Over half the tables outside the café were occupied but no one was eating.
I looked around. Wine, cups of complimentary chips, and here and there a cigarette. It was just past six, the heat had finally broken, and people gathered to enjoy each other and the weather for as long as it lasted. This was Paris almost every evening in August.
By this point in my trip, I had grown used to the way my conversations with others formed. Whether over wine or sparkling water, we would eventually discuss U.S. politics.
They would ask carefully. The way you ask about someone’s sick relative. What is happening in the universities? Are they still waiting on the results of the court cases? Is the media really free? Europeans have watched democratic states slide before, close enough to recognize the symptoms. I had answered versions of these questions in multiple arrondissements that week, falling back on the diplomatic and journalistic habits I carry with me. I offer the analysis, give the context, let them draw their own conclusions.
But Mathilde Saliou didn’t ask me how the U.S. was doing.
“The way the fight against data centers and the tech industry is happening in the U.S. should be an inspiration,” Saliou told me.
I paused and studied her face. Inspiration?
The best way I can think to describe Saliou is the Kara Swisher of France. Black overalls, short brown hair, and a bristly manner that turns out to be funny rather than unfriendly once you’ve been on the receiving end of it for twenty minutes. After graduating from Sciences Po, considered one of France’s elite institutions, Saliou has covered tech and the economy for over a decade. And after two books, Technoféminisme (2023) and L’Envers de la tech (2025), her role veers into the intersection of tech journalist and critic.
She now works on a project called Dirty Data — where journalists in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, Spain and elsewhere report on data centers from inside their own borders. Electricity demand. Water. Land fights. Displacement.
France’s open arms for data centers
I had come to the café expecting France to be more resistant to the proliferation of data centers, given Europe’s reputation for regulating technology more aggressively than the U.S. She told me that wasn’t the case. Yet.
France gets most of its electricity from nuclear power, which produces very little planet-warming pollution compared with coal or gas (I understand that concept can be confusing but that’s what the research says). It also currently produces enough electricity to export large amounts to its neighbors. People in Marseille aren’t opening a utility bill and stacking payment plans like the people I’ve reported on in Maryland. And companies like Digital Realty are expanding data centers in France.
She thinks the U.S. is ahead of the curve on tech and politics, and that French leadership follows where American money goes. In January 2025, Trump announced Stargate, a $500 billion bet on AI infrastructure over four years. The next month, Macron stood up at the AI summit in Paris and announced €109 billion in private-public funds for AI.
“Our politicians want to do everything like you guys do, which is super scary these days,” Saliou laughed. “A lot of the way we are going further and further towards privatization and away from the good functioning of our public space is inspired by some of the ways that you guys work.”
But apparently America exports the thing. And then America exports the resistance to the thing.
Parallels of U.S. and French resistance
The concept of Americans exporting rebellion to France is not new. The American Revolution helped shape the political imagination of the French Revolution about a decade later. In 2026 the stakes are different, but something of that transatlantic exchange happening again around data centers.
And you can see the parallels in the fights communities are having. For example, residents are questioning whether these enormous facilities belong near their homes and whether they get a meaningful say before they arrive.
In France it’s the port areas near the water, Marseille, and the suburban communities outside Paris. Saliou says these places have absorbed the landfills, the industrial parks and the things nobody wants to look at. Now they’ve noticed they are being asked to do it again with the data centers. The leading voices of protests come from “ecological NGOs,” the rough equivalent of our climate groups, but others are also involved. Lawsuits alleging developers skirting regulations and public consultation are popping up.
And according to Saliou, these calls for protests are taking inspiration from what is happening in the United States.
The bipartisan nature of the fight intrigues her: ordinary residents on the left and right protesting together (or apart in some instances) against some of the richest and most powerful companies in the world.
“I think the U.S. will lead the way of our political discussion six months later,” she added.
What data center protests mean for democracy
For Saliou, this fight has become a way of reading the health of American democratic institutions. Can community organizing and protests turn the tide and force change from powerful corporations that are only growing more politically influential by the day? Can Americans come together and stay together on an issue? In the age of rising authoritarianism and AI, do people still have power?
Basically, Saliou’s watching to see whether these protests work. Democracy can be an oddly nebulous word. Even as a reporter, I sometimes struggle to make something so large feel concrete. But talking with Saliou, one piece of it became very simple: Do people have the freedom to object to a decision, organize against it and actually influence what happens next?
The role of journalists covering tech
And Saliou didn’t exempt people like us, the journalists documenting all of this, from the question of who had agency and how they used it.
With over a decade on the tech beat, Saliou argues that tech companies have repeatedly sold governments on sweeping visions of the future—from medical breakthroughs to space exploration—while asking for favorable regulation and public support. And at one point in our conversation she gestured to me, offering a general critique that she’s sure applies.
“As journalists we should probably have done a better job at questioning the tech industry if they had the means to their ends, because they are the ones selling the dream,” Saliou told me. “What technological innovation do we actually want? And to what extent? To what means to what goals?”
After our conversation, I sat with her critique.
Rebrand!
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