Data Center Party Dared Critics To ‘Come And Take It.’ A Few Tried And Failed

WASHINGTON — A celebration of data centers kept humming Saturday night despite protesters’ best attempts to take over the stage.

Four protesters took the stage during the toasts and remarks at Data After Dark, a pro-data center party at the Washington, D.C. bar PubKey. The event, organized by Pirate Wires reporter Jonas Du, R Street Institute tech fellow Ed Tarnowski and Young Voices CEO Casey Given, drew hundreds of attendees who chanted “USA” as protesters were ushered out of the venue.

Asked why he opposed data centers, the first protester told the DCNF, “I wanna live,” as security rushed him out of the bar. “Our only fucking home [planet Earth]. Just so you can get rich. It’s despicable. It’s fucking despicable.”

Among the other protesters was a woman who flipped off the crowd as their chants drowned out her declarations. “Thank you for using all of our water. You are killing the world” the woman yelled through the noise, according to another angle of the incident posted Sunday on X.

“How is this ‘USA’?” she asked as the crowd chanted.

“Fuck all of you,” she said as she raised her middle fingers to the audience.

Two other women then interrupted the speakers’ remarks before security forcibly removed them from the stage.

“I started a ‘USA’ chant to drown them out,” Matt Kita, a Bitcoin investor who attended the event, said in an early Sunday X post. “We will re-industrialize and we will win.”

R Street Institute analyst Adam Thierer spoke after the protesters rushed the stage, and he said the debate over data centers comes down to “makers or takers.”