Editors at National Review Online explore the growing popular opposition to data centers.
Anti-data-center sentiment is sweeping the nation, and, this being an election year, politicians of both parties are jumping to indulge it. In blue New York, Governor Kathy Hochul has signed an executive order that enacts the country’s first moratorium on “hyperscaler” installations. In purple Pennsylvania, Governor Josh Shapiro has reversed his previously bullish position on data centers, taken to describing their developers as “bullies” and “speculators,” and established what he proudly describes as the “strictest guardrails in the nation.” In red Texas, Governor Greg Abbott has halted all approvals for new data centers, pending the results of a comprehensive state audit that will take months to complete. By the end of the year, one would expect skepticism — if not hostility — to be the default mode in all 50 states.
The politics surrounding data centers have certainly changed. A year ago, most Americans were ambivalent on the question. Today, polls consistently show that a supermajority of voters is opposed to the construction of new facilities near their homes and, more broadly, that the very term “data center” has become toxic. The reasons for this toxicity vary — some respondents cite water usage, others electricity prices, environmental concerns, and noise pollution — but the message does not. Per Gallup, only 7 percent of Americans “strongly favor” the construction of a data center in their area.
Not all of these concerns are unfounded. There is, for example, no reason that taxpayers should provide subsidies to the corporations that are building data centers, or that eminent domain should be used. And while most of the concerns about noise or pollution are unfounded, it is entirely legitimate for the citizenry to demand sensible zoning regulations in the same manner as it would elsewhere. Still, the sheer scale of the opposition — and the speed with which it has coalesced — is redolent of a moral panic akin to those that attended the introduction of nuclear power or fracking or 5G. Bluntly put, the vast majority of the sensationalist claims that are made about data centers are nonsense.
