Jeffrey M. Jones, Gallup:
Seven in 10 Americans oppose constructing data centers for
artificial intelligence in their local area, including nearly
half, 48%, who are strongly opposed. Barely a quarter favor these
projects, with 7% strongly in favor. […]The data center question parallels the wording Gallup uses to ask
about local nuclear power plant construction. In the same
March survey, 53% of Americans say they oppose building a nuclear
energy plant in their area, far less than the 71% opposed to data
center construction. Since Gallup first asked the nuclear power
plant question in 2001, the high point in opposition has been 63%.
It’s hard to overstate how unpopular this polling paints AI data centers. It’s just an absolute messaging and marketing disaster for the entire tech industry. Tellingly, the anti-AI-data-center sentiment is bipartisan:
There are partisan differences, but only in slight degree. A savvy politician or party can grasp on this issue and carve out a broadly bipartisan anti-data-center, anti-AI message. US politics is so polarized in today’s era that the salience of this issue will not go unnoticed. The only thing the hyperscalars have on their side is money, but that fact is a significant factor in the general resentment toward the entire industry.
To that point, Ben Thompson suggests (in today’s subscriber-only Stratechery column) that the industry simply pay residents:
Instead, the most obvious solution is the most crass: simply start
giving people money. If data centers are a resource for our AI
future, then start paying people for that resource. If that data
center up the road weren’t sold to my neighbors based on amorphous
tax benefits that my local government may or may not spend
appropriately, but rather were to result in a check in the mailbox
every year, I suspect you could get a lot more people on board!Just to put some numbers on this, the data center up the road was
expected to be 1.6 GW, which could generate around $3 billion in
annual operator revenue. DeForest, the village it was to be built
in, has around 11,500 people. You could pay every person in
DeForest $10,000 a year for 3.8% of annual revenue grossed by the
data center — I bet that proposal would have been approved, and I
bet that the operator could very easily pass those costs on to the
actual data center users (it also highlights how relatively
pathetic QTS’s $50 million commitment was).I do get how ridiculous this sounds, but ridiculous is how we do
things in America.
After mulling the idea for a bit this morning, I’d say it’s unusual, but not ridiculous. Money talks.
