“Yo bro, I run a for-profit PAC!” a fat German in a tan suit tells me as I sip a gin and tonic, sticking his tongue out and wagging it wild. “Shiiiit, I’ve raised fucking millions! I’m running circles around these Wall Street boys! Really takes a Euro to show ‘em how it’s done!”He then laughs and taxonomizes me. “Whoa-ho, man, you’re fucking tall!” All I’d asked was his business. I grin, astounded and salivating to reveal I’m a reporter. Grill him on the money. Make him squirm a little. Stretch out my hands and channel Chris Hansen: “You see how this looks, right?”Sadly, before I can interrogate his boasts, I lose him to the crowd, already raucous and enjoying the open bar, drinking specialty cocktails like the “SMRtini” and “Closed Loop Spritz”, some of the lucky first admits into what journalist Taylor Lorenz said was shaping up to be the “event of the season”: Data After Dark, a pro-data center soirée thrown by the tech-right newsletter Pirate Wires, AI advocacy Substack The Compute Optimist, “the liberty movement’s talent agency” Young Voices, and a roster of ideologically adjacent sponsors.I groan, but it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, since the party is subject to the Chatham House Rule, an honor code prohibiting any outside disclosure of identifying information.In other words, screw the press.Not ideal, of course. But we’re in the capital, where everyone is a born or made coward, so I’ll acquiesce. Thank God for the constant churnings of my mind palace. Accordingly, many personal descriptions in this article are modified to preserve anonymity, if not always decency, and some dialogue is reconstructed as best I remember. The hosts, graciously, agreed to go on the record, as did anyone else who’s quoted with their real name.Outside, the line stretches down the street, the Partiful having garnered nearly a thousand registrants, and those still queued stand in rain that mixes with car exhaust and cigarette smoke into something noxious. Initially conceived as a house party, the event outgrew itself online, forcing the organizers to relocate to PubKey, a massive 12,000-square-foot “Bitcoin bar” adorned with rustic wood paneling and American flags mixed in with accelerationist propaganda and crypto price tickers, and complete with a ballroom and podcast studio.Amidst a sea of Brooks Brothers men and Aritzia women, but mostly Brooks Brothers men, I spot Puppet Edgar, this strange puppeteer I’d encountered last spring at the Polymarket Bar opening. He’s waving his blue puppet about, badgering guests, and asks a pigtailed Romanian girl if she’d “rather live next to a data center or a sex offender?” Later, I see her inside, as a DJ spins “I Follow Rivers” atop a booth with a “COME AND TAKE IT” flag emblazoned with a data center and beneath a screen running loops of the “you look lonely… I can fix that…” scene from Blade Runner 2049. When she recounts this to me, it’s so loud that I think she’s been asked if she’d ever have sex with a data center, so I then ask her about it, and she replies for sure, she’d totally have sex with a data center, definitely, 100 percent, and I’m transmitted a vision of reluctant HAL 9000, circuitry bared and wincing “sorry, babe, I can’t let you do that.” While robosexuality, at least publicly, may be a bit much for most guests, it’s not far off from Marshall McLuhan’s claim that humans are “the sex organs of the machine world,” the bees that keep it blooming. These people don’t necessarily want to fuck machines, but they certainly want to build them, and a lot of them. Why? Ask anyone here and they’ll give you a litany. For Ed Tarnowski, the founder of The Compute Optimist, it’s a matter of historical scale. “It really is our generation’s Industrial Revolution, but bigger,” he tells me. He doesn’t deny the risks, but his bet is that “the risk of slowing down is far greater than pushing forward.”In this calculus, ecological concerns, as usual, will have to take a backseat.Jonas Du, a writer for Pirate Wires and the public face of the party, frames the issue in terms of lives. “We’re talking about human lives here,” he says, citing AI’s medical applications. “The less compute we have, the less frequent we’re going to be coming up with new therapeutics.” It’s a powerful argument, though it requires citizens to rank potentiality over reality: drugs that may yet exist over power bills that already do. “She replies for sure, she’d totally have sex with a data center”Data centers are, in Du’s words, “just warehouses full of computers.” It’s true, but reductive, since the biggest span the length of several football fields and draw as much electricity as a small city. On the Mid-Atlantic grid, the price of guaranteeing future power has risen roughly tenfold in two years, driven largely by data centers, many of which haven’t even been built yet. Du agrees residents shouldn’t foot the bill, favoring local deals that’d compel developers to shoulder the costs, but prospects for these policies remain uncertain.Tarnowski’s answer is engineering. “Innovation over moratoriums,” he says. “This is America. We can figure this out.” He advocates building small modular reactors, compact nuclear plants that, he argues, could power data centers on-site and off the grid. But there’s one snag: no SMR is yet commercially generating power in the U.S., and the first may not come online until around 2030.Whatever the case, Du sees data-center development as essential. “If we want to grow our way out of this […] economic pessimism that has taken over the country for the last few years,” he says, “you have to want to build data centers… We need to figure out how to build things in America again, and we can’t just outsource everything, including our compute, to China.”Fear and loathing toward China permeates the room, the partygoers determined to maintain American primacy, and never experience a “very Chinese time” of their lives. “Do we want the next century to be an American, a Western century?” Du worries. For this crowd, the potential apocalypse is a Hollywood fantasy, and more importantly, a strategic liability. No dooming allowed. Get back to the code, you goddamn nerds.It’s a Talladega Nights world: “If you ain’t first, you’re last.”Besides some stray Vibecampers who recognize me and inquire if I’d heard about the “sex tent”, the party feels light on philosophy. All I hear is that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is a “greedy loser;” Scott Alexander, Nick Land, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and the whole debate team go unmentioned. No accel vs. decel terminology. The guests, giddily huddled in a Christmas tree-lined back room, AI-generating pictures of themselves in data centers and waltzing below posters saying “HEAD IN THE CLOUDS,” are more interested in the policies on the ground.I was told that if it was metaphysics chat I wanted, I should have been at Pascal’s Rager the night before, a party thrown by Madison Campbell, the founder of Leda Health and self-proclaimed “manic pixie tech girl.” It was apparently every bit as pro-AI, but more fertile for questions on the nature of what these machines will become, and what will become of us.I missed it, but Atalanta, a jet-setting Greek economist who once asked me to be her sperm donor should she fail to find a suitable partner by 30 on account of my combined Pareto frontier, gives me the scoop. Sitting in a back booth, she tells me the party was amazing, all 8s and above, really hot guys, even surpassing New York, just incredible for D.C., she says.Nothing like tonight, at least for a girl on the dance floor. “Great place to get hit on by a 5’4” guy,” she complains, walking up to me. “But hey, at least your ratio’s good, right?” I reply. “Yeah, the odds are good, but the goods are odd, you know?”Still, it isn’t all one tribe. In fact, according to Casey Given, the Young Voices CEO, this event’s the most bipartisan his organization’s ever thrown.Downstairs in the speakeasy, supposedly closed to journos, near a guy wearing a Satoshi Nakamoto shirt with Nirvana print, another reporter tells me the party is a real chud convention. He’s not wrong on the optics. Opposition to data centers has surged: Emerson polling shows it jumped from 42 percent to 63 percent between December and July. According to a Heatmap review, more than 500 localities now restrict or block new data centers. Detractors are worried about higher utility prices, strained water supplies, and noise pollution. Some of it is real; some of it is just a mask for the oldest trait in American zoning: NIMBYism, or “Not In My Backyard-ism,” an impulse that has prevented America from building houses, transit, and power lines for decades. Regardless, data-center construction efforts have made a small fringe so angry they’ve turned violent. In April, a gunman fired 13 bullets into the home of a data-center-supporting Indianapolis councilman. A few days later, 20-year-old Daniel Moreno-Gama allegedly lobbed a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s house, after penning a manifesto calling for the assassination of AI tech executives. A constant subject of dread in the Bay Area: another Luigi Mangione.Many here see the battle as a proxy war. A pantsuited Wisconsin woman believes the data-center debate is really a referendum on AI itself, the Neo-Luddite blowback a product of replacement fears and existential worthlessness. Another, a pompadoured man wearing sunglasses, theorizes the public was blindsided by the widespread societal changes wrought by social media and is now afraid of getting caught off guard again, even though most of what they hate about AI actually comes through social media. Du describes Data After Dark as a chance “to get pro-innovation people in a room to talk to one another and figure out how to solve the current PR crisis,” a pep rally for the increasingly beleaguered techno-optimist minority. Around 10PM, after a quick smoke, I pass a poster demanding we “LET DATA REIGN,” and the speakers take the stage. The rally turns literal, and for ten minutes, the Chatham House Rule subsides. Cobalt blue light washing over him like an American Idol contestant, Du thanks the crowd, saying the hosts never could’ve imagined this could’ve turned into something this huge, this big, this much of a celebration of the dominance of American AI.“Yeah! American dominance!” a woman screams.Du then concludes his remarks, and calls up Nathan Leamer, the executive director of Build American AI.“Oooh hoo, Nathan Leamer!” the same woman cries.Leamer then takes the stage as shots of Tony Stark roll behind him, and gives a speech extolling how data centers are facilitating the reindustrialization of the American heartland, and shouting out the boys in the Gundo, a group of Southern California tech bros building rockets, drones, and factories out of El Segundo warehouses, without whom, Leamer claims, we aren’t saving the future. “More Gundo, less Dario!” he toasts to widespread approval. More speakers go up and give their remarks, including Manhattan Institute fellow Daniel Di Martini, and Brittany Kaiser, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower turned right-to-compute activist. By this point I’m availing myself of the open bar, so I’m not paying too close attention, missing some names, believing I’ve got enough for the story, and thinking they’re all pretty much the same speech anyway. A bingo game of AI buzzwords: America, innovation, China, compute, race, winning, victory, power.“A pep rally for the increasingly beleaguered techno-optimist minority”I tune back in, and the blond man on the stage rolls along: “AI will do it.. AI will do infrastructure. AI will pay for new roads. AI will build hospitals. AI will create jobs. AI will be the most important domain of national security since Sputnik and we went to the moon. So raise your glass, to being in this room, on this night, on this domain, to change the planet!”the first protesterThe glasses go up, but with them, some man, a dead ringer for McLovin’, hops on stage and starts yelling things I’m too far back to hear, though still keeps his glass raised, so maybe he’s also signaling he wants to change the planet. Give him a chance, I think, but the crowd isn’t happy. A chorus of boos erupts, followed by chants of “USA! USA! USA!”He’s then escorted off, but as soon as he is, another protestor, a ginger woman with sleeve tattoos, takes his place, and becomes the new target of the crowd’s ire, stirred up and hot blooded for cold chips. Luckily, I can hear her a bit better: “Thank you for using all of our water!” she shouts.“USA! USA! USA!”“You’re killing the world!”“USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!”Du is laughing and raising his fist in the air, defiant. Then the crowd starts booing again, and the woman is whisked away, double-flipping the bird as she leaves.And as soon as she’s gone, yet another woman, this one with mauve hair, assumes the center. Rushing up and wagging her finger, she yells: “Shame on you! Shame on you! Shame on you!”But all she’s met with is “USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!” Thunderous roars rock the crowd for the glory of American compute, big beautiful compute. A century ago, in his Manifesto of Futurism, Filippo Marinetti vowed to sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot, and tonight he’s granted all three. Like the Grimes song, they pledge allegiance to the world’s most powerful computer. We appreciate power! We appreciate power! We appreciate power! So long as it’s American, anyway. After the mauve woman is ushered off stage and thrown out, I follow her outside, and find her with the ginger protestor, already engaged with two other reporters. They’re sisters, Livi and Grace Plihal, saying they’ve a history of disruptive activism, downplaying any nervousness. “It was scarier being in the room with all those people,” Livi quips. “It’s a slap in the face to have events like this… when they are pushing out residents and making [rents] unlivable… Like, how dare you come to D.C. and celebrate your wealth.”By her math, I’d be the bravest man on Earth, I think, wandering back inside and sauntering down to the bathroom. I notice the urinal divider is newly graffitied with an ominous phrase: “Data is the downfall.”“I think we’re gonna keep that there,” someone tells me. Follow Nick on Instagram @manabovetownThe post I Went to a Weird Party About Data Centers, With Hundreds of People Who Love Them appeared first on VICE.