From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Kittrowef.

This is the Daily.

Tech companies are racing to build thousands of massive data centers to power the AI revolution.

And to find the land they need, they're barreling into rural communities

across America. Their pitch is that data centers will bring good jobs, revenue, and a foothold

in a rapidly changing economy. But not everyone's buying it. Today, my colleague Karen Wise tells the story of one county pushing back against big tech

and what happens when AI comes to town.

Music It's Monday, February 16th.

Karen, I'm so happy to have you back on the show.

So happy to be here with you.

Okay, we've come to you because you cover some of the biggest tech companies in America.

And what that's meant recently is covering artificial intelligence.

And specifically, what you've been focusing on is the infrastructure that drives the AI revolution, which they're all involved in.

And that's data centers. You've been reporting

on the conflicted and often complicated way that communities are responding to these data centers,

and that's what we want to talk about today. But before we get there, just help us understand

this data center boom. What does it actually look like? Yes, exactly. I mean,

when chat GPT first came out, initially a lot of the reporting was about chatbots, but very

quickly this major theme started emerging every quarter when the companies would report their

earnings. And what you started seeing is more and more money being spent building data

centers all around the country and the globe. And what's happening is the data centers are

getting bigger and there's more of them. And so the scale is just really hard to wrap your head

...