Data centers are now a midterm issue, even in Brooklyn

At a Brooklyn midterm party five days before Election Day, every conversation, from a council member’s fireside chat to a debate about the Democratic Party, kept circling back to AI and data centers. On Thursday evening, I slipped on my neon yellow heels and a floral mini dress. It’s New York, so I can wear whatever I want to a midterm election event full of media types, techies, policy advocates, and, well, does anyone else even exist at these things? I walked into the dimly blue-lit Brooklyn warehouse and was surprised to see the room already filling up. Newsreel, the media company founded by former Forbes and Newsweek reporter Jack Brewster, hosted the event, and the lineup was heavy-hitting.

Kenneth Schlenker, co-founder of the focus app Opal, sat down for a fireside chat about “the state of attention,” and Aryan Banjan, who built the campaign management software Barza, gave a midterm forecast. I, meanwhile, was moderating a panel on data centers. Brewster said the goal was for people to “put their phones away and talk to each other about the election, five days out.” As the evening progressed, however, one topic consumed nearly every conversation: AI, data centers, and the backlash against the growing technocracy. Lately, as a tech reporter, I’ve noticed a growing chasm between tech and everyone else.