Big Tech keeps planting giant computer warehouses next to farms and neighborhoods, and the socialist Left wants the credit for stopping them.
Silicon Valley calls the whole buildout a patriotic race against Communist China.
And Ron DeSantis answered with one blunt verdict that hints at his 2028 plans.
The Governor Who Won’t Swallow the China Excuse
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has a word for most of what artificial intelligence spits out, and it isn’t a compliment.
The conservative account @ReOpenChris recently shared a clip running more than seven minutes, with Florida officials standing behind the governor at an official event. In it, DeSantis goes straight at the argument Big Tech uses to justify carpeting the countryside with server farms.
“All that stuff is mindless slop, and if that floats your boat, OK,” DeSantis said of the fake songs and fake videos churned out by generative AI. “But don’t tell me that is what we need to beat China.”
The post pulled in more than 600 likes and a lively brawl in the replies. A few commenters sniffed that the governor doesn’t understand technology. Others said he was just putting first things first.
But the line itself isn’t new. He’s been road-testing it for close to a year, and at an event in Sebring in December 2025 he told the crowd, “Let’s not try to act like some type of fake videos or fake songs are going to deliver us to some kind of utopia.”
And he keeps circling back to motive. “Their goal is not to beat China,” DeSantis said of the tech giants pushing the buildout.
He made the same point on X, writing that “China has way fewer hyperscale data centers than the US, and has a narrower focus for its AI.” In his telling, Beijing pours its effort into tools that strengthen the Chinese Communist Party’s grip, not cartoon cat videos.
That flips the whole sales pitch on its head. If the CCP isn’t racing to build the same thing, the patriotic urgency starts to look a lot like a marketing department with a flag pin.
Florida Sent the Electric Bill Back to Big Tech
DeSantis didn’t stop at talk. In May 2026, he signed SB 484, a law that bars utilities from dumping data center costs onto homeowners and small businesses, lets local governments say no to these projects, and shields the state’s water supply from the cooling demands of hyperscale facilities.
“You should not pay one more red cent for electricity because of a hyperscale data center as an individual,” DeSantis said at the signing at Florida Polytechnic University.
He also pointed out that these facilities don’t bring many jobs to the towns that host them. Silicon Valley’s glossy brochures somehow never mention that part.
His broader AI package, which would let parents read their kids’ chatbot conversations and crack down on deepfakes, cleared the Florida Senate. Then the state House let it die without a fight.
So the governor got half a loaf. Half a loaf still beats what most states managed.
Voters Already Settled the Argument at the Ballot Box
Anyone who thinks DeSantis misread the room should look at November. Engadget, citing the tracker Data Centers on the Ballot, counted 45 local data center measures in 10 states, with 33 restrictions passing by the morning after the election and six more on track to follow.
In the Ohio towns of Urbana and Hubbard, voters approved outright bans with 76 and 77 percent of the vote.
NBC News exit polling found 56 percent of voters called AI and data centers a crucial or major factor in their vote for Congress. That’s not a fringe gripe. That’s a majority.
And the Republican base got there first. An NBC News Decision Desk poll from late summer found 57 percent of Republicans opposed building one of these facilities in their own area.
Brendan Steinhauser, a former Republican strategist who now runs the Alliance for Secure AI, saw the split early. “When you talk to Republican voters and activists around the country, they’re more closely aligned with Governor DeSantis on this than they are with, say, David Sacks,” Steinhauser said, referring to the tech investor who has complained about a “patchwork of 50 different state regulatory regimes” getting in the industry’s way.
Translation: the folks who mow their own lawns and pay their own power bills don’t share the venture capital crowd’s enthusiasm.
The 2028 Scramble for an Issue the Socialists Want to Steal
Which brings things to 2028. DeSantis can’t run for governor again, and much of the political world expects him to take another shot at the White House. The data center fight hands him something he lacked in 2024, an issue where the base is already standing and waiting for someone to lead.
But he isn’t alone in sniffing around it. US Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) have pushed a nationwide moratorium on data center construction. For the socialist Left, a moratorium is only the opening bid. Once Washington decides which industries may build and where, the next step for people who dream of public ownership of the economy isn’t hard to guess.
The Democrat Party’s establishment showed up even later. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro rolled out the welcome mat for data centers, then discovered “real concerns about these data centers” once residents started packing meetings. Axios reported in February 2026 that top 2028 Democrats were backpedaling on AI as the anger spread.
These are many of the same people who cheered while Big Tech throttled conservatives over COVID policy, the 2020 election, and January 6. They found their love for ratepayers about the time ratepayers started showing up angry at the polls.
Now, DeSantis’ own record has a smudge on it. In 2025, he signed a tax package that pushed the deadline for Florida’s data center tax credit out from 2027 to 2037. Maybe that was the cost of passing a big tax bill. Maybe he hadn’t seen the backlash coming yet. Either way, it’s a receipt his rivals will happily wave around.
But the stakes run well past the power bill. Dario Amodei, who runs the AI company Anthropic, has said the technology could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs and drive unemployment as high as 20 percent within one to five years.
And the tools carry a darker risk in the wrong hands. A Left that leaned on platforms to silence dissent during the pandemic would love an AI system that flags who skipped the mask, who drives a gas-guzzling pickup, or who shared the wrong meme. Social credit doesn’t need a passport from Beijing to set up shop.
DeSantis seems to understand that the anger goes deeper than kilowatts. On X, he wrote that the backlash against hyperscale data centers is “rooted in distrust of these Big Tech titans and their designs on expanding tech power over the citizenry.”
Sources: @ReOpenChris on X (video of Governor Ron DeSantis press event); The Washington Times, “AI backlash getting real”; Newser, “DeSantis Emerges as Leading AI Skeptic”; Jewish World Review/Stateline analysis of DeSantis and Sanders on data centers; Ron DeSantis on X; WUSF, “DeSantis signs bill adding regulations for ‘hyper-scale’ AI data centers”; E&E News by POLITICO, “DeSantis signs bill aimed at regulating Florida data centers”; Executive Office of the Governor, “Governor Ron DeSantis Signs Law to Protect Floridians from Subsidizing Data Centers”; WFLA; Florida Phoenix; Engadget, “Americans overwhelmingly voted against data centers in the midterms”; NBC News Decision Desk Poll; Michigan Public/NPR; The Boston Globe; Axios, “Top ‘28 Dems retreat on AI”; Insurance Journal/Bloomberg; Fox Business