her anti-fracking efforts in the 2010s, so she is not surprised.

Feridun — who, as far as I know, does not speak a word of Mandarin — said activists see the law enforcement monitoring as an effort to intimidate them, but it is only fueling fears that the AI powered by data centers will be used for broader domestic surveillance.

Indeed, we have never seen such a disconnect between our clueless elites, from Silicon Valley to Capitol Hill and the hallways of Harrisburg, and everyday folks who are filled with fury.

That communication breakdown peaked a few weeks ago when an obscure real estate executive was tapped to address the graduating seniors at the University of Central Florida, and didn’t think twice about hailing the glorious AI future that 22-year-olds see as obliterating their job prospects. The speaker recoiled in shock at the overwhelming boos.

Some observers argue that folks in the rural towns or sprawling exurbs fighting the data centers see them not just as ugly, noisy neighbors, but also as a proxy for the threat to the social order posed by AI as it disrupts the workplace or classroom learning.

But in reality, the rage runs even deeper. It’s anger not only at the machine, but the world that created it — a world where the gap has never been wider between the billionaires of AI (and, this week, the first trillionaire) and us regular schlubs, struggling to pay the electric bill or fill the gas tank before our boss replaces us with a robot.

Making matters worse is the realization that both political parties are in the back pocket of Big Tech and their crypto-bro allies, who are spending well over $300 million to buy the 2026 midterms. If anything, the hypocrisy of top Democrats like Shapiro or Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, who claim to be fighting climate change while pushing for these energy hogs, is more infuriating than the predictable “Drill, baby, drill!” chants of Neanderthal Republicans.

They just don’t get it. They spend all day in their cloistered back offices, counting their future cash, and all night at swank political fundraisers, convinced that anyone who’s not on board with their gravy train must be a deranged radical from Antifa™, or a useful idiot for the International Communist Conspiracy.

They see the pitchforks and the flaming tiki torches and are squinting to see a “Made in China” label. They miss the righteous wrath, born in the USA.

Recently, I attended a showing of a fascinating documentary called A Chip Odyssey that laid out the history of how that small self-governing island democracy of Taiwan came to manufacture around 90% of the world’s most advanced semiconductor chips.

It was not at all, as President Donald Trump keeps insisting, because Taiwan “stole our chip industry.” The real reason is one Americans need to understand: if China ever manages to take control of Taiwan, it will cause a U.S. and global economic disaster that would make the Strait of Hormuz blockade look like child’s play.

It would halt America’s global dominance in the field of artificial intelligence, since U.S. AI companies all depend on sophisticated chips fabricated by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., known as TSMC. As the Wall Street Journal put it, “the island is now the factory floor” for U.S. leadership in AI.

Yet, Trump, before, during, and after his May summit with Xi Jinping, has continued to belittle Taiwan. He discussed a planned $14 billion U.S. arms sale with Xi, despite a long-standing pledge to Taiwan, made by President Ronald Reagan, that U.S. weapons support for the island would never be subject to China’s approval.

Trump has now frozen the weapons sale, saying it could be “a bargaining chip” with Beijing.

The president has repeatedly hinted at his reluctance to defend a place that’s “9,500 miles away.” And he frequently argues that the production of advanced chips could and should be moved to the United States.

My conversations with the director of A Chip Odyssey, Hsiao Chu-Chen, and coproducer Ben Tsiang (along with my recent trip to Taiwan) made clear why it will be years before the U.S. can onshore production of even a modest percentage of its chip needs. The film offers a moving history of how a small, poor island became a tech giant because it had no choice.

“I wanted to tell the history of Taiwan’s semiconductor industry, not just about the achievement itself, but how people strived to achieve what they did,” Hsiao told me over coffee in Philadelphia. Fifty years ago, the island was almost abandoned by the international community after the United Nations switched the China seat to Beijing and expelled Taiwan, she told me. “Taiwan is so tiny, with no minerals, so we needed to find a way we could survive.”

After consulting with Taiwanese American engineers working in the United States, the Taipei government decided to focus on high tech. In the mid-1970s, it licensed and paid for semiconductor technology transfer from RCA, a common process. Nothing was stolen — and, at the time, this technology wasn’t new or mainstream, and was only a minor focus at RCA.

Taiwanese engineers traveled to the United States to master manufacturing technology, returned, and vastly improved it. They began transferring it to the manufacture of consumer electronics such as watches, personal computers, and cell phones.

Fast-forward, when a brilliant Chinese American engineer and star at Texas Instruments named Morris Chang was recruited by Taipei in 1987 to advance its semiconductor industry. He conceived the idea of a “fab-less” process, where small companies in Taiwan and elsewhere, and huge ones in the U.S., could focus on design and research to constantly update the technology, while Taiwan would be the foundry that manufactured complex chips to their specifications.

For example, Hsiao explained, “TSMC makes chips based specifically on designs from Nvidia [a global leader in technology, based in California], so it is not competing with them.” And TSMC has built up the trust of its many U.S. and international partners because it never leaks information. In fact, it hardly ever allows journalists (myself included) within its sprawling precincts at the Hsinchu Science Park, an hour outside Taipei.

“The most important principle [of TSMC] is integrity,” said the film’s director. “Companies don’t have to worry that their technology will be stolen, as it has been in China.” Moreover, TSMC invests massively in research and development to keep its foundry on the cutting edge.

Fabricating chips “is not like manufacturing nails,” I was told by one scientist who studies TSMC and preferred not to be named, “but it is an intense, complex, and layered process. You need to update, improve the technology all the time.”

When Chang pioneered his “fab-less” concept, making Taiwan the world’s semiconductor foundry, it was a huge risk, but it paid off beyond his dreams.

“I understand that some Americans are anxious about losing leadership in the semiconductor industry, but Taiwan earned its place with decades of talent, tireless innovation,” producer Tsiang said intently. “It took daring investment across generations to build what we have today. That is what we were trying to show.

“But it is not a zero-sum game with America. Taiwan’s rise is deeply connected to collaboration with U.S. companies, and will be in the future.”

Indeed, the choice by companies such as Nvidia or Intel to outsource fabrication of chips to Taiwan was based on profit-seeking, since it vastly lowered costs.

The Americans could also rely on the massive Taiwanese production and talent ecosystem that feeds into TSMC. As the film shows, engineers there rotate in three shifts, so they are always present and are ready to show up at 2 a.m. if machinery needs adjusting.

Which brings us to the question of whether a huge chunk of the foundry production could easily be moved from Taiwan and installed in the United States, as Trump demands.

TSMC has committed $165 billion to build six “fabs” (as fabrication plants are called) in Phoenix. Yet, only one is operating, and one more will come online this year.

The difficulties are obvious. Besides far higher operating costs than in Taiwan and the far more casual American work ethic, there is the huge problem of finding the engineering talent in the United States — both to maintain complex machinery and oversee complex operating processes.

“In Taiwan, all the top university graduates go to TSMC,” Tsiang told me. “In the United States, the top university graduates go to Washington, D.C., or Silicon Valley. There is a real test in how the U.S. can develop a talent pool.”

Links are being established with the University of Arizona and other potential feeder schools to programs aimed at filling TSMC positions. But this is a process that will take years.

At present, the Phoenix fabs depend on around 2,000 Taiwanese engineers and staff. There are seven direct flights a week from Taipei to Phoenix.

In Taiwan, audiences tear up at showings of A Chip Odyssey as they listen to elderly scientists reminisce about their years of building TSMC from the ground up. I wish more Americans could see the film, but it is only available for now at special showings. (However, you can watch the trailer as well as an extended interview with the director and producer on YouTube.)

Yet, the cost to America of a possible Chinese takeover of Taiwan in the next decade is almost unimaginable, even though Trump seems to dismiss it. His ignorance of the real story of Taiwanese semiconductors is infuriating and dangerous.

Perhaps some of Trump’s tech-bro pals can get the message across to him before we all suffer the consequences of losing TSMC.