Americans Hate Data Centers. Why?
New York Times · LC · trust 44/100
Credit... Kyle Ellingson Skip to content Skip to site index Opinion David Wallace-Wells
The data center backlash is still, like a tidal wave, growing. And to really understand what’s happening, you have to start not with the constituent parts of the resistance but with the sheer scale of what’s become an extraordinarily broad consensus.
Three in four Americans said they’d oppose the construction of a data center in their communities, according to a recent poll from Heatmap Pro and Embold Research. Local data centers were opposed by two-thirds of Republicans, whose party is warning that recent support for such projects could destroy its chances in key Senate races. And though political causes rarely transcend partisanship, this one appears to: Nearly 80 percent of independents opposed local data center projects, along with 83 percent of Democrats.
Slice the population any which way you want — by age, by gender, by income, along the urban-rural divide — and the pattern is the same. As are the trends. Last August the American public was almost evenly split when Heatmap Pro asked about local projects. Then net approval swung 62 percentage points. Opposition this year was higher than 70 percent in every region in the country; more than half of Americans supported a national moratorium.
In an earlier era, it might have taken a while for politics to catch up to grass-roots rage. But our political institutions, though normally unresponsive, are weaker than they used to be, and entrepreneurial politicians are now more eager to capitalize on anti-establishment frustration. $130 billion in projects were delayed or canceled just in the first quarter of this year. According to The Information , 500 jurisdictions have passed bans or moratoriums, including 150 local bans passed in July alone. In places like Maryland, next door to the data center capital, Virginia, local data center laws have grown to cover three-quarters of the state’s population. In July, New York passed the first true state-level pause.
This is happening not just in Democratic strongholds. In Texas, celebrated in recent years as America’s ultimate laboratory of hands-off construction, Gov. Greg Abbott effectively issued a data center moratorium, pausing approvals until an audit of all data centers seeking to connect to the state’s electric grid was completed. “Our top priority is to protect Texans’ safety and quality of life,” he declared , sounding less like a business-friendly libertarian than someone at the mic of a town hall winning applause from people wearing Pride pins and Infowars-branded “Don’t tread on me” shirts . As recently as November, he bragged that Texas was an artificial intelligence hot spot; by August, he was declaring, “Texans must come first.”
Until recently, Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania spent much of his time boasting of all the ways he streamlined processes to rapidly rebuild a collapsed bridge and promoting new data center projects in his state. Then this month he issued an executive order imposing new guardrails on data center projects, calling the companies building them “predatory” and promising not to be “bullied” or “bulldozed” into submission.
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