Why Americans Hate Data Centers: Let Us Count the Ways

It’s almost impossible in these times to find a specific policy issue on which Democrats and Republicans agree, but there is one: opposition to data centers in their backyards.

This bipartisan concurrence, I hasten to add, is found chiefly in areas where data centers have already been built and begun to operate. Proximity, it appears, breeds contempt.

A Washington Post/Schar School poll released yesterday shows that the share of Virginians saying they’d be “comfortable” if a new data center were built in their community has plummeted to half the level it was at just three years ago. In 2023, 69 percent of state residents said a new data center was fine with them; today, that figure stands at just 35 percent. Democratic support for such data centers has collapsed from 72 percent three years ago to a bare 28 percent today; Republican support has sunk by a smaller but still impressive 20 percentage points, from 67 percent in ’23 to 47 percent in ’26.

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The poll unpacks some, but not all, of the reasons for this air-out-of-the-balloon deflation. The share of Virginians saying that these centers increase their “energy” bills—by which it’s safe to assume most respondents took that to mean electric bills—was 57 percent. While Washington, D.C.’s exurbs are home to the nation’s highest density of such centers, vast areas of the state still don’t host any, so that 57 percent doubtless reflects far higher levels in those regions where those centers proliferate.

Local proliferation also engenders another reason for center-phobia: yet another manifestation of the ever-popular “there goes the neighborhood” sentiment, particularly when these massive centers are built on the open fields and undeveloped spaces that can give such neighborhoods a more bucolic feel, or are actually bucolic in themselves.

But the collapse of the trans-partisan support for the centers has causes that go well beyond neighborhood sentiment and rising power bills. They also clearly reflect the public’s rising apprehensions of and resentments toward the coming of AI, whose expansion is the reason for the surge in data centers. In the first phase of corporate America’s AI adoption, layoffs have proliferated in enough companies that a Wall Street Journal story yesterday termed the past few months “the era of the mega-layoff,” citing Amazon’s recent reduction of its workforce by 30,000 and Oracle’s laying off many thousands of its employees. As the Journal reported,

Instead of laying off people in more incremental—and less disruptive—waves, employers are seizing on the potential financial upsides of severing swaths of their workforces at once. That is a departure from not long ago, when mass layoffs registered as a sign of trouble or mismanagement and that a company needed to take drastic measures to right its performance. Now, such a company is more likely to get a big stock bump and praise from investors for acting boldly.

In fact, investors and our financialized economy generally have long been rewarding the replacement of workers by machines, smart or otherwise, or by cheaper labor abroad. The only new wrinkle in here is that the workers suddenly eligible for unemployment insurance are disproportionately skilled white-collar, professional, and college-educated employees.

The political problem for AI, and for the major investors promoting its substitution for mere humans, is that nobody knows how many workers it will render redundant. The collapse in data center support, then, reflects the broader anxieties about AI’s impact on people’s work lives and income, as well as a different AI-generated anxiety about how it will impact contemporary childhood, as kids spend so much of it online (and if they don’t, their peers surely do). This latter fear has compelled Republican as well as Democratic legislators in every state to try to set limits on what Big Tech can make available to children.

There’s another factor behind the pushback to AI that’s particularly strong among Democrats: their growing, and altogether merited, hostility to Big Tech, which is behind the push to promote and profit from AI. For one thing, the titans of tech—Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Andreessen, Ellison, Thiel, et al.—have become the primary financial base for Trump and a Trumpified Republican Party. Second, their business practices, which consistently thwart efforts of their workers to gain a modicum of voice in their companies’ affairs, which stifle any competition, thus raising costs to consumers, and which repeatedly have included the purchase and neutering of media businesses that have objectively reported on MAGA and Trump. Third, they use their extreme wealth to gain levels of political power that undercut the practices and the very assumptions of democratic government. And fourth, their personal beliefs and practices are so narcissistic and megalomaniacal that they affront rudimentary decency.

All that explains why it’s the Bernie-AOC wing of the Democratic Party that has taken the lead in opposing both the AI transition and the proliferation of the data centers that AI requires. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez introduced a bill late last month that would establish a nationwide moratorium on the construction of new data centers. Their bill has no prospect of passing, of course; both Trump and corporate America are resolutely opposed. Nonetheless, the anxieties raised by AI in the general population present a perfect storm to those who continue to champion it, just as the pols who’ve been supporting the construction of data centers in their districts have encountered ferocious pushback from otherwise supportive constituents who would have been fine with it three years ago.

While most of American big business has been thoroughly cowed by Trump, particularly by his reflexive attacks on anyone who displeases him, that doesn’t mean they eagerly line up with him on all his various crusades. On the promotion of AI, however, that linkage is clearly there. This alliance, in turn, presents an opportunity to their progressive opponents. Both big business and Trump are polling pretty terribly these days, and their support for an industry that threatens Lord knows how many livelihoods and also makes life’s essentials even less affordable renders them even more vulnerable to the public’s rejection and rage. If the Democrats can’t build on that …

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