I think a lot of it is actually the tech for a lot of reasons:
0. No one wants a datacenter in their backyard or hooked up to the grid while the electricity burden is carried by households. People are afraid of losing their property values and being unable to move away if a DC is built nearby - effectively being trapped there. People in Memphis are breathing in gas fumes from the XAI datacenter there. There are concerns about corrosion byproducts making its way into the aquifers from DC waste water. If DC construction takes the cheap option no sound insulation is installed and people can’t sleep and some even lose their hearing: https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2026-04-2...
People are pissed that towns and cities are bypassing public approval to placate corporate builders.
1. People have been told to fear for their jobs
2. Many people believe labs have stolen vast amounts of intellectual property
3. Engineers are being pressured to use AI and told they “aren’t prompting right” if/when it doesn’t work for their use case
I can go on. But I actually think the majority of the backlash has nothing to do with stock valuations.
> But I actually think the majority of the backlash has nothing to do with stock valuations.
I think it exacerbates the points you make. "You mean, you want to take all the IP, immediately force the tech on us, maybe make my job redundant, and you want billions in funding for it!?"
You nailed it
This is exactly it.
AI companies are becoming a catch-all / symbolic lightning rod for "the ruling class".
What percentage of people do you think are affected by AI datacenters?
That argument applies better to blast furnaces than to data centers, but I don't see people complaining about steel. Data centers just don't take up much space or power in the scope of industrial manufacturing.
Your other arguments are legitimate, but "it's a waste of electricity" and "data centers make some significant difference to a nontrivial number of people" are not the same propositions.
I live in rural Wyoming and it's a huge deal here, if these projects go through many people are affected.
Some of these data centers are multiple orders of magnitude bigger than a blast furnace.
I think people are pissed that they're subsidizing the R+D cost of their own unemployment.
I'm sorry it affects you directly, but the number of people who live in the whole state of Wyoming is around a half-million (even ignoring "rural"). If every single person in the entire state were affected, that would be 1/650th of the population of the United States affected, to say nothing of the world.
There's just no way it's a significant factor in overall sentiment.
I don't think this article is about the backlash among software engineers, but rather society at large. What's going on among software engineers is interesting, but I think it's a different thing, not a microcosm of the mainstream backlash.
Ok thanks for the nitpick bud. It’s the last item in a priority first list but go off dude
This is being downvoted but it’s true and it’s obvious. Do people really think the backlash is against stock valuation? Thats insane and shows no theory of mind lol.