Across American communities, the rapid expansion of data centers — the vast, power-hungry facilities that undergird artificial intelligence and cloud computing — has quietly become the issue dissolving old political certainties. Farmers and environmentalists, conservative landowners and progressive activists, are finding themselves shoulder to shoulder in town halls, united not by ideology but by a shared sense that consequential decisions about their land, water, and daily lives are being made without them. In this unexpected convergence, a familiar tension in democratic life reasserts itself