AI Data Centers Are Not Popular, But Does It Matter?
AI Data Centers Are Not Popular, But Does It Matter?
While community opposition is halting projects, aging power grids and connection delays pose a far greater risk to the AI infrastructure boom.
by Ransi Clark and Alex Halsey, California Institute of Technology
February 27, 2026
For decades, Americans have hoped for a new reindustrialization. It has finally arrived. But, not in the form that many expected. Across the country shuttered paper mills, aluminium smelters, and glass factories are being converted to data centers. Mothballed nuclear power plants are being revived to feed power-hungry data centers. Yet, in spite of economic promise, residents in even ailing towns are skeptical of them. Legal battles are intensifying. In many places, resident wins over prospective data centers are as data center operators and landowners sue back.
According to a new national survey we conducted through YouGov in December 2025 among 2000 American registered voters, opposition to local placement of AI data centers is high nationally at over 60% opposing, with little difference regionally. About 25% of the sample have not made their minds up, but this might soon change as local resident groups become more organized.
Our data comes from a survey conducted by YouGov on behalf of Caltech using a nationally representative sample of 2,247 U.S. registered voters, interviewed online from December 1–9, 2025. Respondents were selected from YouGov's opt-in panel to be representative of all U.S. registered voters. The sample was weighted on gender, age, race, and education (from the American Community Survey), as well as 2020 and 2024 presidential vote and baseline party identification. Weights ranged from 0.1 to 4.4 (mean = 1.0, SD = 0.5). The approximate margin of error for the full sample is ±2.3% at the 95% confidence level. This margin of error reflects sampling variability only and does not account for non-sampling errors, including potential selection bias in panel participation or survey nonresponse.
Despite the heavy opposition, AI-optimized data centers are America's fastest growing sector. Known as "hyperscalers" due to their massive energy requirements, these data centers can consume as much electricity as 90,000 homes, even at a relatively modest 100MW capacity. As illustrated below in Figure 1 below, the Commonwealth of Virginia is currently the primary market for data centers in the United States, while Texas follows closely as the state experiencing the most rapid growth.
Figure 1: Number of hyperscalers by state. This spreadsheet lists the operators of each hyperscaler in each state. These data were compiled by listing big data center providers, scraping their websites, counting their locations at the state level, and then compiling.
Local opponents of hyperscalers are having more success in 2025. Heatmap News reports 25 data center closures in 2025 in comparison to just six in 2024. City- and county-level data center moratoria are also piling up. And they are coming from both urban counties that vote overwhelmingly Democrat (e.g., DeKalb County, Georgia, and Prince George County, Maryland) and rural counties that vote overwhelmingly Republican (e.g., Oldham County, Kentucky and Starke County, Indiana). National opposition is also coming from both ends of the political spectrum. Both Vermont's U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and Florida's Governor Ron DeSantis have spoken against data centers and their impact on jobs. This trend is further exemplified by recent electoral shifts in the Georgia Public Utilities Commission, where Democrats have successfully campaigned on concerns regarding data center load growth.
Local opposition seems to be based on a variety of concerns, with electric grid strain being foremost. However, other concerns such as water used for cooling are also sticking points. Amazon walked away from Tucson-based Project Blue because of local concerns about its thirsty cooling systems and Project Flo in Indiana was scuttled for similar reasons. Other local community concerns include a rise in noise and air pollution.
Data center operators say that concerns about water use are overblown, while admitting that concerns about its electricity use is warranted. Some commentators theorize that much of the opposition to water use by data centers arises from the public's lack of context for water use in industrial uses. Our survey attempted to elicit this by describing alternative water and electricity uses for the same amount used by a hyperscale data center.
The survey vignette that we presented to the respondents includes a slight randomization. One-third were provided only estimates of water and electricity use by a large hyperscaler. Another third were provided alternative uses for the water consumed, and the final third were given alternative uses for the electricity consumed.
Here is the vignette:
A hyperscale data center, used for training AI, can use a large amount of electricity for training AI models and water for cooling.
In the month of July 2022, the Microsoft datacenter in Iowa used 11.5 million gallons of water for training an AI model. [For a random one-third: This is about the amount of water that can fill 17 Olympic swimming pools or the amount of water used by 7 typical 18-hole golf courses in a month.]
The datacenter's electricity use for that same month can be estimated at about 110 gigawatt hours. [For another random one-third: This is about the amount of electricity that is used by 100,000 homes in a month or the amount of electricity used by a new aluminium smelter in a month.]
After presenting the vignette, each group was asked whether they would support or oppose the construction of a data center in their local area. Respondents were allowed to respond that they were not sure. Figure 2 below shows each sample's level of opposition to data centers. The opposition was high with more than 60% opposing. More than a quarter of the sample opted out with "Not Sure." The alternative presentations of the vignette made little difference.
Figure 2: Answers to the question: "What is your level of support for a hyperscale data center in your local area?"
Correlating the support for hyperscale data centers against demographics, partisanship, and familiarity with AI chatbots showed predictable variation. Figure 3 shows this. High and moderate AI users were 20% more supportive of data centers and 20% less likely to be against them. Education, on the other hand, was not correlated with support for hyperscale data centers.
Younger respondents were more supportive of AI, probably due to their more likely familiarity with it. Supporters of nuclear energy were also more supportive of local data centers. However, in contrast to the case of nuclear energy, women were neither more nor less likely to support data centers than men.
Figure 3: Attributes predictive of support for local hyperscalers.
Partisanship was the most interesting. Those who identified as Democrat or Independent were more likely to oppose hyperscalers locally and less likely to support them than Republican-identified respondents. However, Figure 4 demonstrates that broken down regionally, the opposition to hyperscalers did not differ much geographically. Even in Texas which is mostly Republican-leaning and is seeing a large growth in hyperscalers, opposition outpaces support.
Figure 4: The proportion of support for data centers at state level.
Opposition to hyperscalers does not differ much among the larger states of California, New York, Texas, and Florida. Out of these, Florida, seems the most pro-hyperscaler, but it has much fewer data centers than any of the others and none of the bigger companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, or Google operate data centers there. Delays are common in Florida with the only two big hyperscaler proposals (Project Tango and Project Jarvis) on hold due to local pushback. Texas, on the other hand, has seen no cancellations and hosts some of the largest data center providers. Project Stargate in Abilene, currently under construction, and is likely to be the largest campus by the end of 2026 with a 1.2GW capacity. Despite high opposition, Arizona is also one of the most rapidly growing markets, primarily due to incentives from Maricopa County.
While opposition to local positioning of hyperscalers is high, this is of minor concern to big operators, who prefer expanding their current campuses to scouting new locations. The primary bottleneck for them is not local approval, but connection to the power grid. The effect of local opposition will be mostly felt by smaller companies wanting to build datacenters. But even for them, if latency is not a concern, more and more options are on the table. Recently, the U.S. Navy has called for commercial bids to put datacenters on their bases. Even the more mature markets such as Virginia are not done building data centers. In spite of local opposition, Virginia's Goochland County introduced a tech overlay preempting approval fights. Hyperscalers are a welcome move to other local areas that are seeing property tax revenue decline. In such places, local administrators have to drive hard bargains and that includes ignoring data center opposition.
Hyperscaler construction is one the largest growing industries in the United States. Counties that welcome them defend their decision as fiscally motivated, while counties that oppose them are concerned about utility strain. Data center operators on the other hand are looking to minimize their costs, which include utility rates. Local opposition may be a challenge to those looking to expand to new locations, but for many data centers the current challenge is getting connected to the grid at all.
1 More than 50% of the respondents reported that they rarely used AI or had never heard of AI. This large number of infrequent users was surprising given the prominence of AI in the national conversation, however recent Pew survey panels find similarly.
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