Justin Smeltzer is an Electrician, United Auto Workers Union Shop Steward, and
Workers Strike Back Member in Peoria, Illinois.
The United States has more than 4,000 operational data centers, and that number is expected to grow substantially in the years ahead. More than 3,000 new data centers are in various stages of development nationwide. Of those planned 3,000, about 600 to 1,000 are slated to be what are called hyperscale data centers. As the word indicates, these are behemoths that use up sprawling areas of space and at least 50 megawatts of power annually — equivalent to 10,000 to 50,000 homes, depending on climate.
These data centers are deeply unpopular everywhere they are proposed for a number of reasons including, environmental concerns, noise pollution, the uses for the AI data stored in these centers, and the layoffs that have resulted because of the AI expansion. Seven out of ten Americans are absolutely opposed to these data centers and protests by working people have shut down the plans for about 48 of these data centers in 2025 alone, amounting to roughly $156 billion worth of projects.
Working people are getting organized into movements to oppose the reckless expansion of these data centers and fighting back against them in nearly every city where they are proposed. Workers Strike Back has been fighting against data centers in Pine Island, Minnesota; Ypsilanti Township, Michigan; and Pekin, Illinois. Workers Strike Back members, along with hundreds of working people, fought back against a 321-acre data center campus in Pekin and we won!
Overcoming the Odds
Our movement in Pekin went up against big tech and real estate billionaires and multimillionaires, and the Democratic and Republican parties that serve them.
Democratic and Republican politicians alike have shamefully provided tax incentives for data centers to corporate real estate developers. In Illinois, billionaire Democratic Governor JB Pritzker signed a bill in 2019, with bipartisan support, that has provided billionaires with an estimated $983 million in lifetime tax breaks and benefits as “incentives” to build at least 27 data centers. Instead of taxing the rich to fund working-class needs like free healthcare for all, Pritzker and the two corporate parties have tried to do all they can to hold a red-carpet welcome for the AI billionaires. This shows the class allegiance of the Democratic and Republican parties is with the billionaires and the multimillionaires, not with the working class.
This meant that our movement in Pekin had to be independent of, and fight against, both the Democrats and Republicans. Our victories to date are:
- We forced Democratic Governor Pritzker to put a hold on the tax breaks for new data center developments!
- We forced the Republican Mayor of Pekin, Mary Burress, to announce in March that the city would not be moving forward with the data center project!
- We forced both the Democrats and the Republicans on the Pekin City Council to vote unanimously to stop the sale of public land to the data center developer, Western Hospitality Partners!
The Democrats and Republicans on the Pekin City Council voted unanimously to withdraw the project when previously they had all lauded the jobs and economic growth that they CLAIMED the new data center campus would bring. In reality, working people will never see a dime of the untold profits raked in by Wall Street investors and big tech billionaires from these data centers.
The complete turnabout by the Pekin City Council is far from a coincidence; it is because working people in Pekin got organized and fought back. We organized City Hall Speakouts, yard sign distribution, and canvassing shifts. You will have a hard time finding any streets in Pekin that don’t have a sign in someone’s yard that says NO DATA CENTER. You will also be hard-pressed to meet anyone in the area surrounding Pekin who doesn’t know about the data center project — and the overwhelming majority are rightly pissed off. Not one single person ever spoke during the City council public comment in favor of bringing this data center to Pekin.
This mass anger is also reflected in the rest of Tazewell County, which houses the city of Pekin. Delavan, Illinois, another city in this county, has just rejected a data center proposal and ceased all further discussion on the topic. This comes on top of a county-wide resolution to temporarily reject all rezoning submissions for data center developments.
These are all small suburban towns in a low-profile county in Central Illinois, where many of the workers opposing these data centers are moving into open struggle against the billionaire class for the very first time in their lives.
Workers Strike Back members have played a key role in the City Council Speakouts by putting forward a fighting, class struggle approach. This has meant politically explaining to our fellow workers involved in this movement the need to create a credible political threat against the establishment politicians. We explained that the Democratic and Republican parties enforce the interests of the capitalist class by relying on every individual politician serving their own careerist objectives by going along with the billionaire agenda and never rocking the boat. In this context, the politicians of the two parties don’t respond to moral appeals or factual, scientific analysis. They can only be forced to concede by the organized strength of working-class movements.
Working people won’t win if we ask Democratic and Republican politicians nicely to “please don’t build the data center, we think it will be destructive for this city’s environment and communities.” Instead, working people have to use City Council public comment to expose the rotten system and point out how “these corporate Democratic and Republican politicians are shamefully doing the bidding of the big tech billionaires if they support this data center and all of them should be thrown out of office for selling out the working class if they vote for this.” We have to arrive at City Hall with signs and banners and come prepared to carry out collective political chanting. When possible, we should also try to hold a short rally before and after the public comment, so that we can present a political analysis of what working people are up against and discuss next steps for the movement.
This gives a glimpse of how we can turn the City Council public comment, which is intended by the ruling class to be a totally performative and impotent platform for the working class, into a powerful City Hall speakout that can help expose the corporate politicians and force them to concede to us. This type of movement that embraces a class struggle based fighting strategy is essential—a strategy that can bring the political clarity of why this is happening, and who is on our side and who isn’t. Without this, the ruling class will continue to ram through their reckless and rapid expansion of these massive data centers and dump the burden of the increased utility costs, harmful health impacts, and environmental devastation onto the already burdened shoulders of poor and working-class people.
The battle in Pekin is just one example of working-class people around the nation fighting back against Big Tech billionaires who are pushing for a massive expansion of hyperscale data centers. These billionaires are also the ones carrying out mass layoffs.
AI Layoffs
Tens of millions of working people are angry at both the data centers and the AI-related mass layoffs. There is huge potential to unite working people nationally and organize mass movements against the billionaires and multimillionaires.
AI is the leading reason companies are citing for layoffs and it accounts for more than one in four job cuts in April with a total of 21,490 AI-related job cuts. These figures are an increase of 38 percent from the previous month. So there have now been almost 50,000 jobs cut in 2026 alone due to AI.
Most of these job losses are in the tech sector. In April, Meta announced it would slash about 10 percent of its workforce, citing increased expenditures on AI. In total there have been over 85,000 jobs cut in the tech sector so far this year.
These rapid job losses are likely to increase. Some analysts predict that in approximately the next five years, 10 to 15 percent of jobs in the U.S. could be eliminated and this could then result in nearly 6-7 percent of workers being displaced. The capitalists who run Goldman Sachs and OpenAI have given even more sinister numbers claiming that they think that 18 percent, or 300 million jobs globally, can soon be automated by AI. The rapid rate of layoffs paired with the outrageous cost of living, made worse by the ongoing horrendous war on Iran and rising, will inevitably lead to recession and severe economic hardship for billions of people globally.
The capitalists, along with the Republican and Democratic Party politicians, are some of the loudest voices in favor of data centers in the U.S., but not the only ones. Several construction trade union leaders have taken the disastrous position of supporting data centers for the sake of the jobs they create. This would be a shockingly unconscionable position in any circumstances, given the scientific evidence of the negative impact of the AI data centers on climate, and the horrific proliferation of AI usage in genocide, imperialist war, ICE terror and mass surveillance. This position is all the more untenable and completely dishonest because while the data center projects do create temporary construction jobs, the data centers have a sparing number of permanent jobs to support their operations. The loss of jobs due to AI expansion is exponentially greater.
It is unfortunate but not surprising that the conservative labor leadership has decided to take the side of the bosses while millions of regular working people are fighting back against the billionaires and are provided no leadership. Many rank-and-file union members like myself who work in the construction trades strongly oppose these data centers for many reasons, one of which is the many ways the corporations use the technology against the working class. The strategy by labor leaders of joining the bosses in a destructive agenda for the sake of very short-term parochial job gains is a complete dead end. The only alternative that can lead to ending imperialist wars, end the climate crisis, and deliver high standards of living to billions of people is for the global working class to take the big corporations and the technology into democratic ownership.
Who Benefits from AI?
The tech in these data centers is being used not to improve the lives of ordinary people, but to enhance the profits of the billionaires and multimillionaires. The advancement of dystopian AI technologies is designed to increase billionaire profits at a time of historic crisis of the global capitalist system, the inter-imperialist rivalry between the U.S.-led and China-led blocs of nations.
One such instance is the pervasive use of AI in health insurance and the systematic denial of care by corporations like UnitedHealthcare. Sometimes, these technologies are used in even more sinister ways: companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Palantir are all using their data storage and AI tools to allow the Israeli military to track and target Palestinians and journalists in the ongoing, brutal genocide in Gaza, and also to help ICE target and detain immigrants in the United States.
In Ypsilanti, Michigan Workers Strike Back members have joined the fight against a proposed data center backed by the University of Michigan and Los Alamos National Laboratories, where the nuclear bomb was invented and tested, before it was dropped on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The facility is set to be constructed on 20 acres of parkland, in a primarily poor and Black neighborhood in Ypsilanti, not in Ann Arbor, where UM is headquartered. It would house the largest supercomputer in the world, cost over a billion dollars, and be partly financed by the working-class in Michigan taxpayers.
According to a Los Alamos representative, one of the two supercomputers will handle restricted data for the US nuclear weapons program. Online ads show UM is actively recruiting scientists for weapons development.
Energy and Water Consumption
Not only are data centers used in the most horrific ways by these corporations, they also consume eye-popping amounts of energy. In some cases over 100 megawatts of continuous energy, which could be used to power up to 100,000 small homes. This massive energy demand from these monstrous data centers has led to an increase in utility rates for working-class people in many areas. These massive hyperscale data centers are also consuming hundreds of thousands of gallons of water per hour, and in most cases the energy supplied to power these data centers comes from burning fossil fuels, all of this is further exacerbating the climate catastrophe.
The energy consumed by the largest data centers is equal to the entire output of a medium-sized power plant. In some cases the largest data center developments are building their own power plant on the site of the data center campus to supply the necessary power in a quicker time than the utility companies can get attached to the electrical grid. This is usually in the form of a fossil fuel system like natural gas powered turbines that are not environmentally safe but have a faster turnaround than the utility companies can promise the necessary grid capacity needed to power the massive data center campus.
One of these gas power plants that was built to power a data center in Southaven, Mississippi violates even the minimal regulations that are in place against pollution with the Clean Air Act. The NAACP filed a lawsuit against this citing that many people in Southaven and nearby Memphis Tennessee have had harmful health impacts due to this pollution. The data center and power plant are owned by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and they power xAI. The Department of Justice has helped to block the lawsuit and to keep the toxic smoke flowing because xAI is being used in the Iran war, a war that is not in the interest of working people anywhere.
This insatiable need for profits in the war and tech industries has driven an out of control demand for energy and water. The cynical sourcing of this energy by the capitalist class is already having disastrous impacts on the climate and these dire conditions will get much worse if they are not stopped. The billionaires profiting from these data centers know the real dangers that spring from their actions all too well, but they are only concerned with maximizing their own profits.
Both parties represent the Billionaires
Fighting back against the data center and AI boom also means fighting the Democratic and Republican Parties who both serve the interests of these ultra-wealthy investors and big tech billionaires.
Big tech spent 1.1 billion in political spending on the 2024 elections and they have established multiple AI PACs to inject massive money bombs into any congressional races they see fit this year and they spent millions on the primary races already to defeat candidates who are against data centers.
Both major parties have shamefully provided tax incentives for Data Centers in places around the country. Illinois Democratic Governor and billionaire JB Pritzker signed a bipartisan bill for nearly a billion dollars in lifetime tax breaks for big tech and real estate corporations to build at least 27 data centers. These insane tax breaks are one of the main reasons that Pekin and other Illinois cities are being chosen for these data center projects.
Democratic Party Under Pressure
Now, under pressure from our working-class movement, Pritzker is proposing that Illinois stop the tax incentives for two years and that the corporations behind the data centers pay for the rapid increase in energy bills instead of the costs being passed on to families that live in these communities.
This change in tone from Pritzker, who himself is a billionaire along with several members of his family, is not due to his newfound concern for working people but because of the pressure he’s facing from movements built to oppose data centers across the state that have made them a very unpopular issue for him. If he continues his support for these data centers, they could cost him and the Democratic Party future elections.
But because the Democratic Party is pro-capitalist, it is their role to try to make AI data centers more appealing and try to find ways to “do them right.” Many leading Democrats have tried varying ways to make data centers less of a political landmine by suggesting certain guidelines or saying the costs for consumer energy bills shouldn’t go up. In some cases, even the corporations themselves tried to declare that they will pay for the outrageously rising costs of energy prices in the communities where these data centers are built. These attempts are mostly failing as most working people see this as a ploy. They are demanding not just regulations but a complete end to the data center expansion.
This has led to some politicians proposing moratoriums on data centers in cities where people are building movements against data center projects. These moratoriums, which act as a temporary pause on new data center developments, have been forced through by the strength of the movements behind them. There has even been so much working-class pressure that statewide and federal moratoriums have been floated by some politicians who feel pressure from their base. The New York State Legislature has passed a one-year moratorium on large data centers.
Senator Bernie Sanders and Congressmember Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) have put forward a bill that would place a nationwide ban on new data centers. Unfortunately, this looks to be more of the same performative gestures from Democratic Party politicians, who propose progressive bills in Congress with no confrontation against the pro-billionaire position of their own party’s politicians and no effort to rally working people into fighting for it to pass. The weakness of their approach means that this bill will likely never have a discussion or vote due to the unwillingness of Sanders and AOC to challenge the Democratic Party establishment.
When the state government of Maine proposed a moratorium on data centers statewide and it passed both the House and Senate, Democratic Governor Janet Mills vetoed the bill. It is not a coincidence that Mills took the heat for driving this law into the ground due to the fact that she is termed out as the Maine governor and can’t run for reelection. Mills was running for the U.S. Senate and subsequently forced to drop out after the fierce backlash from this bill being vetoed. She will, undoubtedly, be rewarded in a different way for her loyalty to the ultra-rich tech billionaires.
The empty rhetoric and political theater by people like Sanders and AOC and outright betrayals by Mills are exactly why working people need our own independent political party.
Working-Class Independence
Working people need to urgently organize independently of the Democratic Party, both in political campaigns but also in militant working-class organizations like Workers Strike Back.
Kshama Sawant’s campaign for the U.S. Congress as an independent socialist showed what is possible when working-class fighters take a principled approach to major issues facing Americans like data centers and AI.
Kshama achieved a historic 17.3 percent of the primary election vote, which is the highest ever, by far, for an open Marxist. What is even more remarkable is that she and her fellow revolutionary socialists won this in a five-way race, with both the Democratic and Republican parties maneuvering against Kshama. Kshama’s campaign boldly called for Big Tech and energy corporations to be taken into democratic public ownership by workers. Kshama ran her campaign to stop all data centers and AI layoffs, for a living-wage lobs guarantee funded by taxing the rich, and for a guaranteed right to unionize for all workers. These demands, as well as demands to end all U.S. military aid to Israel, no weapons or tech for imperialist war, and free healthcare for all paid for by taxing the rich, acted as a lightning rod for many working and young people who are sick of the imperialist billionaires laying off masses of workers and giving tax breaks to incentivize them to create more genocidal tech.
The Kshama for Congress campaign helped to build the movement against data centers nationally and brought a class struggle based strategy to many working people around the country. Which is the only way that working people can win anything under capitalism.
Kshama proved this time and time again during the decade (2014-2024) that she was the lone socialist on the Seattle City Council. She built movements that fought back against the Democratic Party and the billionaires in that city, and they won major victories for workers like the nation’s highest minimum wage at $21.30/hour, the annual Amazon Tax on wealthy corporations to fund affordable housing, and massive renters’ rights laws like a $10 cap on late fees and a ban on winter evictions.
It is these movements, and this fighting strategy, that inspired our approach and the class struggle methods used by Workers Strike Back members in Pekin.
The only reason that the politicians on the Pekin City Council felt compelled to come out against the data center and voted unanimously against it is because we made it unviable for their political careers. We brought clear analysis and the might of an organized working class that struck fear into the city council members who we demanded be thrown out of office if they voted for the data center. We named and shamed them for doing the bidding of big business and selling out working people by even considering this project to begin with. We explained to the workers in this movement that these establishment politicians have shown that their class allegiance is with the billionaires and their warmongering political parties, not the working class.
At first, the politicians on the Pekin City Council attempted to attack the movement by limiting public comment time and making excuses for their selling out. When they finally felt compelled to come out against the data center, the City Attorney warned that the City Council could be sued for violating the purchase agreement. Workers Strike Back members saw this for what it was: a blatant attempt to intimidate the movement against the data center to make us back down in fear of lawsuits. We called it out as such, and the next week the land sale was rescinded. During Kshama’s decade on the Seattle City Council, there were relentless threats of lawsuits, and actual lawsuits, against the demands that working people won through her office. Like in Pekin, Kshama and working people refused to back down to these legal threats.
Our allies are the working class in the fight against data centers, Big Tech, and the billionaire class as a whole. Our enemies are anyone who sides with them, like the conservative labor leaders, the corporate politicians on the Pekin City Council, and the entire Democratic and Republican parties, along with them.
Politically exposing the politicians will not always be enough to stop certain projects and in some cases when we fight data centers we will have to fight for a moratorium, or a local ban, especially when private land is being sold to the data center developer. Workers Strike Back members in Pine Island, Minnesota have been fighting for a moratorium on a Google data center project, known as Project Skyway, that is already approved for construction to try to halt the project.
Shutting down the Pekin Data Center was a huge victory. There have been successful anti-data center campaigns since the breakthrough we achieved in Pekin that have led to several nearby cities and counties in Central Illinois passing moratoriums. This includes Delavan, Logan County, Bloomington, and Normal. Nationally, 75 data centers worth a total of $130 billion have been shut down or delayed just in the first three months of this year. The fight against AI, the data centers, and mass tech layoffs has huge potential to unite working people and win victories.
But the fight to shut down individual data centers also needs to be strengthened by a much more far-reaching strategy to defeat the billionaires and multimillionaires. We will not win every fight to shut down individual data centers. For example, nearby Sangamon County, which is home to the state capital of Springfield, has just approved the latest data center to be built in Illinois. The billionaire class is absolutely determined to ram through the data centers and keep expanding AI. The economy is very likely heading into a massive recession sooner or later at least in part due to the AI bubble. Unless working people fight back, the burden of the recession will be placed on our shoulders. Until then, the billionaires will continue to keep pushing a constant stream of new data center proposals.
The Socialist Approach to AI, Data Centers, and the Tech Industry
We will ultimately need to go further than temporarily blocking this or that data center development especially when it comes to staving off the devastating climate and war impact of AI data centers. The current data centers, not to mention new ones, are completely unsustainable and need to be retrofitted to be environmentally safe and the harmful health impacts eliminated before any new ones are built. There is already plenty of storage for new data to advance important technologies that could help save lives and improve the quality of life for billions of people if all of the harmful use of AI and data centers for war profiteers and bloodsucking capitalists were to be eliminated. But working people cannot change the way the data centers operate because we do not own them. As long as the wealth and the resources are in the hands of a few capitalists, they will use this and every technology to maximize their profits and make billions of working and poor people miserable.
That is why working people need to fight to take the big energy corporations and Big Tech companies into democratic public ownership to be run by workers, so that we can end all war and genocide, urgently address climate needs, and democratically and scientifically decide what technologies to use and how to use them. This is also linked with the need to take the big Wall Street banks into public ownership, because they hold trillions of dollars which are used to finance the data center and fossil fuel projects. The climate impact of Trump’s war on Iran, the rapid expansion of hyperscale data centers, and the deregulation of fossil fuels are all driving us towards a climate apocalypse. What we need is a lightning-fast transition to green energy and infrastructure that can only be carried out by a socialist society.
In order to bring down the capitalist system we will need fighting movements everywhere, and working people across the country and internationally need fighting working-class politics. We need to get organized and build an even bigger fightback against the rich because when we fight for big demands and stand together in solidarity, working-class people can beat the billionaires.