Data & Society report traces roots of data center backlash

More than 60% of Americans favor limiting new data centers, according to surveys of public opinion, and the longest-running surveys show that sentiment is growing fast — even as frontier AI labs pour trillions of dollars into planned data center projects. Data center projects worth $68 billion were disrupted by local opponents in the second quarter of 2026 alone, according to trackers at Data Center Watch.

A new report from the nonprofit Data & Society examines what’s fueling that opposition. The product of 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, it draws on interviews with 44 Pennsylvanians conducted between 2024 and 2026. Its authors, who are critical of how AI has been pitched to the public, say they aren’t trying to measure the empirical impact of data centers, but to understand how people experience the debate over their construction.

Pennsylvania illustrates the industry’s messaging problem. Governor Josh Shapiro headlined a July 2025 summit celebrating $90 billion in data center and AI infrastructure investment; a year later, he signed an order imposing new requirements on data center projects and removing them from a regulatory fast-track initiative. The report’s authors say the industry’s framing of AI as “inevitable” has landed poorly with residents shaped by the state’s history of coal mining, early oil drilling, steel manufacturing, and fracking — experiences the authors say left people suspicious of utopian industrial promises and quick to sense when something feels wrong.

Trade unions are perhaps the strongest supporters of data center construction, largely for the jobs it promises, even though the facilities employ relatively few people once operating. The researchers describe the broader resistance as unexpectedly diverse — not bipartisan, but “post-partisan” — rather than the foreign-influence campaign some in the industry have floated to explain it. They point instead to the Data Center Coalition, a trade group that runs sites like “Pennsylvania Connects” and spent at least $19,000 lobbying the state government last year. The opposition itself blends classic NIMBYs, environmental groups worried about water and energy use, and residents concerned that data center electricity demand will raise their own power bills or lower nearby property values — plus frustration with developer tactics such as asking local officials to sign non-disclosure agreements. Some residents, the authors note, have grown suspicious after watching representatives from companies like Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft show up at town meetings, and after previously responsive local officials went quiet on the subject.

“It is an intimate and relational trust that is now being inserted in people’s lives by these industries,” said Livia Garofalo, a Data & Society researcher, describing the deeper trust problem the industry faces.

Why it matters

The report suggests the AI industry’s data center buildout faces a trust deficit that jobs messaging and rebuttals of foreign-influence theories won’t fix, since opposition spans NIMBYs, environmentalists, and residents worried about their own utilities and property values. That patchwork of grievances leaves regulators with no single lever to pull, making local approval battles a persistent cost of scaling AI compute.