A SPECTRE IS haunting America—the spectre of data centres. The computer-filled warehouses powering America’s boom in artificial intelligence have become less popular than almost every other kind of infrastructure—even nuclear-power plants. Counties and states are rushing to wrap them in red tape or ban them altogether. In July the Ratepayer Protection Act, designed to limit their impact on electricity prices, sailed through the committee stage in the House of Representatives.
Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, signed a bipartisan law creating incentives for their construction. For a sense of how quickly the politics of data centres has changed, consider three very different states: Texas, Illinois and Pennsylvania. In 2019 J.B.
“In today’s world,” he declared, “data centres are as critical a part of our infrastructure as our roads, trains and schools. In Texas Greg Abbott boasted as recently as last year that the state was “the epicentre of AI development”. Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s governor, was similarly enthusiastic: “We are already all in on AI.”
A little over a year ago some polls showed majority support for local data-centre construction. Chicago illustrates the shift. Until recently, few people cared. Now they are packing public meetings in an effort to stop development across the state. “The level of emotion associated with these projects is one that I have not experienced. Some proponents of data centres have blamed foreign powers for the backlash. Yet the evidence suggests these efforts have had little effect. Electricity is a different matter. Their impact on consumers is less clear. Wholesale prices are being pushed up. That could eventually impact households. The question is whether public opinion is still malleable. They also seem open to bribes. It is already showering gifts on communities.
By March that had flipped: one Gallup poll found 71% opposed. Surveys by Annenberg recorded a 19-point swing in net favourability between February and June-July. An Economist/YouGov poll from the end of August put opposition at 63%. Data centres were viewed as bad for the country across every group of voters (see chart 1). In the first eight months of this year, American counties considered 409 moratoriums or similar measures, nearly seven times last year’s total. In more than half a dozen states—including virtually every midterm battleground—more than a fifth of counties have passed at least one moratorium (see chart 2). On August 27th X, a social-media platform, said it had identified a 200,000-strong Chinese bot farm circulating the material. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a federally funded research centre, estimates that data centres consumed 4.4% of America’s electricity in 2023 and could account for between 9.5% and 15.3% by 2030. But the Electric Power Research Institute, a think-tank, estimates that the growth of data centres actually reduced average electricity prices by 6% between 2019 and 2024 by spreading the grid’s fixed costs. Another poll, by the University of Virginia, found that most people would accept a few thousand dollars to support a local data centre, with a median acceptable payment of $10,000. Paying every resident of a median-sized American county would cost around $240m—pocket change for the tech industry.
In August hundreds turned out to oppose plans for a project on Chicago’s South Side that, according to its developers, is not even a data centre. “This is one of the toughest development issues I’ve encountered in my career from a land-use attorney’s perspective,” says Tommy Mann of Winstead, a Dallas law firm. “China could not be happier,” observed Mr Trump. In June OpenAI, a model maker, said that a Chinese firm had produced images designed to undermine support for data centres in America. OpenAI concluded that they generated “little or no observable engagement” among Americans. A poll this month by Echelon Insights found that opposition to data centres could be reversed if respondents were told about just one potential benefit, such as lower property taxes or more spending on schools. “Voters are open to making a deal on data centres,” argues Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster who runs Echelon.
Long before the AI boom, the city and its suburbs hosted scores of data centres, thanks to their position at the heart of America’s internet infrastructure and relatively cheap electricity.
