Data centers have existed for decades. But in the age of AI, they've recently become political pawns.
The rapid expansion of AI factories across the US has created a new political battleground. Opposition has spanned across the political spectrum, with Democrats like Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Republicans like Gov. Greg Abbott calling for moratoriums on building new data centers.
And the reason is clear: public sentiment towards data centers has turned sharply negative, no matter your political affiliation. A Gallup poll published in May found that an average of 7 in 10 Americans oppose data center construction in their area, including 48% who strongly oppose such facilities being built locally.
However, data centers may just be the scapegoat for broader societal anxiety around AI, such as its potential impacts on the economy, jobs, national security and even the way we learn and think, said Jeremy Roberts, senior director of research and content at Info-Tech Research Group, told The Deep View. "AI itself is underwater in polling. It's pretty easy to be against something that is the opposite of a job creator. That's pretty cross-cutting."
It's why the political rallying cry against them has become a clear avenue for populism, Roberts said. It's a textbook example of a leader claiming to champion the general masses over a corrupt elite group.
"Data centers are built by the richest people, run by the richest people, and a lot of the marketing around them has basically been that this is going to concentrate wealth further," said Roberts. "It exacerbates a populist gap."
Politicians protesting data centers are already affecting the buildout of AI infrastructure that tech companies have been pushing. For instance, in July, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul instituted the nation's first statewide moratorium on hyperscale data centers of 50 megawatts or more for a year. Texas followed suit in early August, with Gov. Abbott implementing a moratorium on approving new data centers.
As a result, tech companies may simply have to become more resourceful about the way they build data centers, said Roberts. For instance, rather than building large, hyperscale facilities, they may end up building smaller ones and connecting them with innovative networking technologies.
Still, the impacts are already being felt at a local level as citizens show up in droves to city council meetings across the country to oppose data centers being built in their neighborhoods. Jason Morris, land use attorney and partner of Withey Morris Baugh in Phoenix, Arizona, told The Deep View that data center cases "have gone from being my easiest cases to being my most difficult."
"There is an amount of hysteria surrounding data centers that I haven't seen associated with any other land use," said Morris. "This has become, for better or for worse, AI's Achilles' heel."
To counter this, the Trump Administration is moving to limit those voices. The Environmental Protection Agency plans to cut a federal requirement that forces states to solicit public input on air pollution permits for industrial facilities, data centers included. However, with the public already so resistant to AI, cutting off that avenue for input may only worsen the narrative around the tech, Jason Elliott, former senior advisor to Gov. Gavin Newsom and founder of Versus Consulting, told The Deep View.
"If you don't let people have a chance to weigh in, they're going to assume the worst," said Elliott. "It's really beneficial to give constituents an opportunity to express themselves or point out something that local elected officials hadn't thought of."
Our Deeper View #
The reality of the impacts of data centers themselves is much more complex than headlines often make them seem. Yes, these facilities undeniably use power and water, make noise and strain the electrical grid, but so do many other industrial processes and industries, such as chemical manufacturing, coal and primary metals. The outcry against data centers is practically synonymous with the anxiety around AI broadly. The negative sentiment could pose a real threat to the frontier AI labs fueling a utopian vision of societal transformation, a vision that's propping up potential trillion-dollar IPOs for Anthropic and OpenAI. To achieve the kind of transformation these companies are projecting, the public has to get on board. And repairing public perception won't be solved by data center regulation alone.