We rebuilt the paper. And an AI lab is hiring to watch you.

Hi —

An AI threat-intelligence contractor is hiring researchers to track the communities organizing against data centers. Yesterday, we finished a two-month rebuild of the public-facing version of the same work. Both stories below — plus the regular round-up of what is moving.

Data Center News

An AI safety firm is hiring researchers to monitor the communities fighting data centers.

10a Labs — a threat-intelligence firm that lists “frontier AI labs, AI unicorns, Fortune 10 companies, and leading global technology platforms” as its clients — is hiring a research analyst for a project they call Data Center Watch.

Excerpt from the LinkedIn posting

The role, in their words: track “political risks emerging from local opposition to data centers.” The methods: “open-source and targeted research in various sources, including social media, forums, and news outlets.” The output: reports for AI labs and Fortune 10 companies.

If you have spoken at a town council meeting about a data center, posted in a Facebook group organizing against one, or signed your name to a petition opposing a rezoning, this job is being posted because of you. The methodology section describes monitoring you by name, post by post.

We track the same projects, the same fights, the same organizers. The difference is who the work is for. Their reports go to the companies behind the projects. Ours go to anyone with an email address.

When the people who profit from data centers start paying outside contractors to watch the people fighting them, that tells you the fight is real. It also tells you why making the receipts public matters — so the asymmetry of who-knows-what does not run only one way.

The job posting on LinkedIn →

On the same week, we finished rebuilding the paper.

Same database, same fight, new design. Editorial broadsheet typography. Direct numbers. Bigger maps. A homepage that puts the load and the money side by side. Every page on the site got rebuilt.

Three things to look at first.

State pages. Every state now has its own page with the projects in your area, the politicians taking industry money, the local PACs, and a chart that compares the new generation coming online to the new data-center load proposed. Find your state — the shortfall is usually the story.

Supply vs demand · Virginia

What residents pay · Virginia rates +12.2% YoY

Community wins. Every project communities have stopped — denied, withdrawn, canceled, or frozen by moratorium — now lives on a single timeline. Seventy fights, on one line, sorted by date. Then the full ledger underneath with what happened and how they did it.

Project pages. Every project file now shows the federal officials representing that district, with a bar showing how much each one has taken from data-center / AI / hyperscaler PACs across cycles. Same treatment on the state PAC section — the bar makes the comparison legible at a glance.

See the new homepage →

From the Communities Fighting Back

Georgia — Rick Jackson is spending more of his own money on a primary than any candidate in Georgia history — over fifty million dollars per AdImpact. He also told 13WMAZ on the record that he is personally invested in a Texas data center. The Republican gubernatorial primary is May 19; early voting opens April 27.

↘ Find your Georgia reps · 30 seconds · poweredbywho.com/states/ga

North Carolina — Thirteen successful local moratoriums on file as of this week (Boone, Chatham, Apex, Gates, Orange, Canton, Brevard, Kings Mountain, Rowan, Watauga, Wendell, Swain, plus one more). NC just jumped from 22 to 101 tracked projects on the site. Stokes County's Project Delta drew a community lawsuit; Microsoft's Catawba County buildout is restarting after a 10-month construction pause.

Idaho — Meta's Kuna campus is now under construction with a late-2026 operational target. The political environment in Ada County is shifting fast as the project moves from rumor to steel in the ground.

Read This Week

Wednesday · April 29 House Energy & Commerce hearing: AI and the Grid Subcommittee hearing on meeting AI's growing power demand while protecting ratepayers. Witness list and testimony on the committee site. — US House Energy & Commerce

AI data centers are making electricity unaffordable Opinion column on the cost burden hyperscalers are pushing onto residential ratepayers across the country — and who's paying the difference. — Washington Post

Community votes to deny water to a nuclear-weapons data center A small town withholds the resource the project needs to run. The mechanism every community fight should be studying. — 404 Media

Wall Street is now pricing data-center political risk Ex-Credit Suisse team raising a $1B fund to underwrite the regulatory and community-opposition risk attached to data-center deals. The market sees what the maps already show. — Bloomberg

Insights — the makeover, by the numbers

The site went up in late 2024 with a single goal: make the projects, the politics, and the money legible to anyone — not just the trade press. A year and a half in, the database covers every state, every congressional district, every published project we can verify against public records.

The redesign is the second goal: making the database read like a paper, not a spreadsheet. State pages now read like state desks. Project pages read like dossiers. The wins page reads like a punch list. Same data, more legible.

Hot projects this week

Ranked by clicks on our map in the last seven days. Full leaderboard →

NextNRG Nassau County Hyperscale Campus · Nassau Co., FL 200 MW proposed. Top of the leaderboard this week as Florida residents start asking what NextNRG actually is.

Microsoft Fairwater Campus (former Foxconn) · Mount Pleasant, WI 2,000 MW operational. The site Wisconsin spent four billion taxpayer dollars on for Foxconn jobs is now a Microsoft hyperscaler.

Project Matador / Fermi America (11 GW nuclear + gas) · Amarillo, TX Eleven gigawatts under construction in Carson County. The biggest single development on file anywhere in the country.

AWS Salem Township Nuclear Campus · Luzerne Co., PA 1,920 MW under construction next to the Susquehanna nuclear plant. Behind-the-meter power deal currently in front of FERC.

Trammell Crow Georgia Campus · Social Circle, Newton Co., GA 2,400 MW proposed. Georgia's largest active project as the May 19 primary brings the state's data-center politics to the foreground.

Open the new map

Or look up your reps: poweredbywho.com/your-reps

If this email was worth your time, forward it to one person in a town where a data center has been proposed — especially someone who has been speaking up about it. They should know the room is bigger than they thought. The second best thing you can do is a small coffee. The redesign was funded out of pocket; the next phase — finishing the second-source pass on the other forty-nine states — is what you would be paying for.

Support this project

Commission · $5

Like this Burt Jones card? For five dollars, we will make a series of four branded graphics like it — for any politician of your choosing, on the data-center positions you want documented. Local council member, state legislator, governor, member of Congress — whoever the room needs to know about.

Drop $5 in the Buy Me a Coffee donation above and leave a message with the politician's name and the angle you want covered. We will deliver the set in your inbox.

Thank you for being here.

George

george@poweredbywho.com

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