A $16 billion data center under construction in Saline, Michigan, developed by Related Digital for Oracle and Open AI.Jim West/Getty Images
A new Gallup poll has found that most Americans would really prefer not to live next door to a data center.
For the first time, the polling organization asked people what they think of data centers, the massive computer-warehouses required to operate (among other things) large AI models.
Data centers need significant space, energy and water to operate, and they don’t provide many jobs relative to the investment they require. And they’re often unpleasant neighbors: their cooling systems can be noisy, and many include onsite gas turbines that belch black smoke into the air.
Gallup found seven out of ten Americans would be opposed to a data center in their backyard, with nearly half of those surveyed (48 percent) “strongly opposed” to data centers in their area.
That opposition seems to translate into real-life political organizing: according to Data Center Watch, an industry analytics project, coordinated local pushback led to the cancellation of at least $156 billion in data center infrastructure construction. And Data Center Opposition Report, a newly-launched website tracking opposition to data center development across the country, says there are at least 268 local opposition groups across 37 states, organizing over 300,000 people.
Some developers still aren’t taking the pushback seriously, though. Celebrity investor and Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary, who hopes to build a massive data center in Utah on a plot of land more than twice the size of Manhattan, is one of them. He claimed last week that hundreds of people who showed up to a county commission protesting his plan were “professional protesters,” bussed in from out of state.
A few days later, on Fox News, O’Leary said that those opposing his data center were actually Chinese plants. “These are proxies for the Chinese government is my argument. They’re just spreading falsehoods,” he said. “This is the CCP at work here. There’s no question about it.”
The data, conversely, suggests that opposition to hyperscale data center development is extremely American.
