The Truth & Lies of Data Centers

The Truth and Lies of Data Centers

Few human creations in the world get more hate than data centers. In the US, retaliatory action is now bipartisan, meaning everyone seems to be against them.

Nonetheless, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found that just 14% of Americans supported a data center in their community, compared with 36% who approved of US strikes against Iran.

Because it raises electricity bills.

Because it wastes water like there’s no tomorrow.

Because they are noisy..

Choose your preferred reason to hate; all are valid these days. Whether they are accurate or not is another thing.

But does this make sense? Do they raise prices? Do they consume a lot of water?

Will answer many of these questions today. The culprits are many: Auctions, closed loops, poor measurements, populism… this has it all.

This exercise has served as an eerie reminder to myself that decisions aren’t always based on hard data, and that populism, bad modeling, and ultimately outright lies matter just as much, or more, these days.

The Sudden Wake

I don’t think I’m going to surprise you when I tell you data centers are deeply unpopular.

‘Data center neighbor? No thanks’

In a June 2026 Reuters/Ipsos survey of 4,531 Americans, only 33% approved of the current pace of data-center construction, while 64% disapproved.

When respondents were asked about their own communities, 57% opposed a local data center, and only 14% supported one.

Importantly, the resistance was bipartisan: approximately two-thirds of Democrats and half of Republicans opposed having one nearby. A separate Public First survey covering 15 countries found that only 26% of Americans supported expanding data-center infrastructure, the lowest result in the study and below Britain, France and Germany.

That sentiment has now escaped opinion polls. In July, organizers coordinated 142 anti-data-center demonstrations across 42 states. Texas hosted 18 events, Georgia 11, California eight, while Pennsylvania, Florida and Indiana hosted seven each. National attendance figures were unavailable, and some rallies were small, so this was not yet a mass movement.

But the political diversity of these actions is what should really worry AI incumbents: opposition is appearing in Republican, Democratic and swing states for broadly similar reasons, including electricity prices, water consumption, tax concessions and the secrecy surrounding local negotiations.

And, as you would’ve expected, the one cohort that owes allegiance to anything but holding to power, the politician, noticed.

But before we go deep, I want to make one thing clear from the get-go: moratoriums don’t delay overall progress, no matter how intuitive that sounds, because that capacity is built elsewhere.

From the expected to the not so expected

At the federal level, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the latter of which is polling in prediction markets as the favorite for the 2028 presidential campaign, introduced legislation proposing a nationwide moratorium on new AI data centers until the nation adopts safeguards.

As expected, the bill has not become law. The Trump administration has chosen the opposite approach: continue building, but make developers “pay their own…

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