Transmission // 19
Nobody wants it next door
2 min
Seven in ten Americans oppose a data centre near them. The AI buildout has hit the one constraint capital cannot route around — the people who live where the land is cheap.
The compute story has been told as a chip story, then a power story. It is becoming a zoning story, and that is the version that actually stops buildings from going up.
Gallup polled 1,000 adults across all fifty states between 2 and 18 March 2026 and found that seven in ten Americans oppose an AI data centre being built in their local area, including 48% opposed strongly. That is not a polarised number. There is no partisan coalition to assemble against it, because there is no other side.
What the objections actually are
Analyses of contested projects put water first — cited in more than 40% of disputes — ahead of electricity prices, with noise a consistent third. Water is a good organising issue precisely because it is legible: a county knows what its aquifer does, and a facility either draws from it or does not.
Electricity is the one with teeth for people who never see the building. PJM capacity prices rose sharply over two years with data centres driving most of the increase, and the bill arrives in mailboxes across the mid-Atlantic and Midwest for households that were never consulted about anything.
The moratorium wave
- Two Montgomery County (MD) council committees advanced an 18-month moratorium on new facilities in July.
- New York legislators introduced a bill in February to halt permits for facilities above 20 megawatts for at least three years.
- Texas moved in August to condition new projects on not drawing community water or straining the grid — in a state that had been the least likely place on the map to slow anything down.
Brookings is right that moratoriums are not a substitute for oversight: a pause defers a decision rather than making one. But a pause is what a community reaches for when it has no other instrument, and the reason it has no other instrument is that the approval process was designed for warehouses.
The read
An industry that has spent three years describing itself as inevitable is discovering the one veto that capital cannot route around: a county board. Every gigawatt of the buildout has to land in somebody’s township, and the townships have started saying no.
The intelligence may be artificial. The substation is not.