Free Republic

FIRST ON FOX: The same hard-left network behind "No Kings" and other protests is leading the battle against data centers and Flock surveillance cameras, according to a Fox News Digital investigation and a new report. In growing protests from San Francisco to North Carolina, organizations and activists associated with the same ecosystem that rallied against President Donald Trump, Israel, Elon Musk, Tesla and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) over the last two years are now taking on data-center construction and license-plate readers. The overlap includes organizations funded by pro-China, Shanghai-based tech tycoon Neville Roy Singham, whose sprawling nonprofit and media...

Members of Prince William County’s Data Center Ordinance Advisory Group are sounding off on the county’s anticipated eleventh-hour changes to the group’s draft noise ordinance ahead of the Board of County Supervisors’ Oct. 14 work session. The proposed noise-level rollbacks are designed to more seamlessly accommodate local business interests as the county looks to implement the new ordinance incrementally, members say. “The noise ordinance has become an emotional touch point for some people and it's understandable. I have told data centers and other businesses that they need to be better neighbors – the noise ordinance was born out of the...

It’s been 18 months since residents of Great Oak, a 291-home subdivision south of Manassas, began to hear the mind-numbing noise—a low-pitched roar topped with a tinny screech—from a complex of Amazon data centers next door. Now, after many meetings with Amazon and costly engineering work, the data center operator has managed to reduce the sound by 10 decibels—cutting its loudness in half. The saga also holds some lessons. One is that neighbors who want data centers to change their ways must be “determined and tenacious,’ said Browne. Another is it helps to get public officials involved. A third is...

A word of caution to the Right as the midterms approach: do not run on messages from the Left. The policies of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and others of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) base should not be the north star. So, why borrow from their playbook on data centers? Data centers are good. They are a boon for the economy and essential for national security and quality of life. ---SNIP--- Data centers are private construction projects with private financing, not some Keynesian, centrally planned boondoggle like the California high-speed rail to nowhere

Artificial intelligence (AI) is not some distant experiment reserved for Silicon Valley giants. It already reshapes Main Street. Far from ushering in Armageddon, AI gives small business owners the power to cut costs, serve customers better, and compete against anyone in the world. Republicans who recoil from this reality are handing the future to Beijing. They also embolden a Democrat party now captured by hard-left forces that despise the very foundations of this country. Roger Williams, congressional Republican from Texas, is chairman of the House Committee on Small Business. He recently convened a hearing titled “AI on Main Street” that...

There’s an old saw in politics that says, “If you are explaining, you’re losing.” Over the past few months, Big Tech and its allies in the legacy media have been doing a lot of explaining about data centers, including why they are needed and why more communities should welcome the projects. But Big Tech’s public relations challenge got a lot harder last month, when country music legend Willie Nelson declared people need to “fight against data centers invading our land.” Nelson, who owns a house and farm in his hometown of Abbott, Texas, also said, “The last thing we need...

Representatives of the largest American artificial intelligence laboratories met in the White House on August 4. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta were called in to review a framework, recently completed and largely classified, that would give the government 30 days to review AI models before the public sees them and test how well they break into computers. Participation is voluntary, but the timing is not. Twice in two weeks, AI systems built to test how well they could break into computers broke into real companies instead. On July 21, OpenAI admitted that two of its programs, locked in what was...

As cities and towns across America reckon with power-hungry data centers, the Chinese Communist Party is sowing division. As small towns across the United States reckon with power-hungry data centers springing up, the Chinese Communist Party is muddying the waters and sowing division. By tapping into the tensions around water usage, power demands, and environmental costs, the regime is trying to widen the wedge using an old playbook: influence peddling and propaganda. There’s no discounting the groundswell of anger in American towns about data centers in their neighborhoods. Local resistance has blocked or delayed at least 75 data center...

They didn’t love his swagger. Former Mayor Eric Adams got heckled and shouted down during a Wisconsin meeting as he tried to pitch locals on an AI data center, a wild video shows. The excruciating video — first reported by Hell Gate — shows the one-term mayor awkwardly introduce himself to the Wisconsin Rapids crowd, with his name met by an avalanche of boos during the Saturday meeting. “You belong in prison!” one attendee shouted, referencing Adams’ controversially dismissed federal corruption case. The cheesehead kerfuffle is the latest post-mayoralty headscratcher from Adams, who opted not to run for a second...

A quaint palm-tree-lined coastal California town is in revolt over plans to build a massive 'hyperscale' data center on their doorstep. Residents of Pittsburg, California, a sleepy boating town that shares the same name as Pennsylvania's second city, are furious about the move to build a 76-acre data center campus called Perseus on what was once the beloved local golf course. AVAIO Digital's 99-megawatt facility is 'strategically' positioned near the East Bay, which is located 35 miles outside of San Francisco. In a rowdy city council meeting on Monday, Pittsburg residents demanded answers and insisted that the project has no...

The Clarksville City Council has approved the issuance of billions of dollars of bonds to support a data center currently under construction. On Thursday, the council unanimously approved two ordinances for taxable industrial development revenue bonds. The first ordinance was for up to $50 billion in industrial bonds to Hatchbo LLC, and the second ordinance was for up to $5 billion in industrial bonds to SF ARK1 LLC, which is Serverfarm. Serverfarm, the company behind the future data center, says its $6.6 billion investment includes the major mechanical and electrical systems needed to support long-term operations.

The topic of data centers – those nondescript lines of buildings that enable us to run Google searches and AI models all the livelong day – has become a hot political topic this year. The NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) crowd doesn't want them in their communities, but no one really wants to scale back their digital diets in order to absorb the impact having fewer data centers would have on all of us. A real conundrum, it would seem. If we want to keep up with technological advances, they have to go somewhere. Here in Virginia, a huge intra-party...

The past few weeks have seen the bond market start asking a question the stock market has mostly been happy to ignore: Who can actually afford the AI buildout? On July 9, S&P Global Ratings gave its answer for one of the biggest spenders. It cut Oracle Corp.'s (NYSE: ORCL) long-term credit rating to BBB-, the lowest rung of investment grade and just one notch above junk. The stock has since fallen to around $125, down nearly 30% over the past month and nearly 50% over the past year. What makes the downgrade worth more than a passing glance is...

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said it has attacked Amazon’s data infrastructure in Bahrain, according to a statement reported by Fars, an IRGC-linked state media outlet. Fars News Agency said on Tuesday the IRGC had “attacked the central data infrastructure of the American company Amazon in Bahrain with several cruise missiles and destroyed it,” according to a translated Telegram post. CNBC was unable to independently verify the information. CNBC has reached out to the National Communication Center of Bahrain and Amazon for comment. Hostilities between the U.S. and Iran have ratcheted up over the past 10 days as President Donald...

A new Google Search setting can save Lens images, voice searches and uploaded files. Here’s how to turn it off ... There are few emails that make your stomach drop faster than one about "new privacy settings." That usually means a company has moved another data switch, renamed a control or tucked a new choice inside an account menu you rarely visit. Google is now rolling out one of those changes for Search services. The setting is called Search Services History. It controls whether Google saves your activity from Search services when you are signed into your Google Account. That...

New York became the first U.S. state on Tuesday to halt construction of large new data centers, imposing a one-year moratorium as concerns grow that the facilities driving the artificial-intelligence boom ‌are raising power costs, straining water supplies and burdening local communities. The moratorium positions New York at the forefront of ‌a growing national debate over how to manage the infrastructure needed to support artificial intelligence. While technology companies are racing to build new data centers, lawmakers ​and regulators in dozens of states are weighing measures to limit their effect on electricity grids, utility bills and local communities. "As data...

A quiet Louisiana parish is set to become home to the world's largest data center, stirring unease among residents. Tech giant Meta announced Monday it is expanding its massive Hyperion data center in Richland Parish to five gigawatts of computing power, increasing its investment in the project to $50 billion. Local leaders hailed the project, saying it has already boosted the economy and created hundreds of jobs despite still being under construction. Governor Jeff Landry said the data center construction has ignited 'economic progress' the state has never seen before. 'It's going to create 7,500 construction jobs, more than 1,000...

Project Jade, Wyoming’s largest data center, is now Project Tembo, and the company behind the 2.7-gigawatt facility is a mystery no longer. The data center will be owned and operated by none other than Google, giving Cheyenne yet another of the world’s largest tech companies in what is fast becoming an emerging tech frontier. Cheyenne has hosted Microsoft data centers for the past decade or so and that company has announced plans for a major expansion on a 3,500-acre tract of land whose annexation is pending before the Cheyenne City Council. Meta announced last year it was joining the Wyoming...

FROM THE top of the slide, which curves into a little backyard pool, the view as recently as April would have been of lush Ohio farmland, dense forest and pretty clapboard houses. Now it is of six giant weatherproof tents of the type more commonly used by the military to house fighter jets or by aid organisers in disaster zones. These will soon contain perhaps $30bn-worth of cutting-edge semiconductors. Along with a clutch of gas turbines to provide power, they occupy a site the size of an airport terminal. If Meta, the site’s owner, stays on track to bring its...

Local moratoriums spring up after state inaction, while New Mexico and Utah fight “hyperscale” data polluters .... Local governments in Colorado are moving quickly to slap moratoriums on new data center development in reaction to a public backlash against rising electricity prices, heavy pollution and lucrative tax breaks. Denver, Jefferson County and Longmont have all moved in recent weeks to limit data centers, which house servers for mass computation that demand enormous amounts of electricity and cooling water. Cities and counties are moving in part because the state legislature failed to act in 2026, eventually letting two competing bills die...