‘Water is for people!’: Voters across party lines push back against data centers ahead of the midterms

In Santa Teresa, a town in the remote New Mexico desert, a group of residents rises up during a town council meeting, holding signs painted with marker pens: “We don’t want data centers! Water is for humans, not data centers!” In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a similar scene unfolds: a group of local residents interrupts deliberations in the state legislature carrying banners that read: “We don’t want to be a data center city.” In Memphis, the city where Elvis Presley was born, a recent meeting of the county board of supervisors to consider a possible slowdown in the construction of new data centers ended in a fistfight between supporters of the tech facilities and their opponents.

With slight variations — in some places the main concern is noise; in others, air pollution; elsewhere, the impact on electricity bills — these scenes of opposition to the construction of gigantic data centers are playing out across the United States, from Virginia to California.

These facilities, which house the equipment and data needed to keep the internet and artificial intelligence running, started out a couple of decades ago as buildings roughly the size of a Walmart. Now they can be larger than all of Manhattan and have become one of the major issues in the midterm elections on November 3.

Those elections, which will determine control of the U.S. Congress, will be the first in which the data centers powering AI have become the most visible symbol of public suspicions about the technology and the plutocrats developing it.

Democrats and Republicans, united against data centers

Voter opposition has made its way into politics. Twenty states, ranging from staunchly Democratic to deeply Republican, have approved measures to pause or ban the construction of data centers. Another seven have measures pending.

Texas, one of the states with the highest concentration of data centers, where Republican Governor Greg Abbott had vowed to make the state the “epicenter of AI development,” is among those that have slammed on the brakes amid a wave of polls suggesting a shift among Texas voters toward the Democrats.

The battle over data centers has become a key issue in Ohio, where they are deeply unpopular. In the state, former Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown and incumbent Republican Senator John Husted are locked in a race for a seat that could determine which party controls the Senate in Washington. While 63% of Ohio voters oppose data centers, Brown repeatedly highlights his opponent’s support for them. Polls give the Democrat a narrow lead in the contest.

In this year’s midterm elections, campaigns and outside groups backing candidates have spent more than $53 million on advertisements mentioning data centers.

“Big companies have come before, take what they wanted and left us with their mess to clean up. Now it’s data centers,” warns an ad by Democratic congressional candidate Paige Cognetti airing in Pennsylvania’s 8th district, where the race is tied.

Her Republican opponent, Rob Bresnahan, has also targeted the industry in his campaign ads. In one of them, he says: “To big data, we’re just land and dollar signs.”

Despite public opposition, U.S. President Donald Trump has stubbornly maintained his support for data centers and, by extension, artificial intelligence. At a recent rally in Ohio, Trump doubled down: “We want them.” “There’s so much money to be made for Ohio. You can’t just turn them off. They’ll go to China.”

Giant structures as large as villages

The source of this social and political backlash lies in the sheer scale of the infrastructure. Gigantic windowless structures, as large as several football fields, that devour electricity (to power their systems) and water (to cool them) have sprung up across rural and suburban areas nationwide.

Some are as large as villages: Hyperion, Meta’s megacenter in rural Louisiana, covers 3.5 square miles, the equivalent of more than 1,260 football fields. The Stratos Project in Utah was planned to be as large as New York’s Manhattan, though opposition has forced a revision of those plans.

These facilities store the vast and ever-growing volumes of data that technology giants need to keep their services running, from public transit fare readers to satellite networks. In the United States, 1,333 data centers are already in operation, while another 2,359 are in the planning or construction stages, according to data from market intelligence firm Cleanview.

Their importance to the economy is beyond dispute. Construction of data centers, along with the infrastructure and equipment needed to run them, is expected to account for $10.3 trillion in spending between 2025 and 2032, equivalent to an average of 3.63% of U.S. GDP per year, according to calculations by Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh of Columbia University, author of the study Financing the AI Buildout.

According to Van Nieuwerburgh, “the projected buildout would be larger relative to the economy than the major U.S. canal, railroad, electrification, highway, and telecommunications investment booms.”

Owners of these centers, and the companies that use the data, argue that these massive structures are also essential to everyday life. Without them, the internet wouldn’t work. Nor would streaming platforms, social media apps or online shopping systems. They also contend that measures have been taken to address the problems associated with the first generations of data centers, and that significant progress has been made in reducing both water consumption and noise pollution.

Trump, courted by the tech giants, has become one of their staunchest defenders. He says building these colossal centers brings wealth to the communities where they are located, creates jobs and helps the United States advance in its race with China to lead in artificial intelligence. Communities that reject them, he says, risk ending up “backwards and poor.”

Widespread opposition

However, Trump’s staunch defense is running up against widespread public opposition to data centers in the United States. That opposition has surged in recent months.

According to a study by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, three in five adults (61%) opposed the construction of data centers in their neighborhoods as of August, a 12-percentage-point increase from a previous survey conducted in February and March. Only 14% said they supported such developments.

Having a positive view of AI does not necessarily mean supporting the infrastructure it requires. According to the study, 60% of regular AI users oppose data centers.

“Optimism [about artificial intelligence] has very clear limits and fades when privacy, employment effects or whether a data center should be built in the neighborhood come up. Even heavy users of AI seem worried about these very specific issues,” says Matthew Levendusky, a professor at the Annenberg Public Policy Center.

Opposition is evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. Even among the most ardent Trump supporters, resistance to data centers is common: 45% of those voters oppose them, according to a poll by political analysis firm The Cook Report.

The objections are numerous. Some are environmental. In January, Bloom Energy estimated that U.S. electricity demand would nearly double between 2025 and 2028, rising from 80 to 150 gigawatts because of data centers. In just three years, that would amount to an increase equivalent to the electricity consumption of all of Spain. In Virginia, home to nearly 600 data centers, those facilities accounted for 40% of electricity use in 2024, according to a Bloomberg News analysis. Three-quarters of Virginia voters blame data centers for the state’s rising electricity bills.

Water consumption is another concern. A single data center can use nearly 19 million liters of water per day just to cool its equipment, enough to supply about 16,000 average households. The issue is particularly acute in arid states such as Arizona and New Mexico.

Air pollution is another frequent complaint. Because data centers operate around the clock, operators often install fossil-fuel-powered backup generators that kick in during power outages or, in some cases, where the electricity grid has not yet reached the site, as is the case at some facilities in Virginia.

Another concern is job creation. While construction can generate hundreds of temporary jobs, critics argue that once a facility is completed, it requires only a small workforce to operate. Others question how long some of these centers will remain in use before becoming obsolete.

A recurring grievance is the lack of transparency. Numerous local governments have signed nondisclosure agreements that prevent the release of key project details. Many communities complain that they were never properly consulted before construction began on a vast, intrusive and unattractive facility in their neighborhood.

At a meeting of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors, where the largest concentration of Virginia data centers is located, resident Patricia Gallardo, whose community is slated to host one of the complexes, complained about confusion over the scale of the project.

“Residents can’t tell what’s actually approved,” she told a local newspaper. Gallardo demanded “a public answer to a simple question: What actually was approved, and is that still the project? Our neighborhood deserves to know exactly what planned next door.”

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition