On the ground at a pro–data center party.
A Washington, D.C., bar was packed with data center supporters on Saturday night. Yes, you read that correctly. The event’s flyer, adorned with a server-stack graphic and the words “COME AND TAKE IT,” drew in hundreds of young people.
It was an enthusiastic crowd. They mingled in PubKey’s dimly lit basement, drank “Closed Loop Spritzes,” and chanted “USA” to drown out the cries of protesters (it wouldn’t be a data center event without protesters) trying to usurp the venue’s little stage.
The party came as public support for the technology is sliding and protests become increasingly common. Many in attendance are hoping to reverse that trend.
Event sponsors included the Manhattan Institute, the Abundance Institute, the Bitcoin Policy Institute, the ’76 Crew, and several AI companies. Jonas Du, a Pirate Wires reporter who co-organized the event, asked several of the party’s sponsors to speak: From the stage, MI’s Daniel Di Martino urged party-goers to support data centers, “not for AI, but for America,” describing the AI race between the U.S. and China as an issue of national security. Nathan Leamer, of Build American AI, tacked on a call for the U.S. to embrace American reindustrialization.
To a wave of cheers, Leamer referenced a movement in El Segundo, Calif., that focuses on integrating AI into physical hardware. “More Gundo, less Dario,” Leamer said from the stage. To this crowd, “the Gundo” is techno-optimist, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is a “doomer.”
Data centers have become politically treacherous for Republicans and Democrats alike in the past year, with polls showing supermajorities opposed to their local construction. In March, Gallup polling found that three-quarters of Americans opposed data centers being built near their homes, and only 7 percent were strongly in favor.
Politicians across the country have accommodated this negative turn in perception with statewide moratoriums, modified land-use rules, and foregone tax incentives. In some cases where politicians have promoted data center construction, such as that of Utah’s formerly long-standing Senate president, they’ve found themselves ousted from office.
Party planners referenced the prevalence of data centers locally in their decor. Virginia, just a 15-minute drive south of PubKey, currently has 398 operating data centers and another 287 planned as of late July. AI-generated posters in the venue’s basement displayed rows of data centers and declared, “Virginia Is for Servers.”
The protesters who wiggled their way, one by one, onto the stage Saturday night voiced the most commonplace (and perhaps least supportable) complaint about data centers: water use. Before flipping off the audience, one woman yelled that the technology was stealing water from small communities. She added a plea, drowned out by “USA” chants, for bar-goers to stop being “greedy.”
A handful of others followed suit, several of whom — oddly enough — had their own Voice Memos app rolling as they announced their data center grievances.
While concerns over data centers’ environmental costs circulated rapidly in early 2026, more evidence has emerged that the claims are overblown (see my colleague John Puri’s report on the subject), even if that evidence is often ignored by protesters. Beyond the industry’s improving water efficiency, data centers’ water use is comparable to that of other industrial sectors. For example, Meta’s 500-acre data center in Eagle Mountain, Utah, consumed 35 million gallons of water in 2024; a 100-acre walnut farm uses more than twice that annually.
Data center supporters want the facts to come out about the tech’s actual impact, and more notably, they want a vibe shift. Who says such a thing can’t begin at a rowdy pub?