Never will so much have been spent for so little. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:
As the cost of electricity continues to skyrocket, Georgia voters delivered a political surprise on Election Day – elevating Democrat Peter Hubbard to the state’s Public Service Commission. Hubbard notably ran on rising utility costs and the spread of data centers, and his victory, along with another Democratic win in a separate statewide race, marks the first time in nearly twenty years the party has captured statewide office in Georgia.
Hubbard – who will join the body that regulates the state’s electric utility, ran on a pair of related concerns: rising utility costs and the rapid spread of data centers across the state.
“The number one issue was affordability,” Hubbard said. “But a very close second was data centers and the concern around them just sucking up the water, the electricity, the land – and not really paying any taxes.”
Georgia has become a magnet for data-center investment in recent years, aided by generous tax incentives and a growing footprint of large-scale digital infrastructure. But it is also emerging as an early indicator of a broader national pushback – one that is increasingly bipartisan and increasingly organized, WIRED notes.
A new report released this week by Data Center Watch, a project of AI-security firm 10a Labs, suggests that people are rapidly getting pissed about data centers. The project catalogs community-level opposition across the country using public sources such as news reports, legal filings, and social media. Its latest findings show that between March and June of 2025, local resistance either blocked or delayed $98 billion in data-center projects – surpassing the $64 billion tracked in the project’s first report, which covered May 2024 through March 2025.
