Digging Into the Pushback Against Data Centers | American Enterprise Institute
The Information reports that resistance to new data centers by local governments—pushback driven by strong public opposition— “has accelerated this summer, a warning sign for big AI companies such as Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI that are pinning their compute ambitions on data center expansion.”
There are now “more than 500 active data center bans” in place around the country, according to the the tech publication, which then illustrates the point:
Might the AI infrastructure buildout cost a bit more and happen a bit more slowly than otherwise due to all these various pauses and bans? Perhaps—though I would note that The New York Times estimates that hyperscalers Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft are expected to spend $1.5 trillion building data centers over the next two years.
If there’s lots of economic value in building lots and lots of these server-stuffed warehouses, then lots and lots are probably going to get built somewhere. The big long-term question: Can businesses and consumers generate enough value from AI—through greater efficiency, new products, or new sources of revenue—to justify the massive and ongoing investment by AI companies and hyperscalers? It remains an open, and tantalizing, question.
As economist Erik Brynjolfsson explained in a recent podcast chat with me, powerful new technologies don’t automatically generate productivity gains. Companies have to redesign workflows and invest in new worker skills. If that transformation is successful, there will be lots of demand for the AI services powered by data centers. If it doesn’t, NIMBY protests will be the least of the industry’s problems.
Regarding the opposition itself, I place it in two buckets. In the first, there are regular people who’ve doomscrolled about the issue and have a basically fact-light take on issues such as electricity prices and water usage. For a fact-filled perspective on those and related data center issues, I suggest checking out two of my recent podcasts: one with Shuting Pomerleau, the director of energy and environmental policy at the American Action Forum, and the other with AI researcher Andy Masley.
In the second bucket, there’s the activist class. And in this group, at least some are intent on applying the apocalyptic framework and cultural imagery that characterized the most extreme parts of the 21st century climate movement. The following is from “Frontier Panic,” a wonderful Palladium magazine piece by Stephanie Wakefield, a professor of urban planning and environmental design at Florida Atlantic University:
In the 2010s, an eschatological imaginary of climate crisis took shape through visions of extinction, submerged cities, and looming disaster. The Anthropocene gave this imaginary an epochal name, while across academia, art, and media, social-ecological turmoil became the new normal… Environmentalism in its older sense of clean air and water was displaced by a broader moral-political imaginary organized around climate chaos, proper human conduct, and new claims to govern in the name of humanity’s safety. In 2026, climate change has begun to recede from cultural centrality, but the same logic of technologically-induced doom is reassembling around AI.
If you’re coming to the data center debate from that anti-AI, anti-material progress, anti-tecnocapitalist perspective, you’re probably not open to discussion about how to manage externalities. One example is Meta’s recently announced $1 billion “Future Is For Everyone Fund” to directly support the communities around data centers. And Goldman Sachs recently generated the following graphic showing all sorts of remedies for data-center downsides:
And yet that is the story of technological progress. It’s a “fundamentally a dis-equilibrating process,” as Nobel laureate economist Joel Mokyr has put it. “Whenever a technological solution is found for some human need, it creates a new problem. … Each solution perturbs some other component in the system and sows the seed of more needs; the ‘demand’ for new technology is thus self-sustaining.”
And on it goes, to great success as this chart from World in Data shows:
