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October 2026

7.8 US opposition context

[V][V-s][R][U]Open page 45 in the dossier
  • Data Center Watch, Q1 2026: at least 75 projects (~US$130bn) blocked or delayed. 300+ state bills were filed in six weeks. Statewide moratorium proposals came in 14 states from both parties. Maine came within one House vote of a ban. [V] DCW Q1
  • Q2 2026: 45 projects (~US$68bn). [V] DCW Q2
  • Groups and local fights: 840+ groups in every state except Hawaii. Loudoun County is preparing a 12-month moratorium. Nashville gathered about 600k signatures and faces a lawsuit by DC Blox. [V] Bisnow
  • Recent moratoria: Raleigh (7 Oct) and Milwaukee (13 Oct). [V-s] (datacenterdebate.org not fetched)
  • Caveat: Data Center Watch sells paid research, and its counts are not independently audited. [R]
  • Contrast with Latin America: US opposition works through local zoning, ratepayer politics and state legislatures. In Latin America it runs through prosecutors and public defenders (MPF/DPU), Indigenous-consultation law (ILO 169), environmental courts and the IACHR. That is why it surfaces later, usually after licences are granted.

Case box: "Data centers are not for AI" (John "Jay" Valentine, Texas)

The post. X account @brandilwells ("King Arthur Fan", about 108k followers; its bio uses QAnon slogans such as "Q" and "NCSWIC"). Posted 16 Oct 2026, 09:48 São Paulo time (UTC-3) with the caption "Data centers are not for AI". It is a 2 min 30 s re-upload of a TikTok watermarked @odinqrossy. At reading (17 Oct, ~10:25 UTC-3) it had about 36k views, 1,097 likes and 540 reposts. [V]: the post was retrieved through the X API, and the public video was downloaded and machine-transcribed (video/valentine-transcript.txt; automatic transcription, so minor wording errors are possible). The hearing's venue and date are not identified in the clip [U]. The room resembles a Texas public hearing.

What he says.

  • He introduces himself as "John Valentine… from Salado… a landowner, but also an AI guy".
  • He says he led the teams that built eBay's fraud engine and the TSA No-Fly list, and insurance-fraud systems for "70% of the property casualty industry". He says a partner built systems for the CIA and NSA.
  • He says there is "no need today for hyperscalar data centers for AI". On his account they exist because Palantir, Oracle and others use "1980s technology".
  • He says a 92-hour data-center job ran in nine minutes on a handheld Apple computer "that uses less power than a microwave".
  • He says "only America is doing this craziness with data centers. The Chinese are not building massive data centers… The Europeans are doing the same thing" (distributed computing). He calls the need for data centers a "fraud… on the American people".

His commercial interest (documented).

  • The filing. Sworn direct testimony, PUC of Texas Docket 59475 (SOAH 473-26-16349, Item 4548, filed 13 May 2026). [V] filing
  • The docket is not a data-center case. It is Oncor and LCRA's application for the Big Hill–Sand Lake 765-kV transmission line, which crosses Bell County (where Salado is) and 14 other counties. He testifies for two landowner intervenors (a family trust and Dos Brothers LLC), "opposing any route using G44".
  • His job. He is VP of Operations of Fractal (Austin, TX), which sells low-I/O "fractal" software as an alternative to data-center computing. He built TheSustainableComputingInitiative.com.
  • Paid and advocacy roles. He writes The Black Swan Files Substack and says it has 11,000+ subscribers [V-s]. He says he has been an expert witness for a coalition opposing Wisconsin data centers since Dec 2025. [V] (self-described under oath)
  • What he asks for. He asks the PUC to send the data-center share of load forecasts to independent review. Fewer data centers would mean less need for the line across his clients' land, and a market for Fractal.

Background and voter-roll ties (only what sources support).

  • His sworn testimony lists Georgetown SFS (1973), Tymshare and ADR, and CEO of InfoGlide (an eBay fraud system, described as "foundational technology for the TSA No-Fly List").
  • The voter-roll work (also sworn). He testified twice to the Wisconsin Legislature in 2022 that the voter-ID numbering was "corrupted and vulnerable to intrusion". He ran 77 copies of Pennsylvania's voter roll on an Intel NUC. He gave 350+ demos to citizen groups and candidates in 2021–24. [V] PUC filing
  • The "Jay" byline. As "Jay Valentine", he wrote in American Thinker (4 Oct 2022) that "our technology, Fractal Programming", found "23,000 Wisconsin voters using the same phone number" for "the Wisconsin voter team". He describes "Project Omega" as putting Fractalized public databases "into the hands of citizens". [V] American Thinker
  • Context. In Feb 2022 Wisconsin's Elections Commission told lawmakers that "fake voter" claims presented to the same committee (by Peter Bernegger) were unfounded. That rebuttal targets Bernegger, not Valentine by name. [V] Cap Times
  • Omega4America. Links to that group appear only in search extracts. [V-s]

Claims contradicted.

Claims unverified [U].

  • The eBay, No-Fly and "70% of P&C" credits and the CIA/NSA partner. These are self-reported, though consistent with his sworn testimony.
  • The 92-hour → 9-minute benchmark. His sworn testimony says 90 hours, for an $80m Oracle data-center billing job. No independent benchmark was found.
  • "Systems for federal and state governments" and Apple's request for help with "Department of Defense/War applications".

Analytical note. His examples are database and fraud-matching workloads. The hyperscale buildout is driven mainly by training and serving large AI models on GPU clusters, which his evidence does not address. His opposition to data centers is real, and it lines up with the ratepayer politics in 7.8. But he is an interested party: a vendor of the alternative, and a witness for landowners fighting a transmission line. Use as a case of how the US backlash is narrated, not as evidence about computing.