Anyone can come up with a reason to oppose building data centers

A new ethnographic study from the nonprofit Data & Society reveals that opposition to AI data centers in Pennsylvania is driven not by foreign influence or mere NIMBYism, but by deep-seated industrial memory, material concerns, and a collapse in trust. The findings land at a difficult moment for an industry betting trillions of dollars on new data center projects while public resistance keeps growing.

A Ground-Level Look at the Backlash

Frontier AI labs remain convinced that scaling up compute is the route to better AI, backing that belief with trillions of dollars in planned data center infrastructure. The public is far less enthusiastic: surveys show more than 60% of Americans favor limiting new data centers, especially in their own communities, and that sentiment has been rising steadily. Data Center Watch trackers report that projects worth $68 billion were disrupted by local opposition in the second quarter of 2026.

Some in the industry have blamed secretive Chinese interference for the pushback — an explanation that doesn't hold up well. The Data & Society report, based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork with 44 Pennsylvanians interviewed between 2024 and 2026, takes a different approach. Rather than measuring data centers' empirical impact, the researchers set out 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."

The "Inevitability" Message Backfires

When the research began, data centers were being sold as engines of 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 — a sign that someone saw the writing on the wall.

The authors argue the industry's framing of AI as "inevitable" has gone over badly with residents. Pennsylvania's history of coal mining, early oil drilling, steel manufacturing, and fracking has left people wary of utopian industrial promises.

"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.

Labor unions remain perhaps the strongest source of support, viewing potential jobs as a lifeline for rebuilding membership — even while acknowledging the facilities won't be major employers once built.

A "Post-Partisan" Coalition Takes Shape

Far from the foreign-influence narrative, the researchers describe AI boosters as running their own influence campaign. They point to the Data Center Coalition, a trade group behind websites like "Pennsylvania Connects" that promote projects, and which spent at least $19,000 lobbying the state government last year.

Meanwhile, opposition has grown in unexpected ways. The researchers were struck by the diversity of the resistance, describing it not as bipartisan but "post-partisan." "We don't want to romanticize that everyone is having this kumbaya moment, [but AI is] forcing people to be in conversation together about futures that they want and presents that they want … these fights are incredibly organic," Woluchem said. The coalition ranges from classic NIMBYs opposed to any development, to people wary of AI as a technology and the corporate interests behind it, environmental groups worried about water use and energy emissions, and residents with vaguer public health concerns.

What stands out most is how often material interests dominate. People fear data centers' electricity demand will raise their own power bills, depress property values, or that developers are stacking the deck — tactics like asking local officials to sign non-disclosure agreements.

"There is a significant group of people who are just really clued into their town hall meetings and might notice that wow, a representative from Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, showed up here, or a data center developer showed up at my community meeting …that's a little odd," Woluchem noted. "And my council person, who I have previously had a relationship with, now won't talk to me about this sort of thing."

Trust Is the Core Problem

This patchwork of motivations is what makes the backlash so hard for the AI industry to address — there is no single concern to fix. At its heart lies a trust deficit that has already troubled the sector.

"It is an intimate and relational trust that is now being inserted in people's lives by these industries," Garofalo said. "I'm alone in my house, and I'm talking to a chatbot, and I'm feeling loved and cared for, and yet I know that this is a commodity, and I know I'm being extracted upon."

With more projects heading to communities like those in Pennsylvania, how the industry rebuilds local trust — if it can — may shape the pace of AI infrastructure buildout for years to come.

Meta description: A new Data & Society study of 44 Pennsylvanians shows AI data center opposition stems from industrial memory, material worries, and lost trust — not foreign meddling.

Tags: AI data centers, Data & Society, Pennsylvania, public opposition, AI infrastructure

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