The AI data centre gold rush is now getting mayors and councillors dragged towards the recall guillotine.
According to The New York Times a growing backlash against AI data centres is spilling into local politics, with voters in more than a dozen communities pushing recall elections.
Vermont independent senator Bernie Sanders said: “Residents are making it clear they did not want these projects dumped on them and standing up and saying, ‘Sorry, we don’t want these data centres in our communities for a number of reasons. If you can’t have the guts to stand up to some large corporation, you should not continue serving in office.”
The only problem with this is that the Land of the Fee has a long tradition of local authorities and politicians being bought and paid for by companies and some of these data centres have been approved.
In Festus, Missouri, critics gathered enough signatures in May to force a vote against the mayor and city council members. They had approved a $6 billion data centre, although the recall is now stuck in legal wrangling. In Mason, Michigan, voters will decide in November whether to recall a city council member over zoning rules for data centres.
Voters in Yukon, Oklahoma, will decide in November whether to recall their mayor after the town moved to sell land to a data centre developer. Residents of Independence, a city of 121,000 people about 10 miles from Kansas City, will vote on 1 September on whether to remove Perkins.
Some officials have already been booted in ordinary elections after data centre rows. Last year, two Georgia public service commissioners lost their seats amid worries that data centres were pushing up electricity prices.
Virginia state delegate Geary Higgins lost his job last year after his opponent branded him “Data Centre Geary.” Independence could be among the first municipalities to hold a recall vote driven by anger over data centres, after a judge rejected a challenge claiming the recall breached Missouri’s constitution.
