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.

Today, a new report from the nonprofit Data & Society offers a deeper look at what is activating opposition to data centers. It 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 has been pitched, aren’t trying to measure the empirical impact of data centers, but instead want to understand the way people experience the debate over their construction.

“One of the strengths of ethnography and doing research on the ground for an extended period of time is piercing the bubble of AI hype,” Livia Garofalo, a Data & Society researcher, told TechCrunch. “People are making sense of the dissonances between AI being the next inevitable industrial revolution, and fears about AI.”

“People in Pennsylvania especially have incredible experience with industrial change, have deep lineages of industrial trauma, enough to sniff when things don’t feel right to them,” Maia Woluchem, a program director at Data & Society who co-authored the report, said.

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