The Data Center Backlash Is Swallowing American Politics

The techlash over data center development is becoming a potent political force that could shape elections for generations.

At a national level, political leaders remain dedicated to the global race to dominate artificial intelligence. But cracks are beginning to show when it comes to support for the infrastructure necessary to get there. Nearly every week now across the U.S., from arid Tucson, Arizona, to the suburban sprawl of the D.C. area, Americans are protesting, rejecting, restricting, or banning new data center development.

It’s also popping up in our elections. On Tuesday in Virginia, voters in the No. 1 state for data center development ousted their GOP political leadership, sending to the governor’s mansion a Democrat who promised to make the growing sector pay more for its electricity. In the run-up to Election Day, polling showed voters were hyperfocused on the risk that data centers could negatively affect their lives. Some candidates in local races campaigned almost entirely on the issue, while others pledged to new bans.

“There’s a lot of other things going on too, [but] data centers are much more important than candidates want to admit,” said Chris Miller, president of Piedmont Environmental Council, a conservation advocacy group in Virginia that tracks and fights data center development. “An industry that is used to moving fast and breaking things is moving up against a physical world they’ve never dealt with before.”

Meanwhile, in Georgia, two Democrats won seats on the Public Service Commission on campaigns that wound up focused on data centers and rising energy bills.

We here at Heatmap have gone to great lengths to better understand why this opposition is so widespread. In August, our data intelligence platform Heatmap Pro conducted polling to figure out how Americans feel about the billions of dollars being poured into data centers for cloud computing and AI development. We found that the dislike is incredibly strong — less than half of Americans are willing to support a data center near them. The hostility crosses party lines, with Republicans nearly as likely to express disdain towards these projects as Democrats. The frustrations with these facilities are also poised to increase over generations, as data centers are most underwater with the younger cohorts, aged 18 to 49, who may be more familiar with AI.

The polling also showed that people are easily convinced to oppose data center development in their neighborhoods. Rhetoric in favor of data centers — how they contribute to tax revenue, create jobs, help the U.S. compete with China — might win some hearts and minds, but rhetoric decrying data centers consistently polled stronger than any of the supportive arguments we tested. This registered across party lines. And making matters worse for the tech sector, individuals who previously opposed renewable energy projects were more likely to be anti-data centers.

What you get in the end is a populist conflict appealing to younger people that bridges the ends of the political spectrum, connecting the left and right — and that should make developers very worried.

On one end of the spectrum, left-aligned activists and local leaders are raging against the energy and water system strain that’ll come from the data center boom. You have folks like Blake Coe, an activist fighting data center projects in San Marcos, Texas. Coe told me he began opposing data centers after being politically awakened by a totally different issue: the Israeli government’s offensive in Gaza and alleged genocide of Palestinians there. But as he told me, he didn’t have “the clout, the money, the whatever to work on fixing a genocide.” After learning about the project in San Marcos, he concluded that the community there was something he “can fight for.”

“There’s been this air of inevitability around data centers and AI and all this new tech stuff coming out — how it’s going to happen, so either get out of the way or get run over,” he said. “And our job is to try and remind people in power of their humanity, at the end of the day.”

At the same time, activists fighting renewable energy projects from the right are also lining up to fight data centers, echoing the same frustrations voiced by environmentalists while also tarring the infrastructure as part of a broader social change imposed by Big Tech elites. Take Indiana, one of the most popular data center destinations after Virginia, where the backlash is hitting Indianapolis and rural GOP strongholds alike. Or Missouri, whose Senator Josh Hawley summed up my story here in one post in October.

“These data centers are massive electricity hogs,” Hawley said on X, months after notably leading the push for the Trump administration to defund the Grain Belt Express, a large transmission line proposal that its developer said will help states meet data center electricity demand. “That’s why Silicon Valley wants more transmission lines, solar farms and windmills,” Hawley said. “Somebody has to pay for it all — don’t believe any politician who says it won’t ultimately be you.”

In Oklahoma, 21-year-old GOP organizer Kennedy Laplante Garza started fighting a nearby data center proposal known as Clydesdale after learning over the summer that it would be built a mile from her family’s farm. “I didn’t even know that much about data centers at that point,” she told me. “But I knew my friends across the state were fighting similar things, whether they were solar panels or wind turbines.” Garza wound up organizing a mass petition campaign against the project that ultimately proved unsuccessful — Clydesdale broke ground this week.

Out in Oklahoma there aren’t very many elected Democrats at all, just different shades of Republican. But because of that, Garza told me, party affiliation matters less to voters than whether their elected representatives are listening to them — meaning there could still be consequences for GOP politicians who side with tech companies over any populist revolt against data center development.

“We’d probably see our elections flip, too, if people started running on it,” Garza said, referring to data center opposition.

This brings us back to Virginia, where local races now hinge on data center conflicts. On Tuesday, Democrat John McAuliff — a former White House energy adviser who worked on the Inflation Reduction Act — flipped a seat in the state House of Delegates, taking out an incumbent Republican representing a D.C. ex-urb that went for Donald Trump in last year’s presidential election. McAuliff’s secret sauce? A laser focus on the Virginia data center boom.

“There’s the environmental impact these are having, and of course these are very large water users. But there’s also the cultural impact that they are having,” McAuliff told me in an interview after his victory. “And then of course, there’s the energy bills piece. Because we’re all here in Data Center Alley, we’re bearing the biggest brunt of the increase in transmission lines, the increase in substations.”

Representatives of the nascent data center sector are beginning to acknowledge that they have a PR problem, but they say the issue is one of education — Americans simply do not yet understand the tax and employment benefits that can come with new data centers. In an interview conducted before this most recent Election Day, Data Center Coalition Vice President for State Policy Dan Diorio told me that opposition has “cut across states,” and that protests have become “very much a learning experience.”

“There definitely is a need for better communication,” Diorio said, adding that companies need to be “responsive to things like aesthetics or sound,” while making sure their projects match “the economic development goals of a community.”

Whenever I asked Diorio about how the data center sector should respond to this political quagmire, he would pivot to education. In the industry’s view, people would be more supportive if they simply knew more about companies’ ongoing sustainability efforts.

This left me with the sense that the business sector does not fully understand the scope of the problem it’s facing. Bukola Folashakin, an analyst with Morningstar, told me that’s plainly evident from the sheer magnitude of money — billions — being invested in a new American data center boom without hesitation.

“The data right now, what we’re seeing,” Folashakin said, “is that it’s not clear if investors are concerned from a social perspective. If social issues were such a concern, you wouldn’t see capital going in that direction.”