Last updated on 2026-09-02
*Updated 2026.09.02 to reflect the addition of Adam Bair, Democratic candidate for District 10 House, to the list of signatories.
Marty Jackley takes Meta’s money and leaves them unpunished and solvent to find new ways to manipulate humanity into consumer captivity. Big deal?
Really taking a stand against Big Tech are 23* (so far) Democratic Legislative candidates pledging to take seriously the clear message they say they’ve heard from voters: “South Dakota doesn’t want data centers.”
Yesterday District 9 House candidate Amanda Potter and District 32 Senate candidate Jeff Shelton announced the Data Center Accountability Pledge, by which they and their co-signers promise to take the following actions to stop Big Tech from building more power-sucking and soul-sucking AI infrastructure in South Dakota:
1. Day Zero Commitment: Before the first day of the 2027 legislative session, and continuing throughout the session, we will work with new and incumbent legislators to draft bills to protect everyday South Dakotans from data center costs, unfair utility burdens, and environmental harms caused by data centers.
2. Keep the money out: We soundly reject any financial interests that would promote development of data centers in South Dakota. We affirm that we have not taken, and will never take, any political contributions from individuals or organizations putting data centers over the interests and concerns of the people of South Dakota. Furthermore, we will not support any policies in favor of taxpayer money being used for data center construction, particularly in the form of tax incentives.
3. Promote transparency: We will work as a team to clearly communicate when legislators in Pierre are taking action on data centers. These communications may include press releases, social media and website updates, and other means of clearly explaining what’s being voted on during the legislative session.
4. Defend local control: We will oppose any effort to weaken or repeal local governments’ authority to regulate, pause, or ban data center development in their own communities. This is the authority South Dakota communities like Yankton are already using [Amanda Potter and Jeff Shelton, “Data Center Accountability Pledge,” retrieved 2026.08.27].
As of breakfast this morning, the D-CAP webpage lists the following signers (I sort by District number):
- Courtney Enfield, Candidate HD-1 (Brown, Day, Marshall, and Roberts Counties)
- Erin Ronayne Rudner, Candidate HD-3 (Aberdeen)
- Emelia Enquist, Candidate HD-4 (Clark, rural Codington, Deuel, Grant, Hamlin, and Roberts Counties)
- Garrett Campbell, Candidate HD-6 (Lincoln County)
- Austin Wolf, Candidate HD-6 (Lincoln County)
- Amanda Potter, Candidate, HD-9 (Sioux Falls/Hartford)
- Kathleen Brudvig, Candidate HD-10 (Sioux Falls)
- Adam Bair, Candidate HD-10 (Sioux Falls)
- Aaron Matson, Candidate, SD-11 (Sioux Falls)
- Sonja Mentzer, Candidate HD-11 (Sioux Falls)
- Stephanie Arne, Candidate HD-12 (Lincoln and Minnehaha Counties)
- Joe Zweifel, Candidate SD-12 (Sioux Falls)
- Ali Rae Horsted, Candidate HD-13 (Sioux Falls)
- Erinn Williams, Candidate HD-14 (Sioux Falls)
- June CopperStad, Candidate HD-15 (Sioux Falls)
- Tim Rhead, Candidate HD-16 (Canton)
- Leslie Gerrish, Candidate HD-17 (Clay County and Union County)
- Austin Brunick, Candidate HD-17 (Union and Clay County)
- Karen Springer, Candidate HD-18 (Yankton County and Wakonda)
- Heidi Hora, Candidate HD-19 (Bon Homme, Hanson, Hutchinson, McCook, Turner Counties)
- Lewis GrassRope, Candidate HD-26B (Brule, Lyman, Hughes, Hyde, Jones, Buffalo Counties)
- Morgan Plucker, Candidate HD-31 (Lawrence County)
- Jeff Shelton, Candidate, SD-32 (Rapid in City)
These 23 Democrats are pledging to bring back 2026 House Bill 1301, a wide-ranging data-center regulation bill proposed by Representative Erin Healy (D-10/Sioux Falls) that included a one-year statewide moratorium on data-center construction. Republicans killed that moratorium in committee.
3 Democrats in the Senate and 20 in the House wouldn’t be enough to single-handedly pass anti-data-center legislation. But they could easily find allies across the aisle who share their suspicions about data centers, AI, and Big Tech in general and coalesce working majorities to protect South Dakota from data centers.
Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI are coming for your water, your land, and your electric bill. Hyper-scale data centers are massive, highly optimized facilities run by cloud giants, whereas regular (traditional or enterprise) data centers are smaller facilities managed by individual companies for their own internal use. Tech giants like these negotiate special “bulk” electricity rates behind closed doors, sticking homeowners and local small businesses with the cost of expanding the grid and power plant capacity. And the contracts that discloses how much tech giants will pay for that power is conveniently considered “confidential” by the local politicians, so nobody knows how bad the hit to regular people will be. Working families and small businesses, in other words, will probably be forced to subsidize the richest corporations and the richest billionaires in the world, and this is an increasingly common situation regardless of the company building the data center. This is not a new dynamic. Back in the late 19th century the owners of the most advanced technology in the world were the railroad barons, and those oligarchs played largely the same game by using their great wealth and monopoly power to charge farmers absurd rates to transport their crops, bought up politicians, seized land with the complicity of corrupt governments, and forced the public to subsidize their empires. That abuse produced the Granger movement, the Farmer’s’ Alliances, and eventually the progressive People’s Party. They didn’t oppose railroads; they used them heavily. They objected to the oligarchs exploiting them for their own profit. Today’s AI oligarchs and tech bros echo those railroad barons. The appropriate response to this exploitation of rural America and homeowners is pretty straightforward. No more secret utility contracts, no more forcing residential electric ratepayers to bear the costs of expansion and construction to feed the data centers, no more corrupt tax breaks. The richest men and most powerful corporations on Earth shouldn’t have the power to appropriate a community’s water, land, clean air, and electricity while sticking the locals with the bill and pollution. This isn’t a left-right issue; it’s an oligarchy versus democracy issue. Maybe voters will find the same courage as the 22 Democratic Candidates who are pledging to fight these tech giants and their hyper-scale data centers. Populism was always about protecting people from billionaire robber barons, not the other way around.
The Data Centers:
> Federal Reserve Bank data centers
> Goldman Sacks data centers
> Citi Bank data centers
> NSA data centers
> NBC data centers
> Wall Street Journal data centers
>
Notice what was posted….Plural for many data centers.
“A.I. will be the largest creator of jobs the world has ever seen.” – Jenson Huang, yesterday
Well since so many counties in So. Dak. are going the way of the passenger pigeon, why not let them buy the damn counties and do what they want? Its going to happen somewhere after all and what better place than where nobody wants to live? Any answers? If you believe you can stop AI or whatever, I’m pretty sure your wrong so splain it to me, please.
“A.I. will be the largest creator of jobs the world has ever seen.” –President and CEO of NVIDIA
Jensen Huang is no dummy, but he is greedy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/05/business/nvidia-jensen-huang-estate-taxes.html
Perry… what?
Perry points out that there are institutions and businesses that use data centers. That’s why we need a 1 year moratorium to figure things out. Are we going to use data centers for important research or for pornography or for a national security state. I’d be fine with research, but I think we really need to think about putting AI in charge of our bank accounts and our national security. We need to decide what gets AI and what doesn’t, because it’s too environmentally and economically destructive to let it metastasize.
Data centers are vital to modern society.
Young farmers couldn’t watch movies while they combine without data centers…
Embrace AI as a force multiplier, an incredible tool, but yeah, it’s gonna eliminate a lot of jobs. It will also create new ones, and it’s here for good.
The hate for data centers is a national risk. We need them, but whoever owns them needs to pay for their construction and the grid infrastructure they use.
You want your employees using AI or your company will be left in the dust. Humans cannot think on the massive scale AI can. Don’t kid yourself: the latest reasoning models are legit crazy smart.
Picture this, Grasshopper. The data center reaches from Brookings to SF along I-29. Now see it on both sides of the Interstate. Get off your flabby brains and do something innovative. Being 41st in Innovation Skills is just lazy. SD has brains but they’re dispersed widely across America leaving you all looking like backwater hay-billies!!