The Frontier AI Institute believes that scaling up computation is the path to improved artificial intelligence, and has been putting its money where its mouth is in planned multitrillion-dollar data center projects.
What about the rest of us? Polls show that more than 60% of Americans support limiting new data centers, especially in their communities. And the longest-running surveys show that sentiment is growing rapidly. Data center projects worth $68 billion were halted by local opposition in the second quarter of 2026, according to trackers at Data Center Watch.
AI companies and their investors are struggling to reconcile growing demand for their products with opposition to the key infrastructure behind them. Some answers from the industry don’t really pass the smell test, such as the idea that data center opposition is the product of covert Chinese interference.
A new report published today by the nonprofit Data & Society provides a deeper look into what’s driving data center opposition. This is the result of 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork by a team of researchers who interviewed 44 Pennsylvanians between 2024 and 2026. The authors, who are critical of the way AI is marketed, are not trying to measure the empirical impact of data centers, but instead want to understand how people experience the debate around building data centers.
“One of the strengths of ethnography and long-term field research is to burst the bubble of AI hype,” data and society researcher Livia Garofalo told TechCrunch. “People are starting to understand the dissonance between AI being the next inevitable industrial revolution and fear of AI.”
When the authors began their research, data centers were being touted as the key to economic development. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro headlined the July 2025 Summit celebrating $90 billion in investments in data center and AI infrastructure. A year later, Shapiro signed an order imposing new requirements on data center projects and exempting them from regulatory fast-track efforts. Someone read the writing on the wall.
The authors say the message from industry that AI is “inevitable” has not been well received by Pennsylvanians. They point to the state’s historic waves of industrialization, including coal mining, the early oil industry, steel manufacturing, and hydraulic fracturing, which left residents skeptical of utopian industrial plans.
“Pennsylvanians, in particular, have incredible experience with industrial change and a deep lineage of industrial trauma that makes them turn their noses up when things don’t feel right to them,” said Maia Walchem, program director at Data & Society, who co-authored the report.
Still, because of the potential jobs, unions are probably the biggest source of support for data center projects. While acknowledging that these data centers will not be a major source of employment if built, unions see the project as a lifeline to rebuilding their membership.
There’s an influence campaign, okay.
In contrast to industry concerns about foreign influence, researchers describe AI Booster’s efforts as a kind of propaganda campaign, pointing to the Data Center Coalition, an industry group that has launched websites like Pennsylvania Connects to promote the project and spent at least $19,000 lobbying state governments last year.
Despite the push, the resistance expanded in unexpected ways. The researchers said they were surprised by the diversity of opposition to these projects, calling it post-partisan rather than bipartisan.
“I don’t want to glorify that everyone is having this Kumbaya moment, but[AI]is forcing people to have conversations together about the future they want and the gifts they want…These conflicts are incredibly organic,” Walchem said, pointing to a variety of sources of opposition. Sometimes it’s just the people who are against development, the classic NIMBYs, but from there the coalition grows. There are those who dislike AI as a technology and the corporate interests behind it, there are environmental groups concerned about water usage and energy-related emissions, and there are those who have more nebulous concerns about public health.
But what is surprising is that material interests are most often brought to mind. People worry that data center power usage will affect their electricity bills, worry that data centers will drive down real estate values, and resent tactics used by data center builders to get their way, such as asking local officials to sign non-disclosure agreements.
“There’s a sizable group of people who aren’t familiar with town hall meetings at all and might find it a little weird to have representatives from Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft show up here, or data center developers show up to my community meeting…” Walchem points out. “And the council representatives I used to have relationships with now won’t talk to me about this kind of thing.”
It is a patchwork quilt of motivations for anti-data center activism that presents such challenges for the AI industry. There is no easy way to alleviate this mountain of concerns. The issue is trust, and it’s already hurting the industry.
“What these industries are now building into people’s lives is an intimate, relational trust,” Garofalo said. “I’m alone at home, talking to a chatbot, and I feel loved and valued. Yet, this is a commodity, and I know I’m being exploited.”
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