The Public is Getting Fed Up With Data Centers. Politicians Need to Take Notice

Last week, President Donald Trump met with leaders from US AI companies to promote a new plan for shielding consumers from energy price increases due to data centers. Alongside executives from Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and other companies, President Trump touted their pledge to build or provide their own electricity supplies, without burdening other ratepayers.

The plan is unlikely to be effective: it is a nonbinding agreement and does not specify the mechanisms for achieving the stated goals. Still, this meeting represents a concession that public opinion has quickly turned against data centers. Speaking at the event, President Trump even noted that the tech companies “need some PR help.”

That statement, at least, is true. The country is in the midst of a massive data center boom, with data centers being built and announced at a record-breaking pace. In response, communities are fighting back, organizing coalitions and showing up en masse to public meetings where data centers are being discussed. The crowds at these events worry about the data center’s impacts on their community, and they resent how massive companies use their power and wealth to ride roughshod over the community’s wishes.

Public resistance to data centers isn’t a simple case of reactionary NIMBYism or anti-tech pearl-clutching. Instead, these are stories of communities resisting corporate impositions that will bring material harms, with few benefits in return.

Last year, I co-authored a report studying the impacts of data centers on their local communities. This research found three key issues with data centers.

First, as last week’s White House meeting acknowledged, data centers lead to higher electricity prices for nearby consumers. Data centers require massive amounts of electricity to operate, which puts a strain on the power grid. Many of the costs of upgrading energy infrastructure get passed on to consumers through increased electricity prices. To make matters worse, many data centers negotiate discounted (and often secretive) energy rates with utility providers. All told, one recent report found that electricity rates for consumers have more than doubled over the last five years in areas near data centers.

Second, data centers impose significant costs on the local environment. In states like West Virginia and Nebraska, the only way for utilities to keep up with the rapidly-growing energy demands of data centers is to continue operating coal plants, which spew pollutants that lead to diseases like asthma and lung cancer. Many data centers use gas generators for additional or backup power, leading to further air pollution. Here’s how one Memphis resident who lives a few miles away from a data center described the situation: “I can’t breathe at home, it smells like gas outside.” Meanwhile, data centers devour water to keep their hardware from overheating. Many are located in water-scarce regions of the country, which are already facing shortages.

Perhaps these costs would be worth bearing if data centers brought jobs and benefitted local economies. But, my report’s third finding is that data centers don’t bring stable, high-paying jobs. Data center companies often promise that they will create thousands of jobs for local communities. In reality, though, these promises do not come to fruition. To be sure, building data centers does create construction jobs. But, once data centers are built, they require few employees, since the facilities primarily house computers and servers. The jobs that data centers do create locally are typically low-wage, term-limited, contractor positions.

Given these harms and false promises, there should be little surprise that data centers are unpopular. The rapid pace of data center development means that the backlash is only going to grow.

As politicians campaign for this year’s elections—and look ahead to the 2028 presidential contest—they need to take data center opposition seriously as a salient issue. Voters are likely to reward candidates who give voice to their concerns and punish candidates who champion data centers. This emerging public opposition presents a particularly ripe opportunity for Democrats, who have made affordability their primary focus and champion environmental protection.

Last November’s elections provide valuable evidence that challenging data centers can be a winning issue for Democrats. In Virginia—the state with the most data centers across the US—Abigail Spanberger campaigned for governor on the argument that data center companies should “pay their own way and their fair share” for infrastructure upgrades. In the state’s 30th House of Delegates district, where Democrat John McAuliff narrowly took down a Republican incumbent, McAuliff noted that voters brought up their concerns about data centers more than any other issue. Meanwhile, the largest Democratic over-performance came in the Georgia Public Service Commission elections, in which the Democratic candidates ran in opposition to rising electricity rates and explicitly called out data centers as responsible.

What makes data centers particularly opportune for Democrats is the ability for this issue to appeal to voters outside of the party base. Many data center fights are in exactly the type of rural areas and red or purple states in which Democrats are desperate to make inroads. Communities have organized to resist data centers in states as politically diverse as Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, and Virginia. Voters and politicians alike have noted that data centers are the rare issue on which voters are willing to vote across their normal party lines.

Perhaps most importantly for a party seeking to reclaim power, opposition to data centers provides a unifying position across the intra-party debates about what message Democrats should prioritize. Data centers clearly tie into Democratic arguments around affordability, climate protection, and supporting workers.

Democrats can also incorporate data centers into anti-Trump arguments. His recent efforts notwithstanding, the President has aimed to accelerate data center development through executive orders and an AI Action Plan exhorting the need to “Build, Baby, Build!”

Data centers can also play into Democratic narratives about the power and corruption of oligarchs: the data center boom is being driven by billionaires and tech companies that have successfully lobbied the government to achieve tax breaks for data centers and fought regulations that would constrain data center growth. Some states are losing more than a billion dollars per year to these tax breaks.

Some Democratic politicians, such as Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, have made strong stances against data centers. Unfortunately, though, leading Democrats have yet to raise a serious challenge to data centers, and in many cases have directly embraced them.

One of President Joe Biden’s final acts in office was signing an executive order supporting data center development. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D) has been an ardent champion of data centers, signing two bills that provide tax breaks for data centers into law and pushing numerous data center projects across the state. Meanwhile, last fall, California Governor Gavin Newsom (D)—a frontrunner for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination—vetoed a commonsense bill passed by the state legislature requiring data centers to report how much water they use.

Democrats should learn from their past tendency to discount widespread, brewing frustration among the populace. On the issue of data centers, they can be the party that, for once, gives a voice and a platform for communities that feel threatened and ignored by elites. There are plenty of policies they could champion that would constrain data center growth and prevent tech companies from passing the financial and environmental costs on to the public.

The stakes are high: some Republican politicians are themselves beginning to stake out strong positions against data centers. If Democrats do not act quickly on this issue, they may find themselves outflanked by their opponents.

While the President and tech giants present a masquerade of responsible data center development, voters across the country are pushing for more fundamental restrictions. They are pressuring state and municipal officials to pass moratoria that would temporarily ban data center development. They are crowding public meetings and flooding online message boards to express their desire to not have any data centers in their community.

Democrats should take note: challenging data centers is not just the right policy move on its merits—it is also a position that will set them up for electoral success.