A silent war is playing out across rural America.
Residents are packing themselves into local county meetings in incredible numbers and calling on their representatives to oppose gargantuan data center projects, developments that could cause electricity prices to spike, drain water supplies, and generate copious amounts of noise.
Farmers are being hailed as heroes for rejecting millions of dollars to turn their land into data centers, while claims of the facilities bringing jobs to the area are being met with incredulity and frustration.
In short, the AI backlash has grown immensely over the past year or so — and the latest numbers put the trend in stark relief.
According to a new Heatmap poll, at least seven in ten Americans would oppose a data center being built near their home. That’s a seismic shift from last September, when a similar poll found only 42 percent of Americans were opposed.
By February, the same question resulted in just 51 percent saying they were against having a data center project near their home, indicating that the opposition grew substantially in a strikingly short period of time.
“The public has swung 49 points against data centers in just nine months, underscoring the heightened political salience of the facilities and the AI industry that they embody,” Heatmap noted in in its writeup.
The widespread opposition has turned into a rare bipartisan issue, with conservatives and liberals joining sides to an astonishing degree. According to the latest polling, 78 percent of Americans who said they voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 said they opposed a nearby data center project, while 63 percent of Americans who said they voted for Donald Trump said the same.
Younger voters were particularly strong in their opposition, with an overwhelming 83 percent of Americans aged between 18 and 34 saying they would oppose a data center near their home.
In short, it’s perhaps one of the strongest indications yet that data centers could become a key and highly divisive topic during the upcoming midterm elections.
Meanwhile, many rural Americans continue their fight while are struggling to have their voices heard. Case in point, a planned data center in the broader Salt Lake City region in Utah, backed by Canadian businessman and TV personality Kevin O’Leary, will overtake a swathe of land twice the size of Manhattan — while only generating 2,000 permanent jobs.
Worse yet, the region is already facing a water crisis, a dire environmental predicament that could be made far worse by the development.
Most recently, Utah senate president Stuart Adams appears to have heard these concerns — or perhaps realized the considerable political blowback the project’s construction could incur — and is calling on O’Leary to reduce the data center campus by 75 percent.
The “Shark Tank” host and celebrity investor has since doubled down, though, telling the Salt Lake Tribune that he’s “not walking away.”
More on data centers: Neighbors Horrified by Data Center Twice the Size of Manhattan
