US mayors push back against data center boom as AI backlash grows
By AFP
March 14, 2026
Mayor Kate Gallego of Phoenix says people are growing tired of seeing data centers multiply in their communities - Copyright AFP Patrick T. Fallon
Alex PIGMAN
Data centers were supposed to be a gift. In cities across the United States, more and more mayors are treating them like a problem.
With the midterm election season approaching, big tech’s promise of a windfall of jobs and tax revenue has given way to talk of polluting gas turbines, strained power grids and a growing sense that the AI revolution is being built on the backs of regular citizens.
The issue has grown large enough to reach the White House, where President Donald Trump this month assembled big tech companies to demand that they bear the exorbitant cost of powering the new data centers breaking ground in communities across the nation.
“Most talk has been, ‘hey, this is the future, this is economic development, we need to go as far and as fast as we can,'” Tim Kelly, the mayor of Chattanooga, Tennessee, told AFP on the sidelines of the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin, Texas.
“I wouldn’t say I necessarily disagree with that, but I think now it’s starting to get interesting,” he added.
At the top of many people’s minds is Elon Musk’s xAI, which has gone the farthest and at dizzying speed in building AI infrastructure in Memphis and neighbouring Mississippi.
To meet its massive energy demands, xAI has been running at least 18 methane gas turbines at its South Memphis site — sometimes without permits — accused of pumping out pollutants in predominantly Black neighbourhoods already burdened by industrial pollution.
This week, Mississippi’s environmental regulator gave its green light to the gas generators at a site despite fierce local resistance.
Microsoft, Google, Meta and Amazon are also scouring the country to build out the sprawling windowless concrete structures, driven by the insatiable computing demands of AI.
Phoenix has become a prized destination, thanks to generous tax incentives, low regulation and the construction of new semiconductor plants.
But Mayor Kate Gallego says the local population is growing tired of seeing data centers multiply in their communities, straining water supplies and a power grid that are already at breaking point.
“When you suddenly have transmission equipment in your front yard, that, for many people, does not make it more desirable,” she told a SXSW audience.
Her frustration with the industry goes beyond power lines. Arizona’s largest utility, APS, says it cannot accommodate all the demand — if every data center seeking to locate in its service area were approved, electricity demand would reach 19,000 megawatts, more than double the grid’s record peak.
“We are in constant battle with our utility provider,” said Larry Klein, the mayor of Sunnyvale, in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley.
– We are not here –
Gallego said she often discovers a tech company has arrived in town only by checking the utility’s latest list of biggest customers — the result of non-disclosure agreements that leave citizens in the dark until it is too late.
“There’s a real spectrum of companies — some are proud to be your partners, and others would just prefer you not even acknowledge that they’re there,” she said, pointing to Microsoft and Google as more transparent operators.
Mayors warn that the data center issue is becoming a symbol of Americans’ growing doubts about AI more broadly.
An NBC News poll released this month found 57 percent of registered voters saying the risks of AI outweighed its benefits, compared with just 34 percent who said the opposite.
“I’m not a Luddite,” Kelly said. “But I do think these are the right conversations to figure out how we manage this.”
By AFP
March 14, 2026
Mayor Kate Gallego of Phoenix says people are growing tired of seeing data centers multiply in their communities - Copyright AFP Patrick T. Fallon
Alex PIGMAN
Data centers were supposed to be a gift. In cities across the United States, more and more mayors are treating them like a problem.
With the midterm election season approaching, big tech’s promise of a windfall of jobs and tax revenue has given way to talk of polluting gas turbines, strained power grids and a growing sense that the AI revolution is being built on the backs of regular citizens.
The issue has grown large enough to reach the White House, where President Donald Trump this month assembled big tech companies to demand that they bear the exorbitant cost of powering the new data centers breaking ground in communities across the nation.
“Most talk has been, ‘hey, this is the future, this is economic development, we need to go as far and as fast as we can,'” Tim Kelly, the mayor of Chattanooga, Tennessee, told AFP on the sidelines of the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin, Texas.
“I wouldn’t say I necessarily disagree with that, but I think now it’s starting to get interesting,” he added.
At the top of many people’s minds is Elon Musk’s xAI, which has gone the farthest and at dizzying speed in building AI infrastructure in Memphis and neighbouring Mississippi.
To meet its massive energy demands, xAI has been running at least 18 methane gas turbines at its South Memphis site — sometimes without permits — accused of pumping out pollutants in predominantly Black neighbourhoods already burdened by industrial pollution.
This week, Mississippi’s environmental regulator gave its green light to the gas generators at a site despite fierce local resistance.
Microsoft, Google, Meta and Amazon are also scouring the country to build out the sprawling windowless concrete structures, driven by the insatiable computing demands of AI.
Phoenix has become a prized destination, thanks to generous tax incentives, low regulation and the construction of new semiconductor plants.
But Mayor Kate Gallego says the local population is growing tired of seeing data centers multiply in their communities, straining water supplies and a power grid that are already at breaking point.
“When you suddenly have transmission equipment in your front yard, that, for many people, does not make it more desirable,” she told a SXSW audience.
Her frustration with the industry goes beyond power lines. Arizona’s largest utility, APS, says it cannot accommodate all the demand — if every data center seeking to locate in its service area were approved, electricity demand would reach 19,000 megawatts, more than double the grid’s record peak.
“We are in constant battle with our utility provider,” said Larry Klein, the mayor of Sunnyvale, in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley.
– We are not here –
Gallego said she often discovers a tech company has arrived in town only by checking the utility’s latest list of biggest customers — the result of non-disclosure agreements that leave citizens in the dark until it is too late.
“There’s a real spectrum of companies — some are proud to be your partners, and others would just prefer you not even acknowledge that they’re there,” she said, pointing to Microsoft and Google as more transparent operators.
Mayors warn that the data center issue is becoming a symbol of Americans’ growing doubts about AI more broadly.
An NBC News poll released this month found 57 percent of registered voters saying the risks of AI outweighed its benefits, compared with just 34 percent who said the opposite.
“I’m not a Luddite,” Kelly said. “But I do think these are the right conversations to figure out how we manage this.”
Residents in Western New York are opposing a data center backed by an Epstein-tied private equity firm.
By Derek Seidman ,
March 15, 2026
Marc Rowan, Co-Founder and CEO, Apollo Global Management, speaks at the 28th annual Milken Institute Global Conference at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, California, on May 5, 2025.
Patrick T. Fallon /PATRICK T. FALLON / AFP via Getty Images
Truthout is a vital news source and a living history of political struggle. If you think our work is valuable, support us with a donation of any size.
Abattle over a data center complex in rural Western New York may seem like a purely local affair. But an analysis of the project’s owner reveals ties that include the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, the government’s crackdown on U.S. campuses, and the imposition of neocolonial rule over Gaza.
Over the past year, residents of Genesee County, New York — located between Buffalo and Rochester — have strongly opposed a proposed data center that is being pushed by county officials and backed by Stream Data Centers, a Texas-based developer of hyperscale data centers. Community members say the data center will bring noise, pollution, and higher electric bills, while endangering nearby wetlands and wildlife and threatening the sovereign territory of the Tonawanda Seneca Nation.
But opponents of the data center are up against a much bigger force than Stream Data Centers.
Community members say the data center will bring noise, pollution, and higher electric bills, while endangering nearby wetlands and wildlife and threatening the sovereign territory of the Tonawanda Seneca Nation.
The parent company of Stream is Apollo Global Management, one of the world’s biggest private equity firms. The Wall Street giant has faced controversy over ties to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Moreover, the CEO and public face of Apollo, mega-billionaire Marc Rowan, is a powerful insider who’s shaped the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against universities and is helping oversee the new “Board of Peace” in Gaza.
The entry of a massive Wall Street firm’s portfolio company into a rural and thinly populated area is jarring to local residents in Western New York, who are facing an enormous power structure with arms extending to the heights of government and across the world.
“It feels like this insatiably hungry machine that’s just steamrolling whatever’s in its path,” Adrienne Yocina, who lives a few miles from the site of the proposed data center, told Truthout. “But this place is too beautiful to be another victim of that.”
STAMP Data Center
The proposed data center complex is being backed by the Genesee County Economic Development Center (GCEDC), a public agency that offers tax breaks and other economic incentives to attract private business.
STAMP (Science, Technology and Advanced Manufacturing Park) is a mega-industrial site that was proposed and developed by GCEDC. It’s existed for about two decades — with little to show, many argue. Around a year ago, the GCEDC turned to a new hope for STAMP — data centers — and selected Stream Data Centers as a future tenant.
“It feels like this insatiably hungry machine that’s just steamrolling whatever’s in its path.”
The proposed data center has been mired in controversy. Facing opposition and litigation, Stream withdrew its initial $6.3 billion proposal made in early 2025, only to come back with a bigger, more expensive $11.2 billion proposal, which has now grown to $19.5 billion. Stream says it’s developing the data center “in direct collaboration” with an undisclosed but “prominent” Fortune 50 company.
Community members have staunchly opposed the data center, worrying it will bring noise and pollution and drive up electricity costs. The Sierra Club and the Tonawanda Seneca Nation — a sovereign Indigenous Nation in Western New York, whose reservation shares a border with the STAMP site, itself located in the Seneca Nation’s unceded territory — have opposed the project, arguing it could harm nearby wetlands and wildlife.
Critics have also raised concerns over conflicts of interest in the environmental review of the data center and lambasted the huge public subsidies the project could receive, reported the Buffalo-based watchdog news outlet Investigative Post.
Yocina, who is disabled, has lived in Indian Falls, a hamlet a few miles from STAMP, for 15 years. She’s active with local groups opposing the data center, including the ReThink STAMP campaign.
Yocina said her electric bill recently shot up, and she worries the data center will make it worse. “They’re going to jack up my electric bill even more,” she told Truthout. “That’s really motivated a lot of people around here.”
She’s also upset about the public money that could subsidize the data center. “They’re asking for $801 million in subsidies,” she said. “That’s our money. The audacity to ask for that much money while I’m struggling to pay my electric bill.”
“There’s unity happening here. This is a bipartisan issue. Everybody is against this data center.”
Yocina’s mention of $801 million in public subsidies is a reference to the package of tax exemptions the GCEDC is offering to Stream — a number that Stream is now looking to increase to a whopping $1.44 billion.
Despite the opposition to the data center, the GCEDC unanimously approved a motion on February 5, 2026, to start reviewing a financial assistance application from Stream.
Apollo Global Management
Tucked into Stream’s STAMP data center proposal is a short clause that notes the company is “strategically backed by Apollo Global Management-managed funds.”
Apollo is one of the world’s top private equity firms, overseeing $908 billion in assets. Apollo CEO Marc Rowan is worth over $7 billion, and he’s spent tens of millions of dollars in recent months and years buying up properties near the Hamptons, the elite enclave of Long Island.
“It’s almost impossible for me to even think about having that much money,” said Yocina. “I just feel like $37,000 a year” — the per capita income of Genesee County – “compared to Marc Rowan is an unfair fight.”
Like other private equity firms, Apollo has faced criticism over its management of its holdings, such as hospitals and for-profit colleges, and for labor policies among its portfolio companies. And also like other private equity firms, Apollo is aiming to profit off the AI and data center boom.
In November 2025, Apollo completed its acquisition of Stream Data Centers. Apollo executives view their new portfolio company as a hands-on and strategic investment.
One Apollo statement said that Stream will allow the firm to “potentially deploy billions of dollars into next-generation digital infrastructure,” while Apollo president Jim Zelter declared that “Stream Data Centers strengthen our presence in digital infrastructure.” Goldman Sachs, who advised Stream on the majority investment from Apollo, emphasized that Apollo will “help Stream execute on a multigigawatt development pipeline” and that Stream will provide Apollo “with an ‘origination engine’ for deploying capital.”
Apollo and Jeffrey Epstein
Apollo has also faced controversy over its top executives’ ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
Most notably, Apollo’s cofounder and longtime former CEO Leon Black left the firm in 2021 after revelations that he was Epstein’s main client. Black paid Epstein $158 million to avoid as much as $2 billion in tax payments. As Bloomberg reports, the newly released Epstein files show “how enmeshed” Epstein “was in Black’s financial and personal lives,” noting that “[i]n Epstein’s world, few billionaires loomed as large as Black.”
Bloomberg referred to Epstein as“Black’s stealthy do-it-all fixer” and added that “the convicted sex offender arranged family portraits, helped the billionaire leverage up a vast art collection” and “obscured some of his most sensitive secrets.” The New York Times reports that “[t]he two men often socialized and dined together.”
With the release of the Epstein files, the Financial Times reports that “[t]op Apollo Global Management executives including chief Marc Rowan held wide-ranging discussions over the firm’s tax arrangements” with Epstein throughout the 2010s, despite Apollo’s previous claim that it “never did any business.”
Rowan “repeatedly corresponded with Epstein” over financial matters and forwarded an internal document to Epstein in March 2016, said the Financial Times. An investigation by the Daily Penn — the paper of Rowan’s alma mater — found that Rowan “remained in contact with Epstein between 2013 and 2016” and that emails reveal “discussions about a potential purchase of Rowan’s private jet and multiple plans to meet for breakfast at Epstein’s home.”
“It’s hard not to see these rich, powerful men in suits just continuing what Epstein did, and this insatiable hunger for more power and money,” Yocina told Truthout. “In Genesee County, we weren’t expecting this.”
Truthout reached out to both Apollo and Stream Data Centers for comment about this article but did not receive responses from them.
Campus Witch Hunts and Higher Ed “Compact”
Rowan’s influence stretches well beyond the business world. He’s been a driving force behind the Trump’s administration’s pressure campaign against U.S. universities as well as efforts to stifle campus Palestine solidarity efforts.
In September 2023, Rowan opposed a Palestinian literary festival scheduled at Penn, and following the October 7, 2023 attacks, Rowan “led a crusade” against Liz Magill, then president of the University of Pennsylvania, “[a]rguing that Penn had become a bastion of antisemitism,” sending “daily emails to trustees to protest the school’s direction,” according to The New York Times.
Rowan chairs the board of Penn’s prestigious Wharton business school and has donated tens of millions of dollars to the school. As part of his pressure campaign, Rowan “[curbed] his contributions and [beseeched] other donors to do the same,” reported the Times.
Ultimately, Magill resigned in December 2023 after facing a congressional committee chaired by hard-right North Carolina Rep. Virginia Foxx. In the following weeks, Rowan and his wife donated $13,200 to Foxx and Rowan cohosted a fundraiser with “critical Penn donors” for Foxx.
Rowan is also widely reported as a key architect of the Trump administration’s campaign against higher education, which has included staging investigations into universities over allegations of antisemitism and fraud, and strong-arming rollbacks of so-called “woke” programs by threatening massive funding cuts.
In October 2025, The New York Times referred to Rowan as “the billionaire behind Trump’s deal for universities,” stating that Rowan “was regarded as a central force” behind a document, circulated “at the behest” of Rowan, that became the blueprint of the administration’s campaign against universities.
“The ideas that flowed from Mr. Rowan and his allies are now the backbone of a potentially far-reaching administration effort to tie campus policies to Mr. Trump’s agenda and the federal government’s financial might,” The New York Times asserted.
The administration’s assault on higher education, led by Trump aides like Stephen Miller, has included attempts to pressure universities into signing a “compact,” which Rowan helped write, that would condition federal funding on alignment with Trump’s policies — what one law school dean has called “extortion, plain and simple.”
Weaponizing Antisemitism
News reports have also tied Rowan to broader efforts to paint opposition to Zionism and Palestine solidarity efforts as forms of “antisemitism.”
A New York Magazine investigation into the rightward turn of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) suggested that Rowan has shaped the group’s focus on the “radical left” as the face of antisemitism.
“Current and former ADL employees repeatedly mentioned one name in connection with this idea: Marc Rowan, the Republican megadonor and CEO of Apollo Global Management,” said the investigation, with staffers implying that ADL President Jonathan Greenblatt’s desire to secure funding was involved.
A Jewish Currents investigation into the ADL’s methodology for auditing “antisemitic incidents” argued that a 2023 report misclassified “more than a thousand items” as antisemitic, all of which were “cases of speech critical of Israel or Zionism.”
In a recent speech during a fundraiser for the UJA-Federation of New York, whose board Rowan chairs, Rowan alluded to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani as “someone who uses antisemitism in their campaign and normalizes antisemitism” and stated that “he is our enemy.”
Rowan’s statements, which equate Mamdani’s criticism of Israel with antisemitism, appear at odds with the views of at least a large plurality of New York City Jews, who voted in significant numbers for Mamdani.
During his mayoral campaign, Mamdani criticized Israel’s genocide in Gaza and stated his support for universal rights and equality for Israelis and Palestinians.
Board of Peace
Rowan is also a member of the executive board of Donald Trump’s new “Board of Peace” and a member of Trump’s “Gaza Executive Board.”
Trump’s “Board of Peace” is dominated by authoritarian leaders. “The board seems designed above all to assert Trump’s primacy in world affairs” and “to serve private interests close to the president,” wrote the Financial Times. As part of its seven-member executive board, Rowan sits alongside Secretary of State Marco Rubio, U.S. Middle East envoy Steven Witkoff, and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
The “Gaza Executive Board” that Rowan also sits on is a subset of the “Board of Peace,” which will reportedly “assume full legislative, executive, and judicial control over Gaza, including ‘emergency powers,’” according to Drop Site News.
At a recent “Board of Peace” meeting, Rowan raved about the “tremendous” potential for Gaza’s reconstruction, including “$50 billion on a conservative basis” for “the coastline alone” and “$115 billion of value” in total that “just needs to be unlocked and financed.”
Human rights attorney Diana Buttu has referred to the “Board of Peace” as “neocolonialism in the 21st century,” saying its “aim, of course, is to try to erase Israel’s crimes and to turn them into a money-making real estate venture for Trump, Kushner, and their cronies.”
“Everybody Is Against This Data Center”
Local organizing against data centers and opposition to political repression, militarism, and occupation may seem like distant struggles from each other. In fact, they’re increasingly linked.
Artificial intelligence — powered by data centers — is being ever more integrated into U.S. and Israeli military campaigns and surveillance efforts. Israel has used AI during its annihilation campaign in Gaza and its occupation of the West Bank. The Pentagon has been pushing for deeper integration of AI into its surveillance and war apparatus, and it’s using AI in the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. Authorities have used AI to surveil pro-Palestine protesters in the U.S., including on campuses.
Back in Western New York, organizers against the STAMP data center are focused on impacting current siting, environmental and financial incentive reviews and showcasing the wide opposition to the project, while also imagining the region they actually want — one where $1.44 billion could go toward local needs rather than corporate subsidies.
In doing all this, they’re up against a force much more powerful than just Stream Data Centers and local officials: the well-connected Wall Street powerhouse firm, and its influential billionaire leadership, that sits atop the data center’s ownership chain.
But communities across the U.S. are rising en masse against the data center boom. In Wisconsin, residents recently stopped a data center project owned by Blackstone — a private equity firm even more powerful than Apollo.
Yocina sometimes feels overwhelmed when she thinks about the forces her community is up against. But she also remains undaunted.
“They think that we’re all just stupid country bumpkins,” she said. “But they’re underestimating us. There’s unity happening here. This is a bipartisan issue. Everybody is against this data center.”
Truthout is a vital news source and a living history of political struggle. If you think our work is valuable, support us with a donation of any size.
Abattle over a data center complex in rural Western New York may seem like a purely local affair. But an analysis of the project’s owner reveals ties that include the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, the government’s crackdown on U.S. campuses, and the imposition of neocolonial rule over Gaza.
Over the past year, residents of Genesee County, New York — located between Buffalo and Rochester — have strongly opposed a proposed data center that is being pushed by county officials and backed by Stream Data Centers, a Texas-based developer of hyperscale data centers. Community members say the data center will bring noise, pollution, and higher electric bills, while endangering nearby wetlands and wildlife and threatening the sovereign territory of the Tonawanda Seneca Nation.
But opponents of the data center are up against a much bigger force than Stream Data Centers.
Community members say the data center will bring noise, pollution, and higher electric bills, while endangering nearby wetlands and wildlife and threatening the sovereign territory of the Tonawanda Seneca Nation.
The parent company of Stream is Apollo Global Management, one of the world’s biggest private equity firms. The Wall Street giant has faced controversy over ties to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Moreover, the CEO and public face of Apollo, mega-billionaire Marc Rowan, is a powerful insider who’s shaped the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against universities and is helping oversee the new “Board of Peace” in Gaza.
The entry of a massive Wall Street firm’s portfolio company into a rural and thinly populated area is jarring to local residents in Western New York, who are facing an enormous power structure with arms extending to the heights of government and across the world.
“It feels like this insatiably hungry machine that’s just steamrolling whatever’s in its path,” Adrienne Yocina, who lives a few miles from the site of the proposed data center, told Truthout. “But this place is too beautiful to be another victim of that.”
STAMP Data Center
The proposed data center complex is being backed by the Genesee County Economic Development Center (GCEDC), a public agency that offers tax breaks and other economic incentives to attract private business.
STAMP (Science, Technology and Advanced Manufacturing Park) is a mega-industrial site that was proposed and developed by GCEDC. It’s existed for about two decades — with little to show, many argue. Around a year ago, the GCEDC turned to a new hope for STAMP — data centers — and selected Stream Data Centers as a future tenant.
“It feels like this insatiably hungry machine that’s just steamrolling whatever’s in its path.”
The proposed data center has been mired in controversy. Facing opposition and litigation, Stream withdrew its initial $6.3 billion proposal made in early 2025, only to come back with a bigger, more expensive $11.2 billion proposal, which has now grown to $19.5 billion. Stream says it’s developing the data center “in direct collaboration” with an undisclosed but “prominent” Fortune 50 company.
Community members have staunchly opposed the data center, worrying it will bring noise and pollution and drive up electricity costs. The Sierra Club and the Tonawanda Seneca Nation — a sovereign Indigenous Nation in Western New York, whose reservation shares a border with the STAMP site, itself located in the Seneca Nation’s unceded territory — have opposed the project, arguing it could harm nearby wetlands and wildlife.
Critics have also raised concerns over conflicts of interest in the environmental review of the data center and lambasted the huge public subsidies the project could receive, reported the Buffalo-based watchdog news outlet Investigative Post.
Yocina, who is disabled, has lived in Indian Falls, a hamlet a few miles from STAMP, for 15 years. She’s active with local groups opposing the data center, including the ReThink STAMP campaign.
Yocina said her electric bill recently shot up, and she worries the data center will make it worse. “They’re going to jack up my electric bill even more,” she told Truthout. “That’s really motivated a lot of people around here.”
She’s also upset about the public money that could subsidize the data center. “They’re asking for $801 million in subsidies,” she said. “That’s our money. The audacity to ask for that much money while I’m struggling to pay my electric bill.”
“There’s unity happening here. This is a bipartisan issue. Everybody is against this data center.”
Yocina’s mention of $801 million in public subsidies is a reference to the package of tax exemptions the GCEDC is offering to Stream — a number that Stream is now looking to increase to a whopping $1.44 billion.
Despite the opposition to the data center, the GCEDC unanimously approved a motion on February 5, 2026, to start reviewing a financial assistance application from Stream.
Apollo Global Management
Tucked into Stream’s STAMP data center proposal is a short clause that notes the company is “strategically backed by Apollo Global Management-managed funds.”
Apollo is one of the world’s top private equity firms, overseeing $908 billion in assets. Apollo CEO Marc Rowan is worth over $7 billion, and he’s spent tens of millions of dollars in recent months and years buying up properties near the Hamptons, the elite enclave of Long Island.
“It’s almost impossible for me to even think about having that much money,” said Yocina. “I just feel like $37,000 a year” — the per capita income of Genesee County – “compared to Marc Rowan is an unfair fight.”
Like other private equity firms, Apollo has faced criticism over its management of its holdings, such as hospitals and for-profit colleges, and for labor policies among its portfolio companies. And also like other private equity firms, Apollo is aiming to profit off the AI and data center boom.
In November 2025, Apollo completed its acquisition of Stream Data Centers. Apollo executives view their new portfolio company as a hands-on and strategic investment.
One Apollo statement said that Stream will allow the firm to “potentially deploy billions of dollars into next-generation digital infrastructure,” while Apollo president Jim Zelter declared that “Stream Data Centers strengthen our presence in digital infrastructure.” Goldman Sachs, who advised Stream on the majority investment from Apollo, emphasized that Apollo will “help Stream execute on a multigigawatt development pipeline” and that Stream will provide Apollo “with an ‘origination engine’ for deploying capital.”
Apollo and Jeffrey Epstein
Apollo has also faced controversy over its top executives’ ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
Most notably, Apollo’s cofounder and longtime former CEO Leon Black left the firm in 2021 after revelations that he was Epstein’s main client. Black paid Epstein $158 million to avoid as much as $2 billion in tax payments. As Bloomberg reports, the newly released Epstein files show “how enmeshed” Epstein “was in Black’s financial and personal lives,” noting that “[i]n Epstein’s world, few billionaires loomed as large as Black.”
Bloomberg referred to Epstein as“Black’s stealthy do-it-all fixer” and added that “the convicted sex offender arranged family portraits, helped the billionaire leverage up a vast art collection” and “obscured some of his most sensitive secrets.” The New York Times reports that “[t]he two men often socialized and dined together.”
With the release of the Epstein files, the Financial Times reports that “[t]op Apollo Global Management executives including chief Marc Rowan held wide-ranging discussions over the firm’s tax arrangements” with Epstein throughout the 2010s, despite Apollo’s previous claim that it “never did any business.”
Rowan “repeatedly corresponded with Epstein” over financial matters and forwarded an internal document to Epstein in March 2016, said the Financial Times. An investigation by the Daily Penn — the paper of Rowan’s alma mater — found that Rowan “remained in contact with Epstein between 2013 and 2016” and that emails reveal “discussions about a potential purchase of Rowan’s private jet and multiple plans to meet for breakfast at Epstein’s home.”
“It’s hard not to see these rich, powerful men in suits just continuing what Epstein did, and this insatiable hunger for more power and money,” Yocina told Truthout. “In Genesee County, we weren’t expecting this.”
Truthout reached out to both Apollo and Stream Data Centers for comment about this article but did not receive responses from them.
Campus Witch Hunts and Higher Ed “Compact”
Rowan’s influence stretches well beyond the business world. He’s been a driving force behind the Trump’s administration’s pressure campaign against U.S. universities as well as efforts to stifle campus Palestine solidarity efforts.
In September 2023, Rowan opposed a Palestinian literary festival scheduled at Penn, and following the October 7, 2023 attacks, Rowan “led a crusade” against Liz Magill, then president of the University of Pennsylvania, “[a]rguing that Penn had become a bastion of antisemitism,” sending “daily emails to trustees to protest the school’s direction,” according to The New York Times.
Rowan chairs the board of Penn’s prestigious Wharton business school and has donated tens of millions of dollars to the school. As part of his pressure campaign, Rowan “[curbed] his contributions and [beseeched] other donors to do the same,” reported the Times.
Ultimately, Magill resigned in December 2023 after facing a congressional committee chaired by hard-right North Carolina Rep. Virginia Foxx. In the following weeks, Rowan and his wife donated $13,200 to Foxx and Rowan cohosted a fundraiser with “critical Penn donors” for Foxx.
Rowan is also widely reported as a key architect of the Trump administration’s campaign against higher education, which has included staging investigations into universities over allegations of antisemitism and fraud, and strong-arming rollbacks of so-called “woke” programs by threatening massive funding cuts.
In October 2025, The New York Times referred to Rowan as “the billionaire behind Trump’s deal for universities,” stating that Rowan “was regarded as a central force” behind a document, circulated “at the behest” of Rowan, that became the blueprint of the administration’s campaign against universities.
“The ideas that flowed from Mr. Rowan and his allies are now the backbone of a potentially far-reaching administration effort to tie campus policies to Mr. Trump’s agenda and the federal government’s financial might,” The New York Times asserted.
The administration’s assault on higher education, led by Trump aides like Stephen Miller, has included attempts to pressure universities into signing a “compact,” which Rowan helped write, that would condition federal funding on alignment with Trump’s policies — what one law school dean has called “extortion, plain and simple.”
Weaponizing Antisemitism
News reports have also tied Rowan to broader efforts to paint opposition to Zionism and Palestine solidarity efforts as forms of “antisemitism.”
A New York Magazine investigation into the rightward turn of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) suggested that Rowan has shaped the group’s focus on the “radical left” as the face of antisemitism.
“Current and former ADL employees repeatedly mentioned one name in connection with this idea: Marc Rowan, the Republican megadonor and CEO of Apollo Global Management,” said the investigation, with staffers implying that ADL President Jonathan Greenblatt’s desire to secure funding was involved.
A Jewish Currents investigation into the ADL’s methodology for auditing “antisemitic incidents” argued that a 2023 report misclassified “more than a thousand items” as antisemitic, all of which were “cases of speech critical of Israel or Zionism.”
In a recent speech during a fundraiser for the UJA-Federation of New York, whose board Rowan chairs, Rowan alluded to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani as “someone who uses antisemitism in their campaign and normalizes antisemitism” and stated that “he is our enemy.”
Rowan’s statements, which equate Mamdani’s criticism of Israel with antisemitism, appear at odds with the views of at least a large plurality of New York City Jews, who voted in significant numbers for Mamdani.
During his mayoral campaign, Mamdani criticized Israel’s genocide in Gaza and stated his support for universal rights and equality for Israelis and Palestinians.
Board of Peace
Rowan is also a member of the executive board of Donald Trump’s new “Board of Peace” and a member of Trump’s “Gaza Executive Board.”
Trump’s “Board of Peace” is dominated by authoritarian leaders. “The board seems designed above all to assert Trump’s primacy in world affairs” and “to serve private interests close to the president,” wrote the Financial Times. As part of its seven-member executive board, Rowan sits alongside Secretary of State Marco Rubio, U.S. Middle East envoy Steven Witkoff, and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
The “Gaza Executive Board” that Rowan also sits on is a subset of the “Board of Peace,” which will reportedly “assume full legislative, executive, and judicial control over Gaza, including ‘emergency powers,’” according to Drop Site News.
At a recent “Board of Peace” meeting, Rowan raved about the “tremendous” potential for Gaza’s reconstruction, including “$50 billion on a conservative basis” for “the coastline alone” and “$115 billion of value” in total that “just needs to be unlocked and financed.”
Human rights attorney Diana Buttu has referred to the “Board of Peace” as “neocolonialism in the 21st century,” saying its “aim, of course, is to try to erase Israel’s crimes and to turn them into a money-making real estate venture for Trump, Kushner, and their cronies.”
“Everybody Is Against This Data Center”
Local organizing against data centers and opposition to political repression, militarism, and occupation may seem like distant struggles from each other. In fact, they’re increasingly linked.
Artificial intelligence — powered by data centers — is being ever more integrated into U.S. and Israeli military campaigns and surveillance efforts. Israel has used AI during its annihilation campaign in Gaza and its occupation of the West Bank. The Pentagon has been pushing for deeper integration of AI into its surveillance and war apparatus, and it’s using AI in the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. Authorities have used AI to surveil pro-Palestine protesters in the U.S., including on campuses.
Back in Western New York, organizers against the STAMP data center are focused on impacting current siting, environmental and financial incentive reviews and showcasing the wide opposition to the project, while also imagining the region they actually want — one where $1.44 billion could go toward local needs rather than corporate subsidies.
In doing all this, they’re up against a force much more powerful than just Stream Data Centers and local officials: the well-connected Wall Street powerhouse firm, and its influential billionaire leadership, that sits atop the data center’s ownership chain.
But communities across the U.S. are rising en masse against the data center boom. In Wisconsin, residents recently stopped a data center project owned by Blackstone — a private equity firm even more powerful than Apollo.
Yocina sometimes feels overwhelmed when she thinks about the forces her community is up against. But she also remains undaunted.
“They think that we’re all just stupid country bumpkins,” she said. “But they’re underestimating us. There’s unity happening here. This is a bipartisan issue. Everybody is against this data center.”
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