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Sunday, October 04, 2026

Thou shalt love the datacenter! Verily, thou shalt rejoice in the house of the datacenter!

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NEW: Private intelligence firms are selling dossiers about critics of artificial intelligence and the data centers powering them, including trying to peddle them to federal regulators. It's the latest effort to cash in on spying on those who dissent from government action. Dan Boguslaw reports:

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-- David Dayen (@ddayen.bsky.social) 12:25 PM · Aug 10, 2026

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More from the article ...

... Faced with growing opposition to datacenters from residents who don't want the bit barns in their backyards, Amazon plans to invest more than $1 billion over the next five years to indoctrinate the public.

The company announced the investment in a whataboutism-packed blog post aimed at convincing readers datacenters are not as bad as they've been led to believe, and that if the common folk don't get in line and support their development, the nation could be left in the dust.

The program aims to invest in education, job training, local infrastructure improvements, and sustainability initiatives in communities home to Amazon datacenters.

"This build out is so important geopolitically that there are widespread reports of various countries intentionally seeding misinformation in the US about datacenters to trick us into slowing down," the e-tailer turned cloud titan wrote. "Right now there are over 100 datacenter moratoriums being considered across the country. If these measures are enacted, the US could be writing its own losing ticket to this race, and the consequences would last generations."

If Jeff Bezos's cash cow is to be believed, datacenters will transform the US economy much like the buildout of the highway system did in the '50s. But that can't happen, Amazon argues, if Americans block the development of these bit barns over misguided fears. ...


#1 | Posted by LampLighter at 2026-10-03 09:12 PM | Reply

My god how far the US has fallen.

Failed state status, we have arrived!

#2 | Posted by jpw at 2026-10-05 05:13 AM | Reply

When it costs billionaires and huge corporatiions billions of dollars to sell a disaster to America it doesn't surprise me that the Republican Party supports that disaster.

#3 | Posted by danni at 2026-10-05 11:57 AM | Reply

The Democrats are going to stop all these billionaires from building these data centers, only if we elect them in November and in 2028.

#4 | Posted by lfthndthrds at 2026-10-05 06:23 PM | Reply

@#4 ... The Democrats are going to stop all these billionaires from building these data centers ...

Republicans also seem to have issues with data centers, especially many (most?) of them are being proposed in rural areas.

In a divided America, the left and right unite to oppose artificial intelligence data centers (August 2026)
apnews.com

... In rural eastern Nebraska, a technology revolution could rise from fields of corn and soybean in the form of new data centers to power the artificial intelligence boom.

But just like around many parts of the country, opposition has been building in ways that defy typical partisan boundaries. Conservative farmers and the state Sierra Club chapter recently found common cause against labor leaders as they filled the firehouse in Murdock -- population around 275 -- to share concerns about data center development moving too quickly.

The scene exemplified an unlikely coalition that worries about dwindling farmland, declining water supplies and rising electricity bills -- not to mention how massive corporations could reshape small town America into nodes in a national network of computing warehouses.

The debate around data center projects is one of the rare modern issues to cut across party lines, demographics and geography -- from Republican-dominated Nebraska, Texas and Wyoming to swing-state Pennsylvania to Democratic-leaning New Mexico. ...


#5 | Posted by lamplighter at 2026-10-05 06:37 PM | Reply

The Democrats are going to stop all these billionaires from building these data centers, only if we elect them in November and in 2028.

#4 | Posted by lfthndthrds

They can't do anything about it unelected.

I'm doubtful they'll do much as they're beholden to the donor class as well, but there's a better chance with them than the Repubs.

#6 | Posted by jpw at 2026-10-05 06:48 PM | Reply

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