Seventy percent of Americans say they oppose building artificial intelligence data centers in their area, according to CNN polling analyzed by chief data analyst Harry Enten and confirmed by Raw Story this week. The number is not a partisan artifact. Roughly three in five Republicans oppose local data centers. Sixty-three percent of people in urban areas, who lean Democratic, oppose them. The opposition extends to rural areas, suburban areas, blue states, red states, and the communities across party lines who have watched the facilities arrive in their regions over the past two years. Enten noted that the opposition holds “remarkably steady across groups that rarely agree on anything.” Trump’s response to those groups, per Enten’s analysis, is a shrug.
Understanding why the data centers are unpopular requires understanding what they actually are, which is infrastructure that would be called industrial if it were anything other than technology. A single large AI data center requires between 100 and 500 megawatts of electricity, enough to power a small city, and consumes millions of gallons of water annually for cooling systems. The cooling equipment generates sustained noise that communities near facilities have compared to living adjacent to a continuously running airport. The facilities require reinforced power grid connections that can destabilize local electricity pricing and availability. They create few permanent jobs relative to their physical footprint. They produce significant revenue for the municipalities and states that host them, which is the argument their proponents lead with, and which does not address the experience of living next to one.
The political chemistry of opposition is the part that should be most interesting to the Democratic Party, which has been trying to understand how to build a coalition that includes working-class voters who feel left behind by an economy that benefits technology companies and their shareholders more than the communities where infrastructure is physically sited. The argument that AI data centers represent a transfer of costs from the technology industry to communities and ratepayers, while the profits flow to investors, is structurally identical to arguments Democrats have made about extractive industries, private equity, and monopoly power for decades. The 60% of Republicans who oppose data centers in their area are experiencing the same thing from a different political vantage point. The two groups have not found each other politically, but they are describing the same phenomenon.
Francesca Hong, the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial candidate who narrowly lost her primary to Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley on Tuesday night, had made a one-year moratorium on new AI data center construction in Wisconsin a centerpiece of her platform. She argued that the state should pause new construction while developing regulatory frameworks for water use, electricity consumption, and community impact assessments. The position was genuinely popular with environmental advocates, rural communities concerned about water rights, and the progressive base that was voting in the Democratic primary.
It was also the position that made her the preferred candidate for Republican outside spending groups during the Democratic primary. Pro-GOP super PACs, including one aligned with the Republican Governors Association, spent millions boosting Hong’s profile during the primary on the explicit theory that her AI moratorium, her history of posts calling for defunding the police, and her description of America as an “abundance of suffering” made her the more beatable general election candidate against Tom Tiffany, the hard-right Freedom Caucus member Trump endorsed. The Republicans were running what political operatives call “pied piper” strategy — amplifying the candidate they would most like to face in November. Crowley won anyway. The AI moratorium is off the table in Wisconsin’s governor’s race.
The AI moratorium being off the table in Wisconsin does not mean the concern behind it has disappeared. The 70% opposition to local data centers is a fact about American public opinion that exists independent of Francesca Hong’s primary loss. The communities bearing the costs of data center construction continue to bear them. The electricity consumption continues to climb. The water use continues at scale. The noise continues around the clock. And the president continues to shrug.
Trump’s relationship with the AI industry has been commercially layered throughout his second term. He hosted AI executives at the White House. He signed executive orders streamlining data center permitting on federal land. His Truth Social media company announced the Truth API product, which sells early access to his social media posts to hedge funds and high-frequency trading firms for up to $100,000 per month. Elon Musk, who was his most prominent advisor before departing from DOGE, is building competing AI infrastructure through xAI and its Grok model. The ecosystem of technology companies building the data centers that 70% of Americans oppose includes several entities with direct financial relationships to the administration. That is not a coincidence. It is the regulatory and policy environment that those relationships produce.
The 70% who oppose data centers have not organized into an electoral coalition. They have not attached their opposition to a candidate who survived a primary. The issue has not become a party platform. It has become a polling number that a CNN analyst noted and that a president shrugged at.
When 70% of Americans oppose something that produces billions for a handful of companies the president has financial relationships with, and the president shrugs, what exactly is the policy representing?
Sources
Raw Story: Video — AI data centers opposed by 70% of Americans, Trump shrugs
Fox News: Primary results — Wisconsin gubernatorial, Hong platform
