The aphorism that “you can’t please all the people all the time” expresses a truism that resonates through the ages. Indeed, it’s particularly fitting for today’s tech titans.
Consider: Most people seem satisfied with modern digital technologies, at least judging by their behavior. On 90 percent of American adults own a smartphone and do so voluntarily spend 300 billion dollars per year to use various online platforms.
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However, not everyone is happy with what it takes to make these platforms possible in the first place. Many people may have thought that all of this was somehow “virtual,” but now they know that all of these platforms require massive physical infrastructure involving thousands of data centers. And now, with AI increasing the utility and types of platforms, there is a rush to deploy hundreds of billions of dollars to build even more and larger data centers. So, as a recent Wired title, “Data center resistance has arrived.”
It was inevitable. Data centers are no different from any other infrastructure invented in the past: when they become big, they also become political.
Americans have fully embraced the convenience of online shopping, learning, and banking (more than 80 percent of Americans use financial apps), healthcare, and the entire universe of productivity tools, making it clear that platforms are used for many big tasks, not just social media, doom scrolling, or entertainment. Hence the politicization because, as with all technologies, nothing is perfect and everything involves compromises.
So now, as a research company that tracks opposition to data centers remarks, “About 55% of Republicans and 45% of Democrats in districts with large data center projects have taken a public stand against these developments. » In just one of many similar ones examplesOpposition to data centers recently helped Democrats flip a long-held Republican seat on the Georgia Public Service Commission. Late last year, a GOP pollster asserted that Republicans could turn the projected loss of their House majority for 2026 into a resounding gain by enacting some form of AI regulation.
Senator Bernie Sanders jumped on the data center moratorium bandwagon with enthusiasm, intone– in a video speech broadcast, not without irony, on the immense YouTube platform – that the boom concerns “the richest people on the planet” who “push these technologies” because “they want more wealth and even more power”.
Fueling the resistance movement’s theme of resentment, a featured article Washington Post analysis of Big Tech Spending observed that money deployed in data centers “could fund about four years…of the federal government’s program that distributes more than $90 billion in annual food aid to 42 million Americans.” Moreover, the newspaper points out, Nvidia’s spending alone was equivalent to the amount spent “on police, firefighters, courts, public schools and hospitals, social services, parks and much more for 8.5 million people.”
Right on cue, in December 2025, some 230 environmental groups have petition Congress will ban all construction of data centers. For what? Because, for them, the sin of data centers lies in the astonishing amounts of energy required. (It should be noted that all of society’s useful infrastructures consume enormous amounts of energy.) Data centers are, like Fortune According to the magazine, “local elections are transforming into struggles for the future of energy”. A recent Los Angeles Times The headline noted that “Gen Z can’t save the planet by dry-scrolling it.”
A single, modest-sized data center consumes more electricity than ten football stadiums. Even the lowest forecasts for national development estimate that request by 2032, total power will be more than five times what New York City needs. Thus, data centers are accused of being at the origin of a growing crisis of accessibility to electricity, at least according to at Bloomberg News. (Many dispute this assertion, including a scholar at the National Center for Energy Analytics, the think tank I lead, partly because most of the data centers haven’t even been built yet.)
Controversial issues surrounding the scale of data centers (energy, land and water use, and aesthetics) mix with a witch’s mix of other high-profile harms resulting from misuse of digital technology. Hence the politics. But while negative reactions are inevitable, they cannot be ignored. Today’s tech titans could learn a lesson from their predecessors of the last Gilded Age about how to use their immense wealth for the public good in a time of great technological disruption.
The simple and obvious fact is that even when people are happy with the benefits of a new technology, those benefits do not eliminate concerns about associated harms or disruptions to the status quo. History offers many examples of such discontent.
Think about how many people have seen (and still see) the construction of highways and parking lots needed for the cars everyone wants to own. Or noisy airports for planes, large chemical plants for vital pharmaceuticals, large transmission lines for isolated power plants – the list goes on.
This is also not the first time that new technologies have raised collateral concerns about disruptions going beyond aesthetics or security. Thomas Edison’s invention of the camera led directly to the invention of Hollywood, but also to the concern at the time about the destruction of vaudeville jobs, particularly in New York. The earlier invention of photography raised concerns about impacts on “the arts”, the admissibility of photography as legal evidence, and what constituted property, leading to fundamental legal decisions regarding the nature of privacy. Given human nature, it is difficult today to appreciate the intense emotions many of our ancestors felt when faced with the arrival and effects of radical new technologies.
To counter these concerns – legitimate or not – businesses today hire advisors, consultants and lobbyists to help them with education, partnerships, public relations and old-fashioned politics. Many people who have derived great wealth from the digital revolution also engage in forms of philanthropy, some in the form of good deeds, others as part of a strategy for improvement. But it’s not easy to blunt the resentful criticism of the 0.1 percent – those whom Senator Sanders likes to wrongly characterize as oligarchs.
History may offer another useful lesson here, at least with respect to the type of philanthropy commensurate with the nature of the technological disruption underway.
Our era is often compared to the asymmetrical wealth creation of the Gilded Age, resulting from just as deep technological transformations. In both eras, the absolute number of billionaires exploded, and the growth rate The wealth of the top 0.1 percent has outpaced the growth rate of everyone else, including the top 1 percent.
A notable feature of the philanthropic behaviors of the wealthiest in the Gilded Age – a feature yet to be repeated in our time – was the many truly magnificent public gifts that were apolitical, non-selfish, and of broad and lasting value to the nation. Consider the grand philanthropic gestures of John D. Rockefeller – whose wealth at his peak was comparable to that of Elon Musk today – including his donation of hundreds of thousands of acres to create or expand America’s national parks. Rockefeller also established, with a promise of approximately $200 million (in today’s dollars), an eponymous university in New York to focus on biomedical research.
Or consider Leland Stanford’s multibillion-dollar (inflation-adjusted) donation earlier to create the university that bears his name, using a fortune he earned from the gold rush and railroads. Many others could be cited: Andrew Carnegie, whose wealth rivaled that of Rockefeller, also founded a university. Ezra Cornell did the same, using a technological fortune through his invention and production of insulators for telegraph lines and his co-founding of telecommunications giant Western Union.
Carnegie, as many know, also funded another type of educational infrastructure for the era: more than 2,500 libraries, creating the public information superhighway of that era. Surely today’s centi-billionaires could create the modern equivalents of these libraries.
The “big tech companies” of the early 20th century also had well-funded basic research departments focused on curiosity, not just product or consumer research. Dozens of researchers from these companies have won Nobel Prizes, including at Bell Labs, IBM, GE, DuPont, RCA, Xerox PARC, Ford and Exxon. So far just A Nobel comes from a technology company, at Google. As I written ten years ago“Silicon Valley’s mantra is to disrupt. It’s time for the tech titans to put their money where their mantra is.”
Grand philanthropic gestures do not guarantee a get-out-of-jail-free card for the social and political sins of the 0.1 percent. But they could help alleviate some of the political anxieties of our time. This is especially true if donations respect the two key characteristics of Gilded Era philanthropy: that they benefit all in an apolitical manner and that they have lasting value.
In his seminal book The anatomy of revolutionHarvard historian Clarence Crane Brinton wrote this history shows that political revolutions are generally not fomented by the poorest citizens; they don’t have the time or resources. Instead, political revolutions begin when a significant fraction of the middle class becomes disaffected – when, according to Brinton, “they have less than they believe they deserve.”
Whether they like it or not, the tech titans and companies at the center of the big data center and AI expansion are increasingly at the center of this discontent.
Top photo by: Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images