Frontier AI labs are convinced that scaling up computation is the path to improving artificial intelligence, and they’ve put their money where their mouths are, to the tune of trillions of dollars of planned data center projects. Surveys of public opinion say that more than 60% of Americans favor limiting new data centers, particularly in their communities. And the longest-running surveys show that sentiment is growing fast.
Data center projects worth $68 billion were disrupted by local opponents in the second quarter of 2026, according to the trackers at Data Center Watch. AI companies and their investors have a hard time reconciling the growing demand for their products with opposition to the key infrastructure behind it. Some answers from the industry, like the idea that data center opposition is a product of secretive Chinese meddling, don’t really pass the smell test.
Today, a new report from the nonprofit Data & Society offers a deeper look at what is activating opposition to data centers. It is the result of 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork by a team of researchers who interviewed 44 Pennsylvanians between 2024 and 2026. The authors, who are critical of the way AI has been pitched, aren’t trying to measure the empirical impact of data centers, but instead want to understand the way people experience the debate over their construction.
Governor Josh Shapiro headlined a July 2025 summit celebrating $90 billion in data center and AI infrastructure investment. A year later, Shapiro signed an order imposing new requirements on data center projects and removing them from a regulatory fast-track initiative. Someone read the writing on the wall.
The authors say the message from industry that AI is “inevitable” has landed poorly with Pennsylvania residents. They point to the state’s historic waves of industrialization, including coal mining, the early days of the oil industry, steel manufacturing, and fracking, experiences that have left residents suspicious of utopian industrial schemes. Still, trade unions are perhaps the greatest source of support for data center projects, thanks to the potential jobs they represent.
Even acknowledging that, once built, these data centers won’t be major sources of employment, unions see the projects as a lifeline to rebuild their ranks. In contrast to the industry’s fears of foreign influence, the researchers describe the work of AI boosters as a kind of propaganda campaign, pointing to the Data Center Coalition, a trade group that has set up websites like “Pennsylvania Connects” to boost projects and spent at least $19,000 lobbying the state government last year. In spite of the boosterism, resistance has grown, and in unlikely ways.
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