Tech companies dealing with data center protests locally are fighting a losing battle: Only 8% of opponents actually live near one

Tech giants jostling with small-town opposition as they embark on their massive data center buildout plans risk forgetting a crucial detail: disdain for data centers, and the AI backlash at large, has gone national. Data center opposition is no longer contained to the individual towns and counties playing host to new construction, according to findings from a survey published Monday by Milltown Partners, a global advisory firm. According to the report, only 8% of Americans who say they oppose data centers actually live near one, suggesting an even steeper mountain to climb for AI companies racing to get the U.S. public on its side. Public opposition has thrown a wrench into the AI industry’s sweeping data center construction plans. The largest U.S. tech companies have allocated a record $725 billion in capital expenditure for this year, the vast majority of which is earmarked for data centers—the massive server farms used to train, deploy, and maintain AI models. Opponents have themselves heard, however. In the first quarter of 2026, public backlash delayed or blocked at least 75 data center projects nationwide, worth a cumulative $130 billion, according to the Data Center Watch Initiative, a monitoring project. That was not far off from the total losses companies incurred from blocked projects in all of 2025, and suggested a scale of discontent going well beyond the relatively small clusters where data centers are actually being built. “Something that has changed right now is that now we have people that are against data centers even though they don’t have a data center in their backyard, because they see data centers as the embodiment of AI,” Miquel Vila, lead analyst at the Data Center Watch, told Fortune. “What they oppose is AI,” he said. “They consider that stopping data centers is the way to stop AI development.” Not to be outdone, politicians have seized on souring sentiment to descend on data centers, with local officials proposing more than 120 morat