Breaking Points' Saagar Enjeti says data center backlash is a bubbling political force — and tech should stop the fear-based marketing

Data center backlash is becoming a political force — and tech's fear-based marketing is making it worse

Saagar Enjeti thinks the data center backlash is no longer a fringe concern. It's a bubbling political movement, and the tech industry's own messaging habits are accelerating it.

The grassroots playbook

A Wisconsin city just passed what Enjeti describes as the nation's first anti-data center referendum, giving residents a direct ballot mechanism to block new projects. He expects it to spread. In Virginia, where data centers already consume roughly 40% of state power, opposition became a major issue in the gubernatorial race — with both the Republican and Democratic candidates running against new builds. In New Jersey, residents lined up through the night at local zoning meetings to fight projects. Enjeti's read is that when ordinary voters show up to zoning meetings with their children at midnight, something politically significant is happening.

The underlying grievance isn't purely about electricity bills, though cost consciousness — especially now, with energy prices volatile — gives it fuel. It's a compound anger: jobs weren't delivered as promised (Virginia's Amazon HQ2 experience is the local reference point), electricity bills are expected to rise, and communities feel decisions are being made over their heads. Pollster Ryan Gerdusky, according to Enjeti, has crunched recent numbers and found overwhelming public animus — not just around AI broadly, but data centers specifically.

Enjeti puts it plainly: you're fighting a feeling of oligarchy and lost control, not just an electricity dispute.

“In Virginia, 40% of our power is actually consumed by data centers. Both the Republican and the Democratic candidates were against data centers... I think it's a major issue in 2028. I think in '28, both candidates are going to have a data center platform... Just prove to me that this is gonna make my life better. Stop talking about all these scary things because I'm starting to believe you.”

The fear-based marketing problem

The tech industry's habit of leading with existential risk framing is, in Enjeti's view, actively backfiring. His point is direct: if Anthropic's Dario Amodei goes on every podcast warning that the technology is terrifyingly powerful, at some point people start believing him — and that belief doesn't translate into enthusiasm for more data centers in their backyard. The argument that fear-based messaging was necessary to marshal capital in the early days may have been true when no American had had a meaningful AI experience. It's harder to justify now that the tools are mainstream and the stakes of public trust are higher.

What would actually help

Enjeti isn't calling for a moratorium, but he doesn't think ratepayer protection pledges are enough given the depth of distrust. His preferred fix is a federally mandated democratic process: any new data center project would have to demonstrate its energy footprint to local, state, and federal authorities before approval. The Trump administration's AI infrastructure push and the industry's political dependence on Washington create an opening for exactly this kind of regulatory codification, in his view.

The longer-term answer is a grid and generation problem, not a data center problem. Enjeti points to China as the counter-example — abundant, cheap power means nobody fights about where to put the servers. If the U.S. had that, he argues, the zero-sum dynamic disappears. Nuclear, renewables, shale gas — he's agnostic on the source.

The geopolitical overlay

The Iran conflict adds a layer Enjeti flags as underappreciated. An Amazon data center in the UAE was reportedly struck as part of Iranian military action, and Iran has explicitly declared war on U.S. tech infrastructure. Gulf sovereign funds — QIA, SIA, and others — are deep in Silicon Valley. Any reallocation of that capital toward oil and defense assets during a prolonged conflict could hit AI lab funding hard. Enjeti sees this as a potential pressure point that foreign adversaries have clearly identified, even if the U.S. political debate hasn't fully caught up.

His bottom line: by 2028, both presidential candidates will have a data center platform. The industry would be better served getting ahead of that moment than waiting for the politics to arrive at its door.