Data-center companies are ponying up to find out which communities will resist them the least. Startup Hamlet has parsed tens of thousands of city council meetings by scraping local governments’ video recordings, tagging comments as friendly or hostile to a potential project.
CEO Sunil Rajaraman told Semafor that a large fund that finances data centers and a data-center developer are among its paying customers, looking for whiffs of a moratorium.
“Where there might be more favorable political views” may well determine where future projects get built, Rajaraman said.
Investors backing these projects are also obvious customers for a real-time feed into Americans’ growing antipathy toward data centers.
The appetite for such data shows the lengths to which the tech industry is going to find where projects are most likely to go through, in the face of a national groundswell of anti-data center activism that has turned community sentiment into a financial risk.
Other Hamlet customers include real estate developers, political action committees, and retailers, Rajaraman said. The company on Tuesday launched new rankings for where cities and counties stand on a host of hot-button issues (ranging from zoning laws to pickleball), and a portal for people to look up what their elected officials have said. (Among large local governments, Corpus Christi, Texas ranked No. 1 in speakers’ opposition to data centers.)
“This is public sphere data,” Rajaraman said. “The data needs to be out there so America can make better decisions.”