The backlash against the AI data-center build-out - which we've been tracking since it was a smattering of county fights across 28 states - staged its first coordinated day of action on Saturday: 142 protests across 42 states, from Wasilla, Alaska to Naples, Florida, organized by Humans First, the nonprofit that Tea Party veteran Amy Kremer co-founded and chairs. The crowds spanned both sides of the aisle...uniting a MAGA stalwart in a 'faith, family, freedom' T-shirt in New Jersey, a first-time activist in Texas, and a left-leaning organizer in California's Imperial Valley.

The fight looked like Kenilworth, New Jersey. Residents of the 8,500-person borough gathered outside the municipal court at mid-morning with drums, plastic horns, and sidewalk chalk to protest the $1.8 billion CoreWeave AI data center their planning board approved in May 2025 on the former Merck campus - a project that has since drawn more than 12,000 petition signatures against it, several thousand more names than the town has people. The woman in the "faith, family, freedom" T-shirt marched beside neighbors holding "Build community, not data centers" signs. When heavy rain arrived later in the day, they pulled on ponchos, shared umbrellas, and kept marching. One sign, caught by Business Insider's photographer on the scene: "You think this is pressure? Wait 'til there's no water pressure."

Texas, the country's hottest data-center market, hosted the most rallies - 18 - with Georgia at 11, California at eight, and Pennsylvania, Florida, and Indiana at seven apiece. In Imperial Valley, where a proposed facility could pull 260 million gallons a year from the Colorado River, Ivan DelSol, 54, told Reuters that around 50 people turned out in 100-degree heat. "It's dystopian that you would use this much fresh water for AI," he said. Organizers released no headcounts; turnout ran below expectations in some rural areas and in Atlanta, where about a dozen showed - most of them, a volunteer there said, driving in from the smaller Georgia towns where the biggest data centers are going up.

Kremer is a founding figure of the Tea Party movement who went on to found Women for Trump, and an organizer of the January 6, 2021 rally that preceded the Capitol riot (she neither planned nor took part in the riot itself). She has spent months calling data centers the defining fight of her lifetime, warning the technology could threaten humanity itself, and she is open about running the old playbook: grassroots pressure, town by town, aimed at both parties.

Her crowds bear that out. One of Saturday's Texas rallies, in Tyler, was organized by Eva Cardona, a 31-year-old self-described political nomad and first-time activist who told Reuters she wanted something more hands-on than posting on Facebook; about a dozen people came. And in Imperial Valley, the man who helped lead the rally leans left. The polling explains why a coalition that broad holds. A June Reuters/Ipsos survey found only 14 percent of Americans would support a data center in their own community. Gallup polling fielded in March found 71 percent oppose building an AI data center in their area - 48 percent strongly - a worse number than a local nuclear plant gets. And Morgan Stanley told clients in a July 14 note that support for local data-center bans runs strongest among Republican, higher-income, and urban voters, while Morning Consult's national tracker crossed a line of its own in May: "stop building" (about 45 percent) overtook "keep building while expanding energy supply" (about 38 percent) for the first time since last October.