Data & Society: 60% of Americans want to cap new data centers

A Data & Society report covered by TechCrunch finds that over 60% of Americans now favor limiting new data centers, and that $68 billion in projects were disrupted by local opposition in the second quarter of 2026 alone.

The finding rests on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork and 44 interviews with Pennsylvanians conducted between 2024 and 2026. "One of the strengths of ethnography and doing research on the ground for an extended period of time is piercing the bubble of AI hype," said Data & Society researcher Livia Garofalo.

Pennsylvania is the load-bearing case. Governor Josh Shapiro headlined a July 2025 summit celebrating $90 billion in announced data center and AI infrastructure investment. According to the reporting by TechCrunch's Tim Fernholz, Shapiro has since shifted course, signing an order that imposes new requirements and removes projects from regulatory fast-track initiatives. The Data Center Coalition spent at least $19,000 lobbying state government, and researchers documented an "influence campaign" that ran through trade-group promotional sites such as "Pennsylvania Connects."

The opposition itself is unusually broad and post-partisan: environmental groups citing water use and emissions, residents worried about power bills, homeowners tracking property values, AI skeptics, and classic NIMBYs. "People in Pennsylvania especially have incredible experience with industrial change, have deep lineages of industrial trauma," said Data & Society program director Maia Woluchem.

Industry has blamed foreign interference for the wave of pushback. The researchers place the influence campaign on the trade-group side instead.