Members of the audience wear MAGA hats as they attend the 2026 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Grapevine, Texas, U.S., March 26, 2026. REUTERS/Daniel Cole
President Donald Trump is pushing AI all over America — but a small Wisconsin town is laying the foundations for how to fight back.
A small Wisconsin city upended by a data center backed by President Donald Trump is set to vote Tuesday on a referendum that could reshape grassroots resistance to AI projects nationwide.
“The vote in Port Washington, a lakeside town of roughly 12,000 people just north of Milwaukee, appears to be the first time any U.S. municipality will go to the ballot to kneecap data center development,” Politico reported on Tuesday. “It marks an aggressive new tactic in an escalating movement to oppose the hulking artificial intelligence factories — and offers a potential blueprint for other small towns challenging Big Tech.”
The political magazine reported that roughly 3 out of 10 US voters oppose the construction of AI data facilities in their neighborhoods, with at least three other American cities preparing anti-AI referendums of their own this year.
“If it passes Tuesday, the referendum won’t actually derail the proposed $15 billion, 1.3-gigawatt data center campus from OpenAI and Oracle, one of multiple ‘Stargate’ AI infrastructure megaprojects that the companies are planning with Trump’s support,” Politico wrote. “Rather, it would allow residents to potentially obstruct future projects by requiring city leaders to obtain voter approval before awarding developers lucrative tax incentives.”
In the article, Politico also noted that there is bipartisan ambivalence toward the issue of regulating AI data centers.
“The referendum is also calling attention to the policy vacuum at the state level,” Politico wrote. “While lawmakers introduced multiple proposals last year to standardize rules for data centers, the bills stalled amid partisan division. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers signaled he would veto a Republican-led proposal to regulate the facilities, while a separate, Democratic-led measure with more stringent sustainability requirements failed to receive a floor vote in the Republican-controlled Legislature.”
In contrast with this bipartisan ambivalence, Trump is very close to Silicon Valley and has done his best to promote AI. Many of his closest advisers are Silicon Valley billionaires including
Trump has delegated unprecedented power to the movers and shakers of Silicon Valley, at least those who openly hew to his far right political views. These include Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who created the Department of Government Efficiency; Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who began turning The Washington Post in a more pro-Trump direction; Palantir chairman Peter Thiel, who works heavily with Trump in the military-industrial complex; Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who frequently meets with the president; former Zenefits CEO David Sacks, who serves as artificial intelligence and crypto czar; and former Netscape CEO Marc Andreessen, who regularly advised Trump on AI.
“The examples are everywhere” of their anti-intellectual tendencies, recently wrote The Nation’s Elizabeth Spiers. “Peter Thiel’s crusade against college attendance and his program that subsidizes high school students who want to forgo it, Marc Andreessen’s boasts that he actively avoids introspection, the gleeful prediction of Thiel’s Palantir colleague Alex Karp that AI will hurt educated women the most. That all of these scourges of learning for learning’s sake are themselves beneficiaries of privileged educations doesn’t matter: As ardent monopolists, they’ve managed to believe they’ve cornered the market on critical thinking. Everyone else needn’t be troubled by the rigors of learning, since they exist solely to serve as drones in the tech regimes of the future.”
