From Arizona to the Nation, Data Centers Are Becoming a Test for Democrats

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This year in Arizona, we took on one of the most powerful industries in the world and won.

The fight began at Barrio Dinners, community gatherings, and listening sessions across Arizona and ended on the governor’s desk. Throughout these community discussions hosted by Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA), community members gathered to express concerns about data centers being built in their backyards and what that growth would mean for their water, electricity bills, and neighborhoods. In those same conversations, families talked about struggling to afford groceries, housing and childcare. The hypocrisy at the heart of the data center construction boom in communities across the country was unfolding in Arizona as well. And it was impossible to ignore: lawmakers said there wasn’t enough money to allocate toward meeting our communities’ needs, yet billion-dollar corporations were getting tax breaks to build new facilities down the street.

Arizonans made it clear that this was unacceptable. They took their stories from neighborhood gatherings to legislative offices and public testimony. Alongside coalition partners and Democratic lawmakers, LUCHA partnered with our community members to push for a moratorium on data center tax breaks in Arizona. Tax Day actions and protests, press conferences, and statewide and national media coverage turned an obscure giveaway into a public fight over whose needs Arizona’s government was choosing to serve.

From the start, opposition to our agenda was fierce; even Democratic lawmakers and allies told us this fight was futile. They stated Big Tech had too much money, too many lobbyists, and too many politicians in its pocket. And they were right, to an extent. Yes, Republicans controlled the state legislature, and yes, data center corporations had billions behind their lobbying efforts. But nothing worth fighting for is ever easy, and our motto at LUCHA is to do big things despite the odds. Our relentless organizing forced lawmakers to confront a fundamental question that they could no longer quietly avoid: Why should working families subsidize wealthy corporations while their own needs go unmet? Why should we defund our public schools or kick hungry children off food assistance programs to give corporations a tax cut? 

Ultimately, as negotiations reached a fever pitch, our message broke through. Democrats in the minority achieved something unprecedented — they worked a data center tax break moratorium into state budget legislation in June. In the following days, Democratic Gov.Katie Hobbs signed a three-year moratorium on tax incentives for new data center facilities into law. 

The progress made in Arizona is not unlike other actions we’ve seen carried out in other states around the nation as blue and red states and cities alike place moratoriums on new data center construction and repeal tax breaks for Big Tech on developing these new facilities. The lesson from Arizona is simple: data center developers do not get to bully communities, dictate the terms of their expansion, and walk away with our tax dollars without answering to us. 

LUCHA’s fight exposed the real stakes of the data center boom: while families are being squeezed by an affordability crisis, billions in public resources are still being steered toward powerful corporations instead of the people who need them most.

As Big Tech moves into working-class communities with a familiar promise – of jobs, investment, innovation, and prosperity – Arizonans are asking tough questions: How much water will these facilities consume? Who pays for the additional power infrastructure? What happens to utility bills? Why should billion-dollar corporations receive our tax dollars while families are told there is not enough money for housing, healthcare, schools or childcare?

They call it innovation, but communities increasingly recognize it as a question of wealth extraction.

That is why widespread outrage at data centers development is breaking through in a way many political issues do not. They connect directly to the problems that people are already experiencing: higher costs, strained infrastructure, water scarcity, corporate tax breaks, and a growing sense that the government repeatedly asks working people to sacrifice while powerful corporations receive another deal. Whether you’re a farmer in a rural county or an urban dweller in Phoenix, you are impacted by this issue. 

The public backlash is not isolated to Arizona. A June Reuters/Ipsos poll found 64% of Americans opposed the rapid pace of data center expansion and 57% opposed having one built in their own community. Opposition has produced organizing across red and blue states, including 142 coordinated protests across 42 states this summer. 

But the opposition campaign in Arizona taught us three things.

First, communities can take on corporate power even when the political establishment is aligned against them. The industry entered this fight with tremendous resources. Organized people still forced change.

Second, data centers make the affordability crisis tangible. Arizona families hear constantly that there is not enough taxpayer funding to meet the public’s needs. At the same time, billion-dollar companies have received tax breaks while demanding enormous amounts of energy, water, land, and infrastructure. That contradiction is why we say Arizona is not broke. It is being robbed.

And third, the politics do not fit neatly into the traditional partisan boxes. Working-class communities, rural residents, Latino communities, environmental and water advocates, utility customers, and people across the political spectrum who may disagree on almost everything else are united in their opposition to the construction and operation of these facilities in their backyards.

That should matter to Democrats because they have spent years losing ground with working-class voters while too often appearing more comfortable managing corporate power than confronting it. Rebuilding that coalition starts with showing working people whose side it is on, and data centers are becoming one of the clearest tests.

Republicans are already reading the room. Across the country, Republican officials who once embraced the data center boom are beginning to turn against it. Democrats cannot afford to be flanked on an issue connected to affordability, corporate power, water, energy, land and the basic question of who the government works for.

The opportunity here is enormous: There is a working-class, cross-party constituency forming around the belief that Big Tech, Wall Street, utilities, landlords and massive corporations have taken too much while ordinary people are left paying the bill. That coalition is not neat, and it is not ideologically pure. But rebuilding working-class trust was never going to be neat. It requires choosing fights that make clear whose side you are on.

For Democrats who want to rebuild their relationship with working-class voters over the long term, this is the kind of fight that matters. Not another promise to manage the status quo more competently. Voters want real and dramatic change. And they want it now: a real confrontation with corporate power that people can see in their communities and feel in their monthly bills.

Democrats nationally should understand the warning in that victory: they cannot rebuild the working-class coalition they need in 2028 while standing on the sidelines of the fights working-class voters are already leading. 

The anger is real. The organizing is real. And voters are looking for political leaders willing to meet them in that fight.

Democrats cannot campaign in 2028 on solving the affordability crisis while avoiding one of the clearest fights over affordability happening right now. Data centers sit at the intersection of rising utility costs, public subsidies, housing and infrastructure pressures, and the larger question of who the government chooses to invest in. Meeting this moment means turning that frustration into a governing agenda.

By 2028, Democrats will have to show whether they choose theirs.