In the New Jersey borough of Kenilworth, a crowd gathered outside the municipal court on a rain-soaked Saturday morning, clutching signs that read “You think this is pressure? Wait ’til there’s no water pressure” and “Build community, not data centres.” Some arrived with plastic horns and whistles; others knelt to scrawl slogans in coloured chalk on the wet pavement. As the downpour intensified, the protesters pulled on ponchos and kept chanting, their noise cutting through the hiss of traffic. The scene was one of 142 demonstrations staged that day across 42 American states, from Wasilla, Alaska, to Naples, Florida — the first coordinated national campaign against the sprawling physical infrastructure that underpins the artificial intelligence boom.

Organised by a newly founded conservative nonprofit called Humans First, the protests were led by Amy Kremer, a veteran of the Tea Party movement who once helped organise the rally that preceded the January 6 Capitol riot. Kremer now describes the fight against “Big AI” as the most important of her lifetime. Her group’s demands are strikingly local: greater transparency in project approvals, stronger environmental safeguards, protection of water and land, and mechanisms to hold developers accountable. The movement, she insists, is not partisan. In Texas, which hosted 18 protests — the most of any state — demonstrators gathered in both Republican strongholds and Democratic-leaning suburbs. In Georgia, a dozen people travelled from small towns where massive data centre projects are under construction. The common thread, organisers say, is a sense that communities have been given no real voice in a transformation sold as inevitable.

The unease is not confined to the United States. In Canada, a Leger poll found that 81 per cent of respondents worry data centres will drive up household electricity bills, while 79 per cent fear environmental harm from their enormous consumption of power and water. That anxiety has spilled into the streets: in Hamilton, Ontario, hundreds marched against a waterfront data centre campus; in Olds, Alberta, residents mobilised against a ten-building complex with its own gas-fired power plant. A government briefing note reveals that projects in planning or development could add more than 20 gigawatts of capacity — a sixtyfold increase over the country’s current AI data centre footprint, with 92 per cent of that planned capacity concentrated in Alberta. In Japan, where 80 per cent of the land is mountainous and cities are densely packed, the pushback is equally visceral. In the Tokyo suburb of Hino, 94-year-old Yoriko Kitagawa calls a new data centre “a horrible project,” while neighbours fear battery fires, waste heat, and the loss of sunlight. “The more I find out about it, the more I worry,” she says.

These local frictions are unfolding against a backdrop of staggering wealth creation at the top of the AI economy. Palantir CEO Alex Karp, whose personal fortune has swelled to an estimated $15 billion, recently warned that the technology could multiply his own wealth twentyfold while middle-class incomes merely double, creating what he called a “complete decoupling of unimaginable wealth and normal wealth.” BlackRock’s Larry Fink struck a similar note at Davos, cautioning that AI’s early gains are flowing to “the owners of models, owners of data and owners of infrastructure.” Meanwhile, the cost of building that infrastructure is spiralling: Morgan Stanley estimates the price of one gigawatt of AI capacity has risen roughly 20 per cent, as memory chip prices surge and skilled labour grows scarce. When Big Tech firms announce ever-larger capital expenditure figures, analysts in London note, a significant portion now simply reflects inflation rather than genuine expansion.

Back in Kenilworth, as the rain fell harder, the protesters’ chants did not let up. A petition to halt the $1.8 billion data centre had already gathered more than 12,000 signatures in a borough of 8,500 people. On the wet sidewalk, the chalked words began to blur, but the message remained legible: a community insisting that the future be negotiated, not imposed.