The AI backlash is gaining momentum

Moratoriums on data centers are spreading across rural America

Author

Malcolm Frank, CEO
April 21, 2026

The AI backlash is gaining momentum

Earlier this month, a 20-year-old from Texas hurled a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's San Francisco house, then turned up at OpenAI's headquarters with a jug of kerosene. Days earlier, an Indianapolis councilman found thirteen bullet holes in his home and a note on the step: No Data Centers. In Ravenna, Ohio, a laid-off creative turned a city council meeting into a viral soliloquy, arguing that a data center draining 50,000 people's water to hire ten locals "is not an employer. It's an extraction."

This is the techlash, and for now most of the pitchforks are manifesting as zoning laws. Moratoriums on AI data centers are spreading across rural America: Maine already has one, and thirty-odd additional states are contemplating similar bans. The reflex is understandable…and self-defeating. The data centers will simply move to different states, different countries, and eventually into low earth orbit. Data doesn't recognize geographic boundaries.  Users and businesses in banning states will keep consuming AI all the same, while the tax revenues from the centers go elsewhere.  

But something larger is stirring. The politics of income inequality are gaining increased resonance, with AI as ground zero. And with the US midterms just over half a year away, the noise is about to get dialed up. Way up. Some will frame it as a call for fundamental fairness; others will call it the economics of jealousy. Either way, for executives still treating this as a zoning issue, recognize that something far deeper has been unleashed into the zeitgeist.

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