Everyone can find a reason to dislike data center construction — SkimNews
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- Data & Society released a report based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork interviewing 44 Pennsylvanians from 2024 to 2026, exploring why local opposition to data centers is growing rather than measuring the facilities' empirical impact.
- More than 60% of Americans favor limiting new data centers, per public opinion surveys, with sentiment rising fast according to the longest-running trackers.
- Data center projects worth $68 billion were disrupted by local opponents in Q2 2026, according to trackers at Data Center Watch.
- Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro headlined a July 2025 summit celebrating $90 billion in data center and AI infrastructure investment, then a year later signed an order imposing new requirements and removing projects from a regulatory fast-track.
- The Data Center Coalition, an industry trade group, set up 'Pennsylvania Connects' to boost projects and spent at least $19,000 lobbying state government last year — described by researchers as a propaganda campaign.
- Maia Woluchem, a Data & Society program director and co-author, described the opposition coalition as 'post-partisan,' spanning NIMBYs, AI skeptics, environmental groups worried about water and energy, and residents anxious about power bills, property values, and developers' use of NDAs to lock local officials out of conversations.
- Trade unions remain the strongest pro-data-center constituency due to potential construction jobs, even though the facilities will not be major employers once built — making unions a lifeline to rebuild ranks.
Why it matters: The AI industry is planning trillions in data center investment yet faces grassroots opposition too diverse — NIMBYs, AI skeptics, environmentalists, unions — to address with a single message. Pennsylvania's reversal, from celebrating $90B in projects in July 2025 to imposing new requirements a year later, shows how quickly the political ground is shifting beneath trillion-dollar buildouts.
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