People across the country are pushing back against new data center projects in their neighborhoods, citing concerns about surging electricity bills, strained water supplies and a lower quality of life, including potential health impacts. In fact, nearly 75% of U.S. voters don’t support the idea of a new data center popping up near their communities, according to a recent poll from Embold Research, WTOP News reports.
“The data center story fits in with the economic anxiety story because people are very concerned that some of the deals that are being offered to data center developers involve processes that will end up with people paying higher bills for their utilities,” Stephen Farnsworth, a political science professor at the University of Mary Washington, told WTOP News. “The concern, above all, is one of economic anxiety, and the data center story is part of that.”
One of the loudest voices that’s pushing back against data centers is environmental activist Erin Brockovich, who says that, in many communities, data centers are being “shoved down their throat.”
“There’s a lot of secrecy and NDAs at a very proposal stage,” Brockovich said on an episode of The Jim Acosta Show. In some cases, Brockovich claims, the data centers are presented to residents as warehouses rather than as the increasingly unpopular resource-gobbling facilities.
What’s the problem with data centers?
AI has infiltrated nearly every aspect of our digital lives, from streaming services to business platforms to popular chat tools like Claude and ChatGPT. Those tools work by processing massive amounts of data on real-life servers — and that requires data centers.
However, data centers have received some high-profile backlash. Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary got his fair share over his proposed $100 billion data center in Utah, which would cover 10,000 acres. While O’Leary claimed detractors had ties to China, protestors say that’s not true.
“The only foreign operative here is a Canadian wealthy person trying to ruin our state,” Utah-based political strategist Gabi Finlayson told Business Insider, referring to O’Leary’s Canadian citizenship.
Brockovich noted to Acosta that “those three elder council men in Utah, they had the power to put a pause and to say we aren’t going to zone or permit anything — that’s their authority — until we have further studies on their impact.”
The pushback comes largely down to resources. Data centers require massive amounts of fresh water, electricity and land. There are currently over 4,700 data centers in the U.S., and a large data center can consume up to five million gallons of water per day, according to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI). That is about the same amount of water used by an entire town of up to 50,000 people.
The strain on the power grid is just as significant. According to the EESI, utilities received requests for more than 700 gigawatts of power connections from data centers in 2025 alone, nearly double U.S. electricity consumption in 2023.
