In nearly every state, residents are angry about data centers and fighting efforts to build them near their towns. In Memphis, where xAI’s energy-guzzling, pollution-spewing supercomputing center popped up seemingly overnight, residents are protesting its operations, albeit without much success, as their county officials have permitted it to keep functioning.
Other cities and states that have found themselves in the same boat are also pushing back. Maine tried to pass a moratorium on new data centers, but Governor Janet Mills vetoed it. Residents in Utah fought a data center before their county board, over objections, approved one the size of Manhattan. In Festus, Missouri, voters took the unusual step of ousting every single city council member running for reelection who had voted in favor of installing a center near them. (Opponents have also filed a lawsuit, but the facility is going ahead for now.)
Backlash to data centers is everywhere, and it’s growing. But if it’s clear where popular opinion is when it comes to these resource-intensive operations, which often get pushed through in secret, it’s less clear where this is headed politically. After all, not all voters who are angry will unite and take the action that Festus did. Will the anger people feel at Big Tech turn into votes?
In some ways, the anger over data centers is part of a broader trend. People are unhappy about Big Tech’s dominance and the relentless advance of large language models, at least the ones most people come into contact with, such as ChatGPT and Claude. Half of Americans report being more concerned than excited about AI, and they’re particularly worried about its impact on creativity, mental health, and people’s jobs. Despite these worries, and without much evidence of the benefits of LLMs, American workplaces and schools are welcoming them with open arms—and without many guardrails. That’s exactly what AI’s biggest proponents want: more growth without regulation.
Americans, however, want to regulate these companies; majorities of both Republicans and Democrats think the government has done too little on this front. Indeed, some of the backlash against data centers has had to do with whether the facilities have checks on what they can do in the communities they’re in and whether their neighbors have any protections against them. Tales of data centers draining water and raising electricity bills are everywhere.
The first data centers were clustered mostly in urban areas, but most new ones are planned for rural areas, especially in the South and Midwest. These rural locations, where land ranges over broader jurisdictions, can make it difficult to target the decision-makers, but the people in these areas are no less concerned about how AI may affect their communities. The Rural Listening Project from United Today, Stronger Tomorrow, for instance, found that three-quarters of the rural residents it surveyed were worried about the impact AI would have on the political process, and 68 percent were concerned about the impact it would have on local resources, like water.
The surge of data centers popping up may have awakened a giant new political coalition against them. Residents across the country are turning out to normally sleepy county and city meetings in droves to oppose data center proposals. The strength of the opposition may have something to do with how rapidly and secretly these unpopular projects were pushed through. Kate Hess Pace, the executive director of the Indiana organizing group Hoosier Action, said that many of the siting decisions she’s seen in communities around her were made by public entities in private, without much public review. “It did kind of opened people’s eyes a little bit to local decision makers, like, who decided this?”
Pace said that worries over data centers have drawn more of the people in communities she works in into politics, but they’re struggling to find a home. There are scattered Democratic candidates trying to define what responsible AI growth should look like, and how Americans should be protected from the fallout, but neither party has made it part of their pitch so far in the midterms. Politicians generally, both Democrats and Republicans, say they want to help Americans from paying more in energy costs because of them, but they haven’t done anything. For the most part, the decision-making has been happening on the local level, and those demonstrating leadership on the issue are mainly local politicians and leaders.
So far, the Democratic Party has centered its midterm pitch to voters around affordability issues, addressing the high cost of everything from housing to gas, caused in part by the Trump administration’s policy chaos. Many of the anxieties around artificial intelligence are similar and related, including future job security and families’ rising energy costs. As of yet, however, voters haven’t seen a plan that ties all of these issues together in a way that addresses their concerns, and they don’t know what that could look like. David Dodge of the Rural Listening Project said that many of the rural voters they spoke with wanted tech companies to be held accountable, but have little faith that their government will do so. “They don’t trust the people in power to do the right thing,” he said, and don’t believe they’ll “actually make a difference.”
Coupled with a growing wariness over how big companies behave, that doubt actually provides an opportunity. It gives Democrats an opening to champion issues related to class, corporate power, and affordability with voters who are increasingly angry about the status quo. While a few Republicans, notably Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, have proposed regulations, the Trump administration has largely pushed deregulation and even tried to keep states from passing their own rules. That leaves the field open for Democrats to define an agenda that addresses voters’ concerns and protects them from the future harms from both AI and data centers—and potentially turn some of the swelling anger into support at the polls.
