America Really, Really Hates Data Centers
With surprising swiftness, data centers have become the bête noire of the left, the right and seemingly everyone between those two poles. That poses an immense problem for Silicon Valley, even if it is an issue partially of the industry’s own making.
My colleagues at The Information have been following the mounting opposition to data centers with our data center moratorium tracker for several months. And an amazing array of additional examples has recently arrived that further illustrate how widespread the sentiment has grown. Weeks ago, Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of anything-goes Texas, brought the construction of 1,800 data centers in that state to a standstill over concerns about their power and water use. And then on Tuesday, Josh Shapiro, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, issued an executive order that tightly restricts data center expansion in his state.
Then there was the pee ad that went viral on Wednesday from Liquid Death and the beer company owned by ex-NFL stars Travis and Jason Kelce: The two startups joined up to cajole people to consume copious amounts of weak pilsner and canned water, urinate and then mail off their bodily fluids to a stockpile, which they promise to share with data centers to use in their liquid-cooling systems. They’re kidding, I think, but I can’t entirely be sure: Neither Liquid Death nor the Kelce brothers’ Garage Beer would comment for this story. (According to TechCrunch, it’s theoretically possible to use urine to cool data centers. Take that as you will.)
Fresh polling data attached startling numbers to the unease around data centers, and those figures—from Embold Research, a nonpartisan San Francisco–based polling outfit, and HeatMap Pro, a media startup focused on climate change—went even more viral than the pee ad. A full 75% of Americans now oppose data centers, up from 42% a year ago, according to the data.
Data centers now exist in the same category as in-laws, colonoscopies and black licorice: They’re a source of near-universal dislike. According to Embold’s polling data, opposition outweighs support by 43 percentage points among Republicans, 65 points among independents and 75 points among Democrats.
The sharp increase over the past year shocked Embold Research c0-founder Mike Greenfield when he looked over the data. “When people would ask me, ‘What has surprised you about polling in general?’ I say it’s how steady things are—and how much people don’t change their opinions. This has obviously been an exception to that,” said Greenfield, a former PayPal and LinkedIn analytics scientist who started polling in 2017. The zealous opposition to data centers has few historical comparables, he said, though he thinks it’s similar to the kind of sentiment that led to Prohibition.
To state the very obvious, opposition to data center construction is a grim subject for Silicon Valley, since those facilities sit at the heart of AI. It’s a risible situation for tech, which has exacerbated public unease around the projects. Among other things, the industry picked a deeply foolish metaphor to talk about data centers, likening them to the factories that powered the industrial revolution. Yes, factories were essential to 19th-century modernization. They were also dreadful places replete with human suffering. We might as well have just said: Data centers are great—they’re just like dungeons, coal mines and dental operating rooms.
At this point, I don’t think anyone can clearly predict whether the ultimate outcome to the data center discourse will resemble what happened with fracking, which handily survived a wave of opposition in the 2000s, or whether it’ll mimic what happened to nuclear power, which very much did not survive the opposition that mounted in the 1970s and 1980s. The exact consequences of data center expansion are squishy unknowns. Or, as Yale professor Yuan Yao recently put it in a lengthy but fair-minded piece about data centers, “The environmental impacts of data centers are real, but they are also highly context-dependent.”
Another part of what happens to data centers seems to come down to whether Silicon Valley can pull together on a coordinated public relations campaign that’s more than AI will be great—trust us, you dummies. “Claude Code is an amazing tool,” said Embold Research’s Greenfield. “But I don’t think the companies building data centers have done an amazing job of telling their story to the average voter—the average person—outside of Silicon Valley.”
To a degree, parts of the industry have begun to follow the advice Lulu Cheng Meservey, the highly regarded public relations maven, has voiced: “The most tried and true PR tactic is just give people stuff.” According to Bloomberg, Oracle, which has pinned enormous hopes on AI infrastructure, has donated money to local charities near its Project Jupiter data center in rural Texas—even shifting some cash over to become a sponsor of Dino Dig, a theme park where kids excavate fake dinosaur bones. And as my colleague Amy Dockser Marcus notes in this week’s Big Read, Anthropic, OpenAI and Google have all tried to reposition AI as a means for curing terrible diseases. That has enraged traditional scientists, who think it’s unfair hype, but as far as charm offensives go, offering people cures for cancer is definitely catchy marketing.
A couple things I can more easily foresee: Tech spending in the midterm elections is going to go absolutely nuts. Take the recent note that the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which is responsible for getting Republicans elected to the Senate, sent to a slew of major AI companies: It warns that data center opposition could cost Republicans an Ohio Senate seat and amounts to a direct poke in the ribs for pro-AI super PACs to up their contributions. I also think consumer AI hardware is gonna have a tough time: Will things like OpenAI’s Jony Ive–designed, hockey puck–shaped device will be dead on arrival? Will enthusiasm for Meta’s smart glasses will drastically plummet? (Controversy has already been growing around the glasses’ ability to make covert video recordings.) Data centers have attracted mass consternation because they’re a physical embodiment of a technology many people fear. I wonder how many people will want to walk around wearing items that conjure the same anxieties.