Americans have turned against the giant warehouses of computers that run artificial intelligence, and it is not a close call. In an August survey by Embold Research for Heatmap, 75% of registered voters said they strongly or somewhat opposed a data center being built near their neighborhood. More than six in 10 said they would strongly oppose one. That opposition is already changing where these buildings go up.
A separate Gallup survey, conducted in March and released in May, put the figure at 71% of Americans opposed to data centers for AI in their local areas, with 48% strongly opposed. Much of that came down to noise, pollution, and higher utility bills. The anger crosses party lines, which is exactly why it has lawmakers rattled.
Texas pulled the plug on 1,800 projects
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott laid out his terms plainly. Data centers must not take water that local communities need, must not take power the Texas grid needs, and must not disturb neighborhoods. “My directive has halted up to 1,800 data center projects,” he wrote on August 20. His office said developers should carry the cost of their own facilities instead of passing it to residents.
Press secretary Andrew Mahaleris said companies must invest their own money, provide their own power, and reuse their own water. Texas has a hard reason to guard its grid. The state froze during Winter Storm Uri in 2021, a failure state health officials tied to 246 deaths.
Abbott said projections showed Texas would need to add “five times the amount of power that we have available” to feed the industry. “This simply is not going to work,” he said. The state also could not get straight answers. Abbott said the Texas Public Utility Commission asked every data center operating or hoping to operate in Texas to report how much power it uses and would use. Fewer than 10% responded.
The poll numbers moved faster than anyone expected
Heatmap has asked the same question, worded the same way, four times in a year. In August 2025, people were split almost evenly, about 43% in support and 42% opposed. By May, seven in 10 were opposed. The share who said they would strongly support a data center nearby fell from 13% to 4%.
Founding executive editor Robinson Meyer wrote that Americans moved 33 points against data centers over that year, and that the drop cut across age, gender, income, party, and the rural-urban split. By his math, the facilities are 43 points underwater with Republicans, 65 with independents, and 75 with Democrats. “If you can think of a cohort of Americans, there’s a good chance they wouldn’t welcome a data center in their area,” he wrote.
New York and Pennsylvania drew hard lines
New York’s legislature passed the Responsible Data Center Development Act in June, but the bill has not been enacted. Gov. Kathy Hochul instead issued Executive Order 62 on July 14, pausing state environmental permits for up to a year while regulators write a broad impact statement. The order reaches projects drawing more than 50 megawatts.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro took a different route. He signed an executive order making AI companies get state permits, pay their own electricity costs, hire and train local workers, and follow environmental rules. “My message to data center developers is clear: if you can’t agree to our strict requirements and get the community where you want to build to say ‘yes,’ you’re not going to have the Commonwealth’s support either,” Shapiro said.
The real fight is over who pays the electric bill
Strip away the talk about AI and China, and the anger is mostly about the bill. When a data center needs new substations and transmission lines, those costs often get spread across every customer on the system rather than charged to the company that caused them. In the PJM Interconnection region, wholesale power costs ran about 76% higher in the first quarter of 2026 than a year earlier, according to the grid’s independent market monitor.
An analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists found 130 transmission projects approved in 2024 by utilities in seven PJM states for the sole purpose of connecting private data centers, at a combined cost of about $4.3 billion. More than 95% of those projects were charged to general rates paid by all retail customers. Virginia alone accounted for roughly $1.9 billion.
Mike Jacobs, a senior energy manager who ran the numbers, said the tech companies rushing to build are worth trillions of dollars, “yet they’re successfully exploiting an outdated regulatory process to pawn billions of dollars of costs off on families who may never even use their products.” People in Oneonta, New York, felt it directly. Resident Geoff Doyle said his NYSEG bill was $250.13 in October 2025 and $528.57 by July 2026. Representative Josh Riley introduced the Fair Data Act, H.R. 9655, in July, to force developers to pay for the power and grid upgrades their sites need. He pressed the case at an event in West Oneonta on August 20.
Hundreds of towns already said no
The pushback runs deeper than a few governors. By Heatmap Pro’s count, more than 530 local data center laws were on the books across more than 500 counties and municipalities as of July 30. As of March, at least 12 states in session had filed moratorium bills. Some were sweeping, and most have since stalled. Georgia’s HB 1012, which died with this year’s session, would have barred cities and counties from issuing new data center permits until March 1, 2027. Oklahoma’s SB 1488, which did not pass, would have halted new construction until November 1, 2029, while regulators studied effects on water, rates, and property values. Vermont’s S.205 as introduced would run a moratorium through July 1, 2030, and remains in committee.
“There’s literally not a conversation that I have, not a stop that I make, where data centers and AI don’t come up,” said Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan, earlier this summer. That kind of talk from candidates on both sides is why the state bills keep piling up.
Noise, water, and a sound like a vacuum that never stops
For people who live next door, the complaints are physical. A resident living near the Alliance Cloud Services data center in Dowagiac, Michigan, described a constant sound and compared it to someone setting up “a vacuum, like in your living room.” The company was fined for breaking a local noise ordinance, a penalty it is contesting, and has raised the idea of buying nearby homes.
Water has become another flashpoint. In Georgia, reports linked data center operations to low water pressure and, in one case, muddy water from household taps. Oregon passed a law requiring facilities that use more than 20 megawatts to cover their share of grid costs, and Portland General Electric raised data center rates by 29.7% while cutting residential rates by 1.3%.
Trump says the towns fighting back will end up ‘backwards and poor’
President Donald Trump has thrown his weight behind the buildout. On Monday, he said the only reason a community would not want data centers is if it wants to end up “backwards and poor,” and told towns to “let Data Reign.” He warned that “if we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame.” Trump has called Texas’s stance a mistake and said in an August 7 interview that the industry “could be bigger than oil.”
Vice President JD Vance admitted that building data centers means higher utility bills for local residents, but urged companies to put power back into the grid rather than pull it out. Not every ally agrees with the states. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, whose company reincorporated from Delaware to Texas in 2025, called Abbott’s move unfortunate and said he thought Texas “would be the last holdout against this ignorant thinking.”
The issue has landed in the 2026 midterms, threatening some Republicans who once championed data centers, including Sen. Jon Husted of Ohio. Trump has said he does not mind. If a Republican is against data centers, he said, that is okay with him.
St. Louis is the newest battleground
The latest fight is in St. Louis, where a Terrawatt data center project has run into strong community opposition. The developer pitched the city’s older, underused infrastructure as a chance to bring industry back to struggling areas. Residents were not sold.
Kasey Fowler-Finn, a biologist at Saint Louis University, joined a lawsuit seeking to stop the project, pointing to worries about noise, water, and electricity, along with the lack of an environmental review. It fits a pattern showing up all over the country. A tech company arrives promising jobs and a comeback, and the people already living there ask who pays and who gets stuck with the noise. With more than 500 counties and municipalities already saying no and public opinion still sliding against them, that question is not going away.
