Last month, within a day of each other, two writers published contrasting takes regarding the backlash to artificial intelligence and its infrastructure. I do not think they were knowingly writing in opposition to each other — the second does not reference the first — but they set up the titular question I find intriguing: will the public backlash toward data centres be sustained?
Brian Merchant, on August 27:
It’s almost funny to think back to the mild wave of public consternation and Congressional wrist-slapping that pundits termed “the techlash” in the heady days of the first Trump administration, over concerns of disinformation on Facebook and social media, compared to what we’re seeing now. That is, a genuine, sustained demonstration of rage at some of the modern tech industry’s key aims.
And all of this has become so clear, so palpable, and so widespread that it’s apparently causing tech industry leadership and pro-AI policy wonks to enter either a state of denial or something more akin to fevered delusion.
Merchant lists a few things opposed by people in the U.S. in a broad and non-partisan way. One of them is data centres — particularly the massive ones powering today’s generative A.I. services.
Andrew Sharp, who is part of the Stratechery extended universe, the following day expressed doubts about not only the longevity of that opposition, but also its sincerity:
But I wouldn’t over-read this moment, either. This comes back to my lack of alarm about the long run implications. While it’s certainly true that a nihilistic sort of populism is on the rise in both parties and de-growth impulses are especially common on the left—two trends that aren’t going away—it’s worth keeping in mind that policy movements that draw their momentum from stuff people are saying on social media often lose steam just as quickly as they seemed to accelerate to the forefront of every political conversation in the country. Or to put it differently: of all the things that have taken their turn as The Current Thing, the track record for sustained outrage or support is not great. No one talks about de-funding the police anymore, Donald Trump is not building the wall, no one is flying Ukrainian flags today (well, except my parents), the MeToo movement is now seen as excessive in a variety of ways, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who today sponsors a bill to impose a federal moratorium on data center buildouts, recently made news for blithely admitting, “Woke 1 was crazy.”
I guess I should first address the incidents of activism that have apparently fizzled out. Fewer people may be talking about “de-funding the police”, but a U.S. Gallup poll published in July found confidence in police is lower now than it was in June 2020. Meanwhile, the Trump border wall was not a “movement [driven by] stuff people are saying on social media”, but instead a policy that has been revitalized under his second administration — one that has been augmented by a violent and illegal deportation policy that has resulted in several murders. This has resulted in net public favourability of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, another form of “police”, falling below that of any agency except the Internal Revenue Service, according to Gallup. Meanwhile, I am curious who, exactly, thinks the “MeToo movement is now seen as excessive in a variety of ways”.
Alas, it is conceivable that loud public fury over data centres will become quieter and less urgent, though not necessarily because people will grow to like or even accept this infrastructure. Construction could proceed on large-scale projects regardless of public reception. In Louisiana, for example, not only is Meta’s massive data centre project moving along, “state utility regulators overturned a judge’s order to make [calculations about] job projections and electricity needs” public, according to the Louisiana Illuminator. That certainly is one way to blunt criticism of a project. On that, there is ample precedent; Sharp:
In lieu of offering obvious advice, I’m more interested in cultural observation. Many have cited the 5G panic as a parallel for the kind of mass delusion around data center harms that has taken root this year, but personally, I think back to the conversations we used to have about fracking for oil and natural gas. That, too, was once branded as a uniquely harmful practice that imperiled our water supply, and while there were isolated incidents in which that was true, Obama’s EPA found that as a general matter those fears were overblown (although the agency later softened its exculpatory language after receiving criticism from activists and scientists).
[…] most importantly, Americans who once opposed fracking don’t care or even notice. There was never any grand public debate where one side won and the other lost; the work got done in spite of vocal critics, and then the critics mostly forgot about it.
For completeness, the “exculpatory language”, as Sharp puts it, in the fracking report was inserted late in the draft stage, and was objected to by the EPA’s Science Advisory Board. Sharp may cast aside such concerns as the mere opinions of “activists and scientists”, but the outcome touted by the petroleum industry from this EPA report was undercut several years later.
Whether Sharp realizes it or not, the fracking public relations playbook is exactly what people like asset manager Dan Clifton argues data centre developers and A.I. companies ought to be pulling from. Josh Brown, the host and another finance guy, says this was a relatively easy argument for the fracking industry to make because “the answer is obvious: two-dollar natural gas”. Clifton responds by admitting that “one of the problems [with data centres] is they don’t create a lot of jobs. There’s not a lot of construction jobs, and there’s definitely not jobs inside the data centre itself. So you’ve got to make it about property taxes”. “You know what would be a good argument?”, Brown asks, “hey, it’s this or a nuclear power plant”.
Clifton’s framing — and Sharp’s, for that matter — kind of rests on people in the U.S. viewing fracking favourably. According to Pew (PDF), however, just 45% of Americans supported more fracking when polled in spring 2025, while 51% were opposed. Nuclear power was considerably more popular, with 59% saying they wanted more of it in the U.S., though nothing came close to solar at 77%. Notably, support for fracking has grown only a little from a low of 37% in spring 2020; solar, meanwhile, has declined from near-universal favourability at 92% in 2019, for seemingly no reason other than political waves. The Pew survey is not an outlier, either: a 2025 meta analysis found fracking, here treated as a category of natural gas production, was perceived negatively overall and in a number of specific categories. So, contrary to Sharp’s insistence that “Americans who once opposed fracking don’t care or even notice”, this Pew survey actually shows how public aversion has lingered despite easy financial arguments and a growing albeit troubled industry.
But while the U.S. public is not convinced about fracking despite its proliferation, there seem to be few high-profile protests. That is true of many things. There is finite energy to throw behind any one thing, and there are so many worthwhile things. Passionate voices are often not well received but any reaction is better than being ignored. And we are in an era of democratically elected governments that seem to be content with paying little attention to the broader public. In fact, this seems to be what Sharp approves of:
So midterms will come and go. Opportunistic states like Texas will find a way to return to building. As entertaining or distressing as the current panic has been, the future of American AI infrastructure will not in fact be relocated to the UAE or outer space. Some of this controversy will probably be revived for a presidential election in 2028, but I expect the incentives for both companies building data centers and local governments attracting them will stubbornly prevail. And over time, voters won’t care.
The question is not whether voters will care. The question is whether policymakers, regulators, and big corporations will listen.
As Merchant wrote:
What’s happening, after all, is pretty simple: Tech companies have encroached into Americans’ personal lives and public spaces, with both development projects and surveillance products, and people find the tradeoffs unacceptable. It’s really not complicated. Data centers, Flock cams, and AI glasses have been thrust into the public sphere by tech companies, with little to no preceding democratic input, and they are being rejected with extreme prejudice, because people do not like what these things do or what they represent. There is an additional layer of anger because people feel that they weren’t consulted; these vast infrastructural buildouts and high tech privacy violators pretty clearly tap into a shared sense of resentment and powerlessness.
Protests and demonstrations are supposed to get attention for a cause. In the best case, a movement may become quieter because people with power actually listen to the voices of their constituents. The anti-nuclear movement has resulted in a steady decline of nuclear warheads, which — coincidentally or not — peaked in 1986, the same year as the disaster at Chernobyl. There are fewer public demonstrations against nuclear weapons today, undoubtedly in part because people were so vehemently and loudly opposed forty and fifty years ago.
I am skeptical of the likelihood of sustained public backlash of the type documented by Merchant, however. When media coverage treats it as an old story — see: fracking — enthusiasm toward and awareness of the opposition will wane. But that does not mean the movement will have been unsuccessful.
For years, companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft blanketed the Earth in data centres with little public awareness. These buildings — which now seem small despite their preposterous scale — have powered websites and apps for decades with barely a ripple, though they share many of the same problems as their contemporary cousins. If the ultimate outcome of activists is that more people understand more about how technology works, that is a degree of success.