Data Centers Face Opposition from Voters and Politicians Amid Labor Support
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Still, most registered voters oppose building a data center in their area, according to a July Fox News poll, including 60% of Republicans and 53% of MAGA voters.
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FortuneData center backlash is also uniting people from across the political spectrum ahead of the midterm elections. While President Donald Trump champions them, most registered voters oppose data centers, including 60% of Republicans and 53% of MAGA, according to a Fox News poll.
JacobinThe polling backs this up. The University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center found that opposition to local data centers jumped twelve points in four months this year — from 49 percent in March to 61 percent in July. And an August Heatmap Pro poll pushed the number to 75 percent, with more than six in ten Americans strongly opposed — the most negative result since the outlet began tracking the question a year ago.
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Americans are wary of AI data centers, and politicians have taken note (much faster than they usually do). In July, New York Governor Kathy Hochul imposed the country’s first statewide moratorium. Weeks later, Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott — a longtime data center recruiter — paused new grid connections pending an audit. And just this month, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro — who celebrated Amazon’s data center investment as recently as last year — signed an executive order marketed as the nation’s strictest guardrails on the industry.
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Washington Times BusinessDemocratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul ordered a one-year ban on large data centers. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a fellow Democrat, said his administration would no longer prioritize data center projects when it comes to issuing construction permits or granting developers lucrative tax exemptions if they don’t meet certain standards.
FortunePennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro took his own steps on Aug. 18, signing an executive order that imposed new energy-affordability, environmental and community requirements on data centers and removed AI data centers from a fast-track permitting program.
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Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced a halt on approval of new data centers until audits determine their impact on the state’s electrical grid.
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FortuneTexas Gov. Greg Abbott ordered regulators to scrutinize data centers seeking to connect to the state’s power grid before allowing projects to move forward earlier this month. ERCOT, which manages most of the Texas grid, was facing roughly 474 gigawatts of requests for new connections—more than five times the state’s record peak electricity demand. That matters for OpenAI because Texas is central to Stargate, with its flagship site in Abilene, and additional pending projects in the state.
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Some labor leaders see new job opportunities Data centers have found an ally in organized labor, including Mike Gage, president and secretary-treasurer of the Nebraska State AFL-CIO. Gage said he personally was worried that some workers are seeing their jobs replaced by AI, but that the centers can also create construction jobs and longer-term positions for people running the finished product.
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JacobinBut while opposition to data centers grows, the labor movement remains divided, for obvious reasons. The data centers are creating jobs (at least, right now), while AI threatens to eliminate jobs in the future. And those jobs largely belong to different sets of people.
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Independent claims that didn't surface elsewhere in our corpus. Treat as supplementary — not corroborated across outlets.
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01 Fortune CEO Sam Altman is conceding that Americans are openly hostile to the facilities powering the AI boom, awkward timing for a company both planning to spend $50 billion this year on compute. “Clearly, people hate data centers—right now, at least,” Altman told Time in an interview. “People are pretty negative on AI.”
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02 Washington Times Business MURDOCK, Neb. — In rural eastern Nebraska, a technology revolution could rise from fields of corn and soybean in the form of new data centers to power the artificial intelligence boom.
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03 Jacobin Several weeks ago, Jason Kelce (football player, podcaster, Taylor Swift’s brother-in-law) starred in an ad asking Americans to pee in jars and send them to their nearest artificial intelligence data center. The spot — a collaboration between Liquid Death and Kelce’s own Garage Beer — was nominally about water consumption. Mostly, though, it was evidence that hating on data centers has gone fully mainstream.
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04 RealClearMarkets The Data Center Backlash: Bipartisan, Nationwide & Wrong Tosin Akintola, Reason Accepting the flawed arguments of the industry's critics and introducing harmful legislation is tantamount to accepting mob rule.
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