Frontier AI labs believe that scaling up computation is the path to improving artificial intelligence, and they have put their money where their mouths are—trillions of dollars in planned data center projects.
The rest of us? Surveys of public opinion show that more than 60% of Americans favor limiting new data centers, particularly in their own communities. The longest-running surveys indicate that this sentiment is growing rapidly. According to Data Center Watch, data center projects worth $68 billion were disrupted by local opponents in the second quarter of 2026 alone.
AI companies and their investors struggle to reconcile the growing demand for their products with opposition to the key infrastructure behind it. Some industry explanations—such as the idea that data center opposition is the product of secretive Chinese meddling—do not 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, are not trying to measure the empirical impact of data centers. Instead, they want to understand how people experience the debate over their construction.
“One of the strengths of ethnography and doing research on the ground for an extended period of time is piercing the bubble of AI hype,” Livia Garofalo, a Data & Society researcher, told TechCrunch. “People are making sense of the dissonances between AI being the next inevitable industrial revolution, and fears about AI.”
When the authors began their work, data centers were being pitched as key to economic development. 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.
“People in Pennsylvania especially have incredible experience with industrial change, have deep lineages of industrial trauma, enough to sniff when things don’t feel right to them,” said Maia Woluchem, a program director at Data & Society who co-authored the report.
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 will not be major sources of employment, unions see the projects as a lifeline to rebuild their ranks.
There’s an influence campaign, alright
In contrast to the industry’s fears of foreign influence, the researchers describe the work of AI boosters as a kind of propaganda campaign. They point to the Data Center Coalition, a trade group that has—
via TechCrunch AI