Bad Reasons and Worse Reasons to Hate Data Centers
It's not existential dread about the internet.
It's a tough time to be a data center. These buildings—which to be clear, are a vital part of the modern tech-based economy and will only grow in importance as the AI boom continues—have suffered a complete collapse in overall public support.
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Falling approval for data centers is rapid and sudden. A poll from Heatmap News found significant erosion over the course of the last year.
"It's a swift, massive shift in U.S. public opinion on a scale that I wouldn't have once thought possible," writes Robinson Meyer of Heatmap.
This shift is happening in spite of the fact that data centers are economic boons to their neighbors. They generate so much money for Loudoun County, Virginia, for example, that the local government was able to cut everybody else's property taxes. Yet people all over the country are saying they don't want to live next to them, and political figures are listening. Both Republican and Democratic state officials have announced efforts to slow down the approval processes for new construction—over the objections of President Donald Trump, who remains extremely supportive of data centers and frequently touts their benefits. For once, it's Trump who seems out of step with a growing left-right populist backlash against some economic consensus.
But the question remains: Why? Why are people so furious about buildings?
One answer, proposed by my friend Nick Clairmont, seized upon by a large number of commentators on X, is that people are not really mad about data centers per se: Instead, the data centers are a convenient scapegoat for the greater evil of the internet itself.
I think the data center backlash is at a deeper cultural level the expression of people recognizing that the internet is on net simply Bad. https://t.co/qOT3h3LFSG
— Nick Clairmont (@NickClairmont1) August 19, 2026
Clairmont analogizes this to the public opposition to nuclear energy, which was really about existential fear of nuclear destruction. The comparison drew some criticism, with The Washington Post's Damir Marusic pointing out that people don't seem to agree the internet is bad for them, at least as far as consumer preferences go. (Clairmont responded that drug addicts have trouble recognizing that drugs are bad for them.)
So in one sense we are just re-litigating the debate I wrote about in my book Tech Panic: Why We Shouldn't Fear Facebook and Future. In that book, I mostly covered elite media and policymakers' sudden opposition to social media, rather than the internet specifically. I don't think the proposition the internet itself is bad is actually up for debate: Is it really possible to argue that human beings were better off without it? The slightly more sophisticated version of this argument is that the internet has created forms of communication that are addictive and polarizing and brain-rotting, and these make people unhappy even though they are addicted to them.
Still, it's a curious argument for people who are themselves internet commentators to adopt: Saagar Enjeti, the co-host of the YouTube news show Breaking Points, is particularly impressed by it—even though he owes his entire career to online speech platforms. Presumably he does not believe that Breaking Points' 2 million subscribers would be better off without it.
In any case, the idea that this is why people don't like data centers strikes me as implausible, since the opposition to data centers frequently cites misguided but tangible criticisms like electricity costs, water usage, and noise. I suppose it's possible that these criticisms are manifestations of some deeper existential dread, but is that likely?
It seems more likely—to me, anyway—that people are irritated about new construction and are falling for popular but incorrect talking points about how data centers are gobbling up resources. (This is untrue: See Christian Britschgi's essential Reason cover story on the joy of data centers.) Advocates for building new data centers need to do a better job explaining to the public that they create huge amounts of value, for the country overall as well as the communities where they're built.
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