Earlier this year, I sat in on a Zoom presentation by a panel of Washington-based experts about the upcoming political season. It was an informative discussion, but I realized afterwards that there had been no mention of data centers.

That wouldn’t be the case if the same discussion were held today. Over the past several months, the political heat around data centers has risen dramatically. Polls last year showed people about evenly split on whether they opposed data centers being located near them. In a recent Gallup poll, 71 percent were opposed on the same question.

Data centers are a component of artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies, and all the stuff that we spend so much time talking about at the national level. But it would have been easy to misjudge the political impact they are having if you were only looking at it from the level where visionary billionaires battle trillionaire visionaries in court over the technology they say will enrich us all in practically no time.

Instead, the heat has been rising around the kind of stories that used to be the fodder of small-town papers and county weeklies, when there were more of them than there are now. Stories like the data center in Hampton under construction near a black cemetery, or the ritzy subdivision in Fayette County where the water pressure dropped when a data center began operations next door, or the Talbert County residents suing their county commissioners for allegedly changing zoning restrictions for a data center project without proper notice. These stories seem to be popping up more and more.

They’re the kind of stories that often inspire angry local government meetings. They don’t often affect politics at levels higher than that, except when they’re happening all over the nation. That seems to be what’s been happening this year. You know the political temperature is rising very fast when data center developers start voluntarily giving back the tax breaks they’ve already received, as was the case with QTS in Fulton County.

The relatively sudden ripening of this issue as the midterm elections draw near has left politicians with no certain guide to handling it, as we can see from the caution in approaching the issue shown by both candidates for governor. The General Assembly demonstrated what a hot potato it can be earlier this year, when it took up 20 bills dealing with data centers and failed to pass any of them.

Clearly, Rick Jackson, whose been candid about his investment in a data center in Texas, is the pro-data center candidate in this race. But he said last week at the Georgia Chamber of Commerce’s annual luncheon that he thinks every local community should have the right to decide if they want a data center or not. He argues that data centers could be an economic boon in many parts of the state, allowing some counties to eliminate property taxes.

That puts Keisha Lance Bottoms on the rising side of this year’s hottest populist issue, but as she also made clear at the luncheon, she’s cautious. While she has spoken of a moratorium on new data centers, Bottoms said last week she has talked with people on both sides of the issue, including people concerned about environmental and economic impacts and rural leaders who see data centers as a way to balance their strained budgets.

“So I am respectful of everyone’s thoughts on it, but at the end of the day, we’ve got to separate fact from fiction, and we don’t have enough facts on data centers to make an informed decision on how we move forward. We need a pause,” she told reporters after her appearance at the event.

In a sense, we’ve already got what both candidates are proposing. While construction is ongoing at a number of sites like OpenAI’s 1,400-acre, $20 billion Project Camellia in Effingham County, a number of counties and municipalities have instituted pauses of various lengths on data center projects.

Pauses eventually turn into procrastination, and local communities never have the luxury of unfettered self-determination. Neither candidate has much to say yet about what will be one of the biggest issues of the next governor’s term.

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