Most Data Center Opponents Don't Live Near One: Poll
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- Milltown Partners polled 6,872 registered voters between May 10 and May 20 and found that only 8% of data center opponents know of one near their home, framing the backlash as a proxy for wider AI anxiety rather than local NIMBY concerns.
- Nearly half of Americans (49%) support a moratorium on new data center construction, while only 16% oppose one and 27% are neutral — suggesting a narrow but real mandate for a temporary halt, per the survey with a 3-point margin of error.
- Pew Research Center found in April that two-thirds of planned data centers are headed to rural areas, even though 87% of existing facilities are sited in urban locations, meaning opposition is racing ahead of local exposure.
- Steve Bannon on the right and Bernie Sanders on the left have both attacked AI as a threat to working people, according to a recent Atlantic piece, giving the data center fight rare bipartisan momentum.
- Stanford's Andy Hall warned on X that if unemployment rises two percentage points and voters blame AI, the result will be a 'real populist backlash' — handing critics more ammunition as tech leaders publicly warn of mass white-collar job loss.
- Genesis AI co-founder Zhou Xian told Axios the company is filling severe data center labor shortages with a newly launched general-purpose robot designed to navigate complex environments, betting that automation can sidestep the worker pipeline problem.
- Milltown Partners, which counts leading AI labs among its clients, oversampled voters in Texas, Georgia, Michigan, California, and North Carolina — the five states with the most active data center project pipelines.
Why it matters: With 49% of voters backing a moratorium and only 16% opposed, data center opponents outnumber supporters three-to-one — and the opposition isn't coming from neighbors but from a broader electorate anxious about AI's costs, water use, and job displacement. That gives tech companies a narrow window to answer concrete questions about resource use and local benefits before bipartisan anger hardens into binding restrictions.
