Working class neighborhoods are resisting data centers at 5 times the rate of wealthy ones

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Working class neighborhoods are resisting data centers at 5 times the rate of wealthy ones<br>And other key insights about the data center protest movement. Plus, Bernie Sanders' AI sovereign wealth fund proposal, an argument against AI consciousness, and more.

Brian Merchant<br>Jun 05, 2026

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The data center protest movement has gone nationwide. From Vermont to Oklahoma to Indiana to California, communities are organizing to halt the tech industry’s drive to build out data centers in their neighborhoods. This week, the New York state legislature passed a one-year moratorium on data center construction and sent it to the governor’s desk where it awaits signature. Chicago’s governor has suspended data center tax breaks. Little has proven as politically galvanizing, or as unifying; the bipartisan issues of 2026 are data center disdain and AI animosity.

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TODAY in BITM: An exclusive report from a data scientist who crunched the numbers on who’s blocking data centers and how successful the protests have been, exactly. Plus, some thoughts on Bernie’s ill-fated AI sovereign wealth fund idea, Ted Chiang’s argument that AI is definitely not conscious, and more.<br>This work is made possible by subscribers who chip in a small sum each month to help me keep the lights on. If you find value in this kind of reporting and analysis, in 100% independent media that holds the AI firms and big tech accountable, consider becoming a paid supporter—and a huge thanks to those who already do. I couldn’t do any of this without you.

If you think I’m exaggerating, Heatmap just published a survey of over 4,000 Americans’ attitudes towards data centers, and whether they would support a project being built near them. The results show that sentiment towards data centers is now wholly and completely underwater. According to the poll, 55% of Americans “strongly” oppose data centers being built in their areas. This is “a record low that reveals a staggering shift in public opinion against the facilities powering the artificial intelligence boom.”

Democrats, people living in rural areas, and young people are especially opposed: 80% of poll respondents aged 18-35 were against data centers. (This tracks with general sentiment trends now, too; it’s been well-established in other polls—and not to mention overwhelming anecdata—that Gen Z is deeply hostile to AI. Look no further than the choruses of boos at AI-boosting commencement speeches this summer.)<br>But, as readers of this newsletter well know, questions about the drivers and nature of this broadening resistance have been raised and debated. Strident arguments made that the data center opposition amounts to reactionary NIMBYism, and that it’s being led by affluent environmentalists. And while the sheer number of Americans opposing data centers presented in the Heatmap survey might offer clues that that’s not the case, there’s nothing in the poll that specifically examines those factors.<br>If you want to argue the contrary, as I and folks like Astra Taylor and Saul Levin, do, that the data center opposition is grounded in working class politics, it helps to have good data. And this is where it helps to have readers who happen to be data scientists. After I published my story about the data center rebellion, which relied on accounts from my own first-hand reporting and a survey of news reports from across the country, the researcher Geoff Holtzman reached out to share the results of his own analysis of the movement, with an eye towards who was really doing the protesting.<br>Holtzman describes himself as “a philosopher and data scientist who writes about quantitative propaganda and scientistic rhetoric,” and he often does so at his science & Power newsletter. His peer-reviewed work has been published in places like the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and The American Journal of Bioethics. He had also heard the oft-repeated suggestion that the data center protest movement was led by wealthy, NIMBY folks, so he set out to investigate. He analyzed a dataset of current and proposed data center projects alongside US census data1 and has graciously offered to share the results in an exclusive here. He came to at least three stark conclusions:<br>1. The poorest neighborhoods resisted data centers at nearly five times the rate of the wealthiest (19.0% vs. 3.8%)

Figure note: These quartiles are calculated just for the census tracts in the data center dataset; they’re not national quartiles.<br>“The highest rate of resistance comes from neighborhoods with a median income of between $8,000 and $72,000,” Holtzman notes. “The lowest rate of resistance is in neighborhoods where the average household makes between $133k and $250k per year.”<br>This flies directly in the face of the notion that data center opposition is led by well-off Patagonia-clad NIMBYs; neighborhoods...