Everyone can find a reason to dislike data center construction

Frontier AI labs are convinced that scaling up computation is the path to improving artificial intelligence, and they’ve put their money where their mouths are, to the tune of trillions of dollars of planned data center projects.

The rest of us? Surveys of public opinion say that more than 60% of Americans favor limiting new data centers, particularly in their communities. And the longest-running surveys show that sentiment is growing fast. Data center projects worth $68 billion were disrupted by local opponents in the second quarter of 2026, according to the trackers at Data Center Watch.

AI companies and their investors have a hard time reconciling the growing demand for their products with opposition to the key infrastructure behind it. Some answers from the industry, like the idea that data center opposition is a product of secretive Chinese meddling, don’t really pass the smell test.