Data centers are drawing protests and city hall spats across the country. You wouldn’t have known it Saturday night in downtown Washington, DC.
When I arrived at Data after Dark, a “pro-data center” party 10 minutes before it was scheduled to start, there were already a few dozen attendees waiting in the rain to get into Pubkey, a bitcoin-themed bar.
I was led downstairs, into a VIP room sponsored by AI company Cognitio, where a live jazz trio was playing and drinks were flowing. White gift bags with a black server rack above the words “come and take it” were everywhere.
The party hadn’t officially started yet, but the room was already full of people.
Guests in cocktail dresses and suits (a handful of whom donned the signature of a Hill employee — a pin on their lapel) bounced around the room, pitching themselves and networking. I surprisingly only saw two tech bro vests.
The event brought together figures from a trio of tech and free-market organizations. Jonas Du, a journalist at Mike Solana’s tech-and-politics media company, Pirate Wires, first posted it on X in August. He organized the event with Casey Given, CEO of Young Voices, a nonprofit talent agency for “classically liberal” writers and commentators, and Ed Tarnowski, a tech fellow at free-market think tank R Street Institute.
They were expecting to throw a get-together at his rowhouse in DC, but after more than 300,000 views and hundreds of requests to attend, it became more serious.
“We host parties every other month at my rowhouse — it’s usually no more than 70 or 80 people, and that’s what it was,” Du told me. “But we hit 70 within a day.”
The final Partiful guest list was over 1,000 people, more than double Pubkey’s 500-person maximum capacity. The venue was packed, and a security guard told me that if I left, I wouldn’t be allowed back in.
I wandered upstairs, where I was confronted by flashing lights and a DJ. Behind him, an LED screen showed stock assembly-line footage and the occasional video of Robert Downey Jr., presumably as Tony Stark.
The music was loud, but so too were the conversations. The multiple bars never lacked patrons ordering one of the themed cocktails, like a Loudoun County Iced Tea — the county with the most data centers in the world — or an SMRtini, a play on small modular reactors.
Around 10 p.m., the music was turned off, but the hum of the crowd stopped for no one. A few weeks before the event, a Partiful blast was sent asking for volunteers for the toast session: that time had come.
At least three protesters jumped on the stage separately to hijack the pro-data-center toasts. I couldn’t hear them, and the crowd couldn’t either, but that didn’t stop them from booing and chanting “USA” to get them off stage and out of the bar.
“Who believes in freedom?” Adam Thierer, toast-giver and resident senior fellow at the think tank R Street Institute, asked the crowd. “Well, we know who doesn’t believe in freedom, it’s the kind of freaks that were just up here charging the stage.”
“All of us need to go out into the world and fight — not for AI, but for America,” Manhattan Institute fellow Daniel Di Martino told the crowd during his speech.
What was a party quickly turned into a rally as the toasts turned more into battle cries.
If you watched the crowd on hand, you’d think a ban on data centers had just been lifted, and a new version of America was on the horizon. The music came back on, and the dance floor was packed, with a few people dancing to the electronic music.
Everyone seemed to be on the same page, but I did talk to a couple of guests who were hoping for a little more.
One woman who came with her husband from Baltimore — about a 50-minute drive — said she was expecting more technical talk about data centers. She said her icebreaker for entering a conversation was, “Do you have a GPU?” She said only one person knew what that was. (A graphics processing unit is a piece of computing used for graphics and video rendering, a key tool for AI.) She said she’d be back if they hosted another party, though.
Another guest didn’t expect as many people as there were, and was excited to be among other pro-data-center people, but he didn’t really get the chance to talk about them.
One attendee, who works for a defense technology company, told me it was refreshing to be in an environment not ruled by “slopulism” (a term he explained to me as a sort of lazy populism). He said that people liked to hate data centers simply because it’s popular to do so, but haven’t bothered to explore the arguments for them.
The audience was thunderous throughout, and the overall mood of the night was optimistic — celebratory even. What exactly they were celebrating is still unclear. They may have just been celebrating the fact that many people felt the same way they did.
Du, one of the organizers, said the event wasn’t planned to change people’s minds — it was promoted widely as pro-data center — but he hopes they won over some skeptics. The main goal, though, was to party.
“We want people to have a good time, and I don’t know how much actual conversation and debate happens,” he said. “I don’t know how much appetite there was for that.”
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