Three-quarters of Americans would oppose a data center near their home, new polling finds

Three-quarters of Americans say they would oppose a new data center being built near where they live, and more than six in 10 say they would strongly oppose it, according to a Heatmap Pro poll released August 20. The survey of 2,045 registered voters was conducted by Embold Research from August 8 to 13 through text-to-web responses, covering all 50 states and Washington, D.C., with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.3 percentage points.

Heatmap has asked the same question four times in the past 12 months without changing its wording. In August 2025, respondents were roughly evenly divided, with about 43 percent in support and 42 percent opposed. By February, 51 percent said they would oppose a data center and 48 percent said they would support it or were unsure. In May, seven in 10 were opposed and 55 percent were strongly opposed. The share saying they would strongly support a data center in their area fell from 13 percent last August to 4 percent now.

Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s founding executive editor, wrote that Americans have moved 33 points against data centers over that period and that the shift runs across age, gender, income, party identification and the rural-urban divide. By his account the facilities are 43 points underwater with Republicans, 65 points underwater with independents and 75 points underwater with Democrats. Among rural voters, the figure is 63 points. “If you can think of a cohort of Americans, there’s a good chance they wouldn’t welcome a data center in their area,” Meyer wrote.

Heatmap Pro counts more than 530 counties and municipalities that have restricted or banned construction of the facilities nationwide. “There’s literally not a conversation that I have, not a stop that I make, where data centers and AI don’t come up,” Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan, said earlier this summer.

Good Jobs First, which tracks state subsidy policy, counted at least 12 in-session states with filed data center moratorium bills as of March 9. Georgia’s HB 1012 would bar cities and counties from issuing permits for new data centers until March 1, 2027. Oklahoma’s SB 1488 would halt new construction until November 1, 2029, while the state Corporation Commission studies effects on water supply, utility rates, property values and siting. New Hampshire’s HB 1265 would stop construction statewide for one year and create a legislative committee on environmental impacts. Vermont’s S.205 as introduced would run a moratorium on AI data centers through July 1, 2030.

New York’s legislature passed the Responsible Data Center Development Act, S10642, in June, and the bill has not been enacted. Governor Kathy Hochul instead issued Executive Order 62 on July 14, pausing state environmental permits for up to a year while the Department of Environmental Conservation prepares a generic environmental impact statement. Under the order the department will not issue discretionary permits that were not already deemed complete. “New York will lead the way in creating the strongest standards in the nation for data center development, ensuring that when companies succeed because of New York, New Yorkers succeed too,” Hochul said.

Who pays to connect the facilities to the grid is one thread running through the state bills. An analysis published by the Union of Concerned Scientists in September 2025 identified 130 transmission projects approved in 2024 in the seven-state PJM region for the sole purpose of connecting private data centers, at a combined cost of about $4.3 billion. More than 95 percent of that was rolled into general transmission charges recovered from all retail customers rather than billed to the company requesting the connection. Virginia accounted for roughly $1.9 billion of the total, Ohio $1.3 billion, Pennsylvania $491.7 million, Illinois $239 million, West Virginia $215.8 million, Maryland $107.5 million and New Jersey $14.5 million.

“The big tech companies rushing to build out massive data centers are worth trillions of dollars, yet they’re successfully exploiting an outdated regulatory process to pawn billions of dollars of costs off on families,” said Mike Jacobs, a senior energy manager at the group, who conducted the analysis.

Representative Josh Riley of New York introduced federal legislation on August 20 called the Fair Data Act, which would require data center developers and operators to pay for the power generation, transmission and distribution upgrades their facilities need rather than passing those costs to ratepayers. Speaking in West Oneonta, Riley said his parents used to balance the household budget at the kitchen table with envelopes for each line item. “Today, too many Oneontans, too many upstate New Yorkers are finding it harder and harder to fill those envelopes,” he said, according to WBNG.

Residents at the event described their own bills. “There are already approximately 135 data centers in the state of New York and their impacts are being felt statewide, most immediately in our utility bills,” said Geoff Doyle, a Town of Oneonta resident. “In October of 2025, my NYSEG bill here at this house was $250.13. Last month, in July of 2026, it was $528.57.” Mark Pauquette, who lives in the City of Oneonta, said his bills had run between $50 and $100 over the past decade and had not fallen below $200 in the summer months for the past two years. Will Rivera, the Town of Oneonta supervisor, said the rates are “devastating to our community and the affordability of all New Yorkers.” More than 700 residents signed a local petition supporting a ban on data centers in the town.

Good Jobs First also points to state revenue. It cites Georgia estimating $2.5 billion in losses to data center tax breaks in a single year, Virginia $1.6 billion and Texas $1 billion, and notes that sales tax exemptions on servers and equipment grow as the builds get larger. Liz Moran, a New York policy advocate at Earthjustice, said when the New York bill passed that one in four New Yorkers already struggle with energy affordability.

The Union of Concerned Scientists analysis called on state and federal regulators to require that connection costs be assigned to the customer that causes them, rather than recovered from every other customer on the system.