{"id":625899,"date":"2026-04-23T14:46:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-23T14:46:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/625899\/"},"modified":"2026-04-23T14:46:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-23T14:46:08","slug":"data-centers-used-to-be-movie-set-pieces-now-theyre-the-villain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/625899\/","title":{"rendered":"Data Centers Used to Be Movie Set Pieces. Now They’re the Villain"},"content":{"rendered":"

Throughout the last few decades of cinema, data centers have mostly appeared as \u201cserver rooms,\u201d or occasionally \u201cserver farms\u201d when that room was exceptionally big. For the bulk of their early film appearances, these rows of server racks functioned more or less as plot device\/set piece hybrids wherein the protagonists could hack, steal, bypass, or reroute some technobabble MacGuffin while surrounded by rows of blinking boxes. These onscreen centers of yesteryear offered (now quaintly) \u201cfuturistic\u201d heist moments, like in Mission: Impossible or Entrapment. These locations were opportunities for product placement, like in Iron Man 2, which gave the Oracle<\/a> logo (and Larry Ellison) ample screen time and positive PR as friends of Tony Stark. More often, they were sinister extensions of the antagonist\u2019s master plan, like in Hackers or Skyfall.<\/p>\n

A quarter of the way through the 21st century, the cinematic data center itself finally became a villain in 2025\u2019s Eddington<\/a>. Set in the throes of the 2020\u2019s early pandemic collective insanity, Eddington\u2019s data center is depicted as a job-creating inevitability with bipartisan support that the audience shudders at from their future vantage point. Thankfully, today\u2019s real-world small-town citizens are better informed than those in Ari Aster\u2019s dark comedy. Increasingly aware of the myriad threats data centers pose to their community, people from all around the country, from across the political spectrum, are banding together to stop these scourges from entering their communities.<\/p>\n

The data center development boom of the past few years has been a top-down effort from Silicon Valley and its vassal politicians to undergird the coming \u201cAI revolution.\u201d But now, a few years into that brave new world, the output of these models is increasingly seen as brain-breaking sycophantic chatbots<\/a>, slop animation of cucked fruits<\/a>, or deeply evil weapons of war<\/a> and surveillance<\/a>, rather than the cancer-curing<\/a>, work week-shortening<\/a> bill of goods AI boosters have been trying to sell. Accordingly, the small towns slated to take on the energy-hogging<\/a>, environment-polluting<\/a>, and incessantly buzzing<\/a> centers that make this all possible are starting to fight back.<\/p>\n

Historically, corporations were able to get facilities with similarly harmful tradeoffs approved and built by waving the carrot of \u201cjobs\u201d in front of politicians and voters. Data centers, however, don\u2019t even offer that sort of Faustian value proposition. Not only do they exist to serve the technology being developed to replace jobs elsewhere, but these centers also provide vanishingly few real jobs<\/a>. While their construction creates some temporary contract jobs, only a few dozen permanent positions materialize per center built.<\/p>\n

Research<\/a> recently published by Food and Water Watch found that, as of 2024, fewer than 23,000 people across the U.S. had permanent positions at these centers. Their findings also showed that in Virginia, the \u201cdata center capital of the world,\u201d with hundreds already built and hundreds more in the pipeline, \u201cdata centers generate just 1 permanent job for every $13 million invested\u201d\u2014100 times more costly than in other sectors.<\/p>\n

But this godawful value proposition seems downright prudent when compared to a JPMorganChase center deal recently exposed in New York Focus<\/a>. Approved in a sparsely attended 2024 public hearing, New York\u2019s Rockland County gave the country\u2019s largest bank $77 million in tax subsidies to build its data center in the hamlet of Orangeburg, which has a population of under 5,000. In return, the center would provide one permanent job.<\/p>\n

In the Focus article, the head of Rockland\u2019s Industrial Development Agency (IDA), Steven Porath, pooh-poohed the notion of assessing the deal\u2019s merits in cost-per-job as \u201coutdated\u201d and claimed such a narrow assessment \u201cdoesn\u2019t take into account all the other economic factors of that data center sitting in our community.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the optimistic cost-benefit analysis<\/a> Porath shared highlighted the proposed boons for private individuals\u2019 wallets and public coffers while failing to account for any of the known downsides that they would also be the ones to shoulder: increased utility bills<\/a> and potentially contaminated drinking water<\/a>, for example. This and Porath and the Rockland IDA\u2019s back-to-back multi-million-dollar data center subsidy deals in mostly empty public hearings<\/a> have resulted in Orangeburg turning into something of an overnight data center hub. But with the long-term environmental impacts of these facilities still indeterminate, policymakers are now proposing halts on further development at the state<\/a> and federal<\/a> levels until proper testing can be done.<\/p>\n

In other parts of the country, some governments and constituents at the local level have already deemed data centers existential threats and are moving rapidly to stave them off rather than sitting around waiting for a slow, uncertain rescue from on high. The small town of Festus, Missouri, just removed half its city council<\/a> (and is still calling for the mayor\u2019s head) after the council ignored the public\u2019s concerns and ram through approval for a $6 billion center. The Oklahoma City Council unanimously approved a moratorium<\/a> on data center construction through the rest of the year. One California city just east of LA has taken an even more proactive approach to dealing with the problem.<\/p>\n

On Monday, Monterey Park became the first city in California to permanently ban data center construction within its borders, as first reported over at Brian Merchant\u2019s Substack<\/a>. Voting unanimously on three ordinances<\/a>, the council designated centers as public nuisances that will not be allowed to poison the community. The Council\u2019s decision came after hours of public comment filled with residents speaking out (and weeks of activist pushback) against the 247,000-square-foot AI data center proposed and soon after abandoned by Australian asset manager HMC StratCap.<\/p>\n

Monterey Park\u2019s victory, while a heartening underdog story, also provides a blueprint for any other cities and towns across the nation wishing to prevent Big Tech and Wall Street from dropping vampiric buildings into their neighborhoods. When citizens are informed and organized, corporatist agency heads and councilpersons have a much harder time sneaking in detrimental sweetheart deals. If enough people go NIMBY mode on data centers, this AI bubble might just finally burst.<\/p>\n

Sure, future cinematic depictions of this anti-data center moment might not be as action-packed as Tom Cruise hacking while hanging from a wire, but that doesn\u2019t mean they can\u2019t be compelling. After all, the idea of a movie about the foundation of Facebook was once a punchline, and now the sequel<\/a> is about to drop.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Throughout the last few decades of cinema, data centers have mostly appeared as \u201cserver rooms,\u201d or occasionally \u201cserver…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":625900,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,10832,134,344],"class_list":{"0":"post-625899","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-data-centers","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=625899"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625899\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/625900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=625899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=625899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=625899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}