Like A Razor Slash

At PWC, we optimise the systems that put your data to work so you can scale your AI from proof of concept to competitive edge and accelerate your tech evolution so you can redefine what's possible. From blueprint to breakthrough, we take you further with tech. So you can "outthink", "outpace" and "outperform". PWC. So you can. PWC refers to the PWC network and all one or more of its member firms, each of which is a separate legal entity. Mod.com is changing the way people battle excessive fatigue. Ever hit a wall in the middle of the day and the third coffee just doesn't do it anymore? Here's what's actually happening. Coffee only briefly blocks a denocene, the chemical that tires you out. When it stops working, your system is flooded and you crash. Modaphanil is a prescription treatment that works in a completely different way. Modaphanil works by stimulating multiple receptors in the brain associated with wakefulness, including dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, histamine, glutamate and erexin. It's a more complete solution that gives you 10 to 12 hours of steady focus and energy. To learn more, go to mod.com. Fill out your intake form, meet with a license provider, and if approved, mod alert ships straight to your door. Go to mod.com to get started. That's m-o-d.com. From the times and the Sunday times, this is The Story by Manvin Rana. We're a day away from the most expensive US midterms on record, and the race is on for who will control the house and the Senate. Seeing blue brand new CNN polls and races that could decide who controls the Senate with results Democrats will like across the board. With diesel prices soaring and Donald Trump's poll ratings hitting historic lows, the Democrats could be in for some significant wins. In a last ditch attempt to win over voters, Donald Trump has been rallying his base. But it's not just voters' opinions of Donald Trump or the Iran War that will shift the dial at these midterms. There's a new political battleground opening around the building of data centers. I retired out here. Now all of a sudden, I may not be able to get back when I put into my home. Who wants to live next with data center? That's liberal. The Democrats, I don't agree with them very often, but they're right on this issue. Republicans, we should be winning on this issue. We're getting our tail came. In Pennsylvania, Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro had promoted data center investments just last year. Now he's imposing new restrictions on them. Biden and Trump is defending data centers. In this truth social post, the president said the only reason to oppose data centers is if communities wanted to end up, quote, backwards and poor. So why have data centers become such a hot-button issue? What is resistance like on the ground? And how will this change how Americans vote tomorrow? The story today, have data centers become a defining issue in the US midterms. So I was in northern Kentucky, sort of just on the edge of the Ohio River in a place called Maisville. That Susie Cohen, US correspondent for the Times and the Sunday Times, she's been on the road in the run up to the US midterms, getting a sense of what voters in Middle America really care about. The corner that I was in is very rural, very small, 60 miles from Cincinnati. And everyone knows each other, sort of close-knit community, rolling, sloping green farmland and lovely sort of expanse of nature as well. And it was in Kentucky that she met a pair of farmers with firsthand experience of one of the big issues in this election, data centers. So I had the pleasure of spending an afternoon with Ida Huddleston, who's 83 and her daughter, Delcia R, she is 54. They are mother and daughter, very strong-willed widows, who work great fun, and they've become these sort of two David standing up to the goliath of these huge data centers. They're farmers, their families owned this land in Kentucky since 1848, which they built on. And they have this wonderful connection to it. The land always means freedom. One of the land, there's nothing like that. One other equation whenever you put land in there is freedom. I'm free to go and come and go as you please. If you've got a horse, you can ride all of the fence roads in one day or two. Did you used to grow your own vegetables? Oh yeah, we used to can, and early. Well, what would you grow? Ida and her late husband Bill built this beautiful cabin, which she lives in today, and that Delcia and her have matching recliners in, and they like to sit and put the world to rights together. And they have this extraordinary story of sort of going from being a mother and daughter who really do exist by themselves. They have this reputation of being shoot-first asked questions later farmers, so not too much by their neighbours. But one day, these two gentlemen turn up and make them this incredible offer to buy their land. And they can't be the door, we want to buy everything you've got. Just how impressive was this offer? What was on the table? Initially, he said 48,000 per acre, so they wanted 463 acres of Delcia bar's land. Ida Huddleston, the mother said, "Well, since we're in La La land, I'll take 60,000." And they said, "Okay, then." Oh wow. So they agreed to 60,000 per acre for her 71 acres, so combined, that's 26.48 million. Nearly 10 times what the land is worth, just completely out of the blue, this bizarre offer. I mean, that's extraordinary, 10 times the land's actual value, 26.0 million. I mean, they must have been tempted. Yes, I think they've owned land and varied bits of land in the area for a very long time, and previously they had lost to something called eminent domain, which is where local authorities or governments can force landowners to sell if it's for public services, and they were concerned that this was going to be used on them. I'm in the 80s, some years old, you don't just approach people, and I ask them, I said, "You all come in here and knock on a door." It was there for sale, sign out there, anywhere on my land, that you see it for no man we didn't see it. Well, I said, "I don't think anything's for sale then." Everybody, everybody that signed was worried they would force it with eminent domain. So they reluctantly agreed, even though it was a huge sum of money, these are not women who live particularly luxury. If you had 26 million dollars, what would you do with it? I'll land around the land already, so that I wouldn't have any more problems out of people. Bucking up puts more cows on there. I like cows and horses. They're not interested in the trappings of the rich, so they weren't particularly rolled over by the offer and the money. It were more concerned about what might happen if they don't agree, and then they could be left, you know, forced to take a really crappy deal. So, did they sign on the dotted line? They did, they did. But they didn't feel good about it, and they didn't like that it was all sort of shrouded in secrecy. When I spoke to Ida, she was saying how the thought of leaving is heartbreaking, and she said it makes her feel sick. "It's my whole life, and my children's lives, and probably my grandchildren's life." So, not only did they have the concern about who is this mysterious buyer that had never been disclosed, this is part of their history, it's part of their ancestors' history, and they're being asked to upsticks. That's her land, and my land, what they first, when we signed the contract, and the war got stupider and we heard about it. We don't know who we're dealing with. I said, "How can you deal with anybody? You don't know who you're dealing with." Too many red flags shows up when you read through it. So, in the end, with all of these concerns, Ida and Delcia backed out of the deal. "I don't feel bad at all, I'm glad I told them to kick rocks and don't come back." Susie, who was this buyer? I assume it is a data center. So, yes, that is what they ultimately found out, but the members of the local authority who had agreed to this and were aware of it happening at a much earlier stage had all signed NDAs themselves, so it was initially very difficult for members of the public and the local community to get answers out of them. But through some serious sleuth thing and piecing things together and all of this extraordinary work that the residents have been doing for months, they were pretty certain that it was metter and then earlier this month their suspicions were confirmed, it was officially announced that metter is indeed the company behind the proposed data centre and metter release the following statement in response to the citizen's concerns. With this potential project will not only pay the full cost of the power we use but will invest directly in Mason County, in schools, workforce training and local infrastructure, guided by what local leaders and residents tell us they need. We take seriously the diversity of opinions in the county and we intend to keep showing up and listening, not just during the approval process but in the long run, so that's where things currently stand. But just stepping back Susie, give us a sense of how often this is happening, how many data centres are being built and where and who's generally building them. So it's definitely something that's erupted in the past five years or so. The data centre capital of the US is actually Virginia but they're everywhere and there are 3359 data centres in operation across the US and a further 1,420 planned and that's according to US data centre map which has been tracking the facilities and there's also a lot of resistance in these communities across the board, I think 7 out of 10 Americans oppose data centre construction in their communities. Susie, I can understand why farmers who presented with this level of secrecy and people turning up to buy their land and change the landscape around them, I can see why they would be upset by it. It is astonishing that 7 out of 10 Americans now oppose data centres. What are those objections based on? So they're concerned about their energy bills spiking, their energy usage in the area is they're going to be enough left to run the towns and cities that they live in. They're concerned about pollution, a lot of these data centres use a huge amount of water, noise and I think there's just a lot of suspicion of people who are concerned, they don't know the long-term impacts of these data centres and given the level of secrecy about who owns them, it's very hard to know how you would hold people accountable for any of those impacts on a community. What sort of response were were you getting in Kentucky? The farmers you were talking to, how did they view the idea of a data centre? So I spoke to Delcia and Ida who were very anti the idea of a data centre but they have been forming part of the opposition with a woman called Janet Garrison and she is a former IT teacher at the community college and she initially was very excited about the idea of a data centre but she completely you turned on this when they were so frozen out of the consultation. I was excited at first for my former students who are programmers and network administrators and all that you know that this could be a potential job for them but as a mother and a grandmother I've also looked into the negative effects of one of these things. So I was like on the fence and I'm like well if they do it the right way, if they bring the community in and we all work together I could support it but they didn't want any of that. They wanted to do everything their way in secret, keep the community out of it. Ida and Delcia they are part of this opposition group called We Are Mason County with Janet. They are sort of the everyday American trying to stand up to these big tech firms and not be strong armed into having to accept these big companies taking you know buying up their land and all for all the reasons we've discussed. They've become these symbols of the resistance. I'm looking at this huge wodge of letters of people saying that you're inspirational. How does that feel to have become these sort of bastions of standing up against status centers? Tell me something that all over the whole United States it's not just us picking on somebody. When you get these letters and they got where they came from, well it's just not a local find here, they don't want it all over the whole United States. And Susie and Kentucky from the people you were speaking to did their suspicion and antipathy towards a data center, did it correspond with their political views you know was it sort of Democrats who were particularly against them? What was the picture? So it's quite extraordinary because in the years that I've been here it's obviously been so incredibly polarized, the political dynamics, especially in a place like Kentucky which is a very red state. But what I saw was for example Janet is a Democrat always voted blue. Ida and Delcy say that they're independence, but you know they voted Trump in the past three elections. But they've joined forces and it's created these incredible alliances that you just wouldn't expect. I think Janet said that she was a bit terrified of Delcy or an Ida from the room as she'd heard. But she said I would never have guessed that I would have gotten on with these women so well, and we have spent much in common, but had they been still in those boxes of Trump supporter, you know, Democrat Republican, they would never have spoken and really got to know each other. So it has had this extraordinary ability to bring people with differing political views together. And you know you said that certainly the farmers had always voted Trump before. We are coming up to the midterms, will this change their vote? Do you think this will have an impact in Kentucky, which is a very red, very Republican state? In Kentucky, it's still very heavily Republican. I don't think necessarily this is going to this election, swing it either way, but it could eat into some of the Republican margin, or it could, you know, some voters may decide to stay home. Delcy in particular said that she would vote for whoever was against data centers. If someone came out and said they were against data centers, would you vote for them? Yes. Even if they were Democrats. So they were. Socialists. And long as they shut down the damn data center, because I know that the data center's anti-Christ. For her, it's a very religious issue as well, and it's her responsibility to try and be a good custodian of the land and pass it down. We don't know how it will turn out, but will it swing it? In Kentucky, I don't think so, but we're definitely seeing. Some changes in voting habits. Okay, so it may not dramatically change things in Kentucky for this election, but if we look at the big picture across the country, will it have an impact elsewhere? Oh, it's a huge issue that's spanning out nationwide, and we're seeing it again and again, in different races from local level to the Senate races, to congressional races, and also the gubneutorial race in Pennsylvania. And it's, you know, in two years' time, it's going to be even more of an issue and will probably be finding out what kind of an impact these data centers have actually had on a more localised level. Coming up, how big an electoral issue has this become? And where in the US might it have the power to swing votes in these midterms? We'll hear from an expert in just a moment. So you can outthink, outpace, and outperform, PWC. So you can. Mod.com is changing the way people battle excessive fatigue, ever hit a wall in the middle of the day and a third coffee just doesn't do it anymore. Medaphenil is a prescription treatment that works in a completely different way. Medaphenil works by stimulating multiple receptors in the brain, associated with wakefulness. Including dopamine, serotonin, nor epinephrine, histamine, glutamate, and erection. Fill out your intake form, meet with a licensed provider and if approved, mod alert ships straight to your door. go to mod.com. get started. That's m-o-d dot com. Business is booming. Is your fulfillment ready for peak season? Switch to ship station now and handle more volume with confidence when accounts. Ship station connects Shopify, Amazon, TikTok shop and over 200 more integrations with one platform that does it all. You can manage orders, sink inventory, track returns, all automatically. Everything your operation needs all in one place. Right now qualified shippers get a real dedicated person to get you set up and switched over for free. So when peak season hits, you're ready to go. Switch today at shipstation.com, code audio. Data centers have popped up as a major topic in many races all across the country. That's Darryl West, a senior fellow at the U.S. Think Tank, the Brookings Institution. He specializes in AI and data centers. At the gubernatorial level, just because states play a major role in the location decisions of data centers, but also in house and center races because there are national policies that are relevant. Particularly states that we are watching are Pennsylvania, where governor Josh Shapiro a year ago was actually very positive towards data centers and wanted Pennsylvania to become one of the main sites of data centers. When he saw public opinion changing, he started to shift in a more negative direction. So I think everyone is watching his reelection effort to see how that affects him. We've seen too many developers who are trying to bulldoze our community with these speculative deals that are never gonna come into reality. And the wreaking havoc on our neighbors. I don't want them here in Pennsylvania. Texas is another state where the gubernatorial race has gotten engulfed in the data center issue. Governor Abbott, again, has been very pro business and pro data center. But in recent months, as data centers have become more contentious, he has called for an audit of the current data centers to make sure that we understand who's paying the energy costs and what the local issues are that are concerning people. Now Governor Abbott says that data centers need to have more scrutiny as to where they can be built. Take a listen. Pushing back against these AI data centers, they're trying to build in our neighborhood. I make there already. Any AI data center, even thinking about coming here, they got to bring their own money, bring their own power, reuse the own water and do it in a way that reduces the cost of electricity for residents across our state. It's become an issue in Ohio, in Michigan, in Wisconsin, in Nevada. So there are numerous races across the country that I think people are going to be watching on election night to see how they turn out. So this really is becoming a political battleground now. Have that always been the case? I mean, just talk us through how much public opinion has changed. And was there a particular moment when the tide seemed to turn against data centers? Public opinion has changed literally just in the last six to nine months. Like if you go back to last year, data centers either were viewed positively or people didn't really have any real attitude toward them. What changed over the course of the last six to nine months was electric rates started to go up in many places around the country. There were developers who wanted to put data centers in the Southwest where water is quite scarce. And so people worried about the water usage, even in rural areas where you would think those would be areas that would what economic development because right now there aren't a lot of jobs. People in rural areas have now turned against data centers because you know, they want to look out at rolling farmlands. Like they don't want to look at industrial-style data centers. So this has become a bipartisan issue. When you look at the polling, both Republicans and Democrats have reservations about data centers. Democrats tend to be more negative than Republicans, but their majorities in both parties that have serious concerns about data centers. That's so interesting. You can imagine that the nimbyism, as we corner the idea that you've got a huge isor of a data center in front of you rather than rolling farmlands. You can also completely understand the fears about electricity bills. Is there a chance though that politicians are playing on that a little too much? You know, energy bills have been rising around the world because of the Iran war. Are the data centers becoming a bit of a scapegoat for that sort of something physical and manifestation that you can point out and say that's why your energy bills are going up rather than a distant wall? That is a very good point and certainly there are many factors that are driving up electric rates across the country. The Iran war has contributed tariffs have raised prices. Just labor costs have got up in virtually every sector. But what people are seeing is that the recent rises parallel the recent development of data centers. So in public opinion surveys, people are pinning a lot of the blame for the rising electric cost on data centers. So whether that's right or wrong, that is how people are perceiving it and that then becomes a real problem. Has opinion about data centers also changed because you know simultaneously there's a real fear about AI and what that might mean for our future. Public opinion has shifted negative not just on data centers, but also on the broader issue of AI. For months Americans have been bombarded with headlines talking about AI taking jobs, AI agents going rogue, engaging and unauthorized behavior that their developers did not approve. There have been intrusions into government websites based on security of vulnerabilities that the AI agents have found. So data centers have become part of the proxy war against AI. And the thing that's interesting is Americans have very few vehicles to protest against AI because the tech companies have complete control over what products they offer, what services they offer, how they roll out AI. Basically the only choice consumers have is either to buy the product or not to buy the product. But with data centers they are a physical building being developed in local communities across the country they require local construction permits from the local government. And so it turns out that it became easy for people to protest AI by protesting data centers. This is becoming a problem for the bigger political picture, you know who holds tech to account. Is it dividing down party lines? I know you said that there are concerns in both parties about AI in the future, but Donald Trump has certainly seems to have aligned himself quite closely with the Silicon Valley and the tech bros and the future of AI even telling Europe we shouldn't be regulating it. Trump is completely on the side of the AI proponents and the data center developers. He's had numerous public statements saying AI is great. Don't worry about it. We're leading China in AI where it must sophisticated country in the world and frankly I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI wins and we could put guardrails, we can do this in that but I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn't be bringing it up. I know you're concerned about safety but we'll take care of it. You can trust us to handle that. The tech companies won't do anything to damage their own business on the data center front. It's been the same thing. He's told local officials you're crazy if you don't locate data centers within your community because they will provide jobs and tax revenues for your local residents. But the problem is people aren't buying that argument. You know 70% of Americans don't like data centers and that's true for Republicans and Democrats. So it's not really a divided public that is concerned but Republicans do have a little more vulnerability on this issue because they have tended historically to be the pro-business party. Over the last few years they have been the ones that have supported tax breaks for data centers to come into local communities. And so what's happening in this year's election is many Democrats are using the data center issue against Republicans if those particular individuals either are supporting Trump because of his well-known sympathy for data centers or because they supported tax breaks in recent years to build these data centers. And so the whole issue of the election has become intertwined with data centers and it'll be interesting to watch to see how voters come down on that subject. Darryl in America right now is there almost sort of a fight for the narrative over this. You know as you say people are seeing energy prices going up and rather than talking about their own war they can see the data center that is one of one of the reasons builds a higher. When it comes to people losing their jobs because of AI or because of driverless cars or you know what of the future maybe with driverless trucks which are also coming that you can now blame AI whereas in the past you know you might have blamed immigrants. Is that the shift that is happening? AI is being blamed for a number of different things and not all of the criticisms actually are fair or accurate. But when you look at public opinion surveys, people see AI as out of control. They see these wealthy tech companies meeting with President Trump quite regularly. They're often our photo ops of the President Outfront kind of surrounded by 10 tech billionaires. And so the whole issue of data centers and AI has also become intertwined with income inequality in America and the fact that these tech billionaires are doing so well financially, but then they still want tax breaks from local governments. So the change that I think will have important economic ramifications in the future is based on this election. There's likely to be a slowdown in data center development. You know, they are investing a huge amount of money in building the data centers on the assumption that the revenues over the next five years are going to come in equally substantial and provide a decent rate of return. And it's not clear that the arithmetic is going to add up. It's not clear that the revenues in a world if data center slowdown and AI development starts to slow down. It's not clear tech companies are going to get all the revenues that they have been expecting. Susie, having heard Darrell and his analysis of how data centers are swinging the vote in the midterms and beyond, does that chime with your experience reporting on the ground? Definitely. Also, it's this idea of these data centers being a physical issue that residents and communities can get behind to protest AI and the erosion of the rural way of life and other values that that represents in terms of, you know, how these communities have existed for all these years, definitely rang true about my experience in Kentucky. I think Delcia said at one point, we just want our rural living ways left alone. And I think that really charged with that. The thought of this land being turned into a data center, how does that make you feel? For me, it's gourds rising. Makes you want to throw up. Well, it makes you sick like to think about anybody, even asking you to do something like that. What would you have done with the money? Well, I just bought the next farm next to me, the next farm next to me, the next farm next to me. The data center wants what I want, I just wanted more camel land. That was Susie Cohen, US correspondent for The Times, and Darryl West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. If you have any thoughts or questions about the state of US politics and the midterms, do get in touch. Our email, as ever, is the story at TheTimes.com. The producer today was Paige Reynolds. The executive producer was Sophie McMultie. Sound design was by Dave Creasy, and theme composition was by Malaceto. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow. At PWC, we optimize the systems that put your data to work so you can scale your AI from proof of concept to competitive edge, and accelerate your tech evolution so you can redefine what's possible. So you can outthink, outpace, and outperform. PWC, so you can. PWC refers to the PWC network, and all one or more of its member firms, each of which is a separate legal entity. Business is booming. Switch to shipstation now and handle more volume with confidence when accounts. Shipstation connects Shopify, Amazon, TikTok shop, and over 200 more integrations with one platform that does it all. Everything your operation needs, all in one place. Right now, qualified shippers get a real dedicated person to get you set up and switched over for free. Switch today at shipstation.com, code audio.