Frontier AI labs are convinced that scaling up computation is the path to improving artificial intelligence, and they’ve put their money where their mouths are, to the tune of trillions of dollars of planned data center projects.

The rest of us? Surveys of public opinion say that more than 60% of Americans favor limiting new data centers, particularly in their communities. And the longest-running surveys show that sentiment is growing fast. Data center projects worth $68 billion were disrupted by local opponents in the second quarter of 2026, according to the trackers at Data Center Watch.

AI companies and their investors have a hard time reconciling the growing demand for their products with opposition to the key infrastructure behind it. Some answers from the industry, like the idea that data center opposition is a product of secretive Chinese meddling, don’t really 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, aren’t trying to measure the empirical impact of data centers, but instead want to understand the way 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,” Maia Woluchem, a program director at Data & Society who co-authored the report, said.

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 won’t 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, pointing to the Data Center Coalition, a trade group that has set up websites like “Pennsylvania Connects” to boost projects and spent at least $19,000 lobbying the state government last year.

In spite of the boosterism, resistance has grown, and in unlikely ways. The researchers said they were surprised by the diversity of the opposition to these projects, calling it not 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, pointing to a variety of sources of opposition: Sometimes it is simply folks who are against development — classic NIMBYs — but the coalition grows from there. There are people who dislike AI as a technology and the corporate interests behind it, environmental groups concerned about water usage and energy-related emissions, and those with more nebulous concerns about public health.

What’s striking, though, is how often material interests are top of mind. People are concerned that data center electrical usage will affect their own power bills, worried that data centers will drive down property values, or are upset by the playbook that data center builders use to get their way — tactics such as 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 notes. “And my council person, who I have previously had a relationship with, now won’t talk to me about this sort of thing.”

It’s this patchwork quilt of motivations for anti-data center activism that presents such a challenge for the AI industry: There’s no simple way to alleviate this raft of concerns. The problem is trust, which has already deviled the industry.

“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.”