America’s data-centre backlash puts the AI boom at risk
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Business | Do not compute<br>America’s data-centre backlash puts the AI boom at risk<br>Opposition is spreading across the country<br>Share
Illustration: Janne Iivonen
Jun 23rd 2026|New Albany, Ohio|10 min read
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FROM THE top of the slide, which curves into a little backyard pool, the view as recently as April would have been of lush Ohio farmland, dense forest and pretty clapboard houses. Now it is of six giant weatherproof tents of the type more commonly used by the military to house fighter jets or by aid organisers in disaster zones. These will soon contain perhaps $30bn-worth of cutting-edge semiconductors. Along with a clutch of gas turbines to provide power, they occupy a site the size of an airport terminal. If Meta, the site’s owner, stays on track to bring its “Prometheus” data centre online in 2026, it will dedicate an entire gigawatt (GW) of power—the amount needed to power as many as 1m homes, or roughly the output of a large nuclear reactor—to artificial intelligence.<br>The mammoth data centres of the future, capable of training frontier ai models in 2030, will not be in the urban clusters in Virginia or California that currently house most of America’s server farms, but in the emerging “Silicon Heartland” of Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio, or in southern states like Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. Vast sums of capital—as much as $750bn by Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle, plus billions more by data-centre specialists like CoreWeave and real-estate developers bankrolled by Wall Street—are being ploughed into investments in these places. An estimated $3trn will go into AI data centres globally between 2026 and 2030, according to Moody’s, an information provider. Much of that is earmarked for America. The money will expand total AI computing capacity, measured in the amount of power consumed by data centres, from just under 12GW in America currently to as much as five times that amount by the end of the decade (see map). And almost everywhere across the country, people of all political stripes are furious about it.<br>Map: The Economist<br>There is plenty to dislike: the ugliness of the buildings; the roar of generators and cooling systems; the skeleton army of new transmission towers criss-crossing the landscape; the fear of contaminated water. Surveys suggest that Americans would sooner live next to a nuclear plant than a data centre. The issue has surged in salience. Gubernatorial candidates facing voters in November are routinely quizzed on where they stand.<br>Already local activists are claiming scalps. At least 20 data-centre projects worth $42bn, which would have used 3.5GW of power, were cancelled in the first three months of 2026 after local pushback; $85bn-worth of projects have been cancelled over the past three years, including small centres proposed by Amazon and Meta. Residents of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, are resisting Google’s plans to build one there. Several townships in Michigan have passed moratoriums after OpenAI broke ground on a project in Saline despite local opposition.
Yet the resistance is more than simple NIMBYism. In April a survey by Pew Research, a pollster, found that Americans who have merely heard of data centres are just as opposed to them as those who live within five miles of one. Philosophers have long worried that a rogue ai—fixated on a singular goal, like maximising the production of paperclips—would doom humanity by hoovering up all its resources, paving the earth with servers and rendering the planet uninhabitable. Sam Altman of OpenAI and Dario Amodei of Anthropic have spent years warning that AI will throw most people out of work or be turned to mass harm. Now the infrastructure they need is arriving on people’s doorsteps, and it looks like something out of a war zone. Residents across America are standing up in council meetings begging for projects to be axed in the hope of slowing the technology’s progress. Will they succeed?<br>That question is not just on the mind of the AI industry. “We need to stay a ways ahead of China,” says Chris Wright, America’s energy secretary, in an interview with The Economist. Ensuring America leads in artificial intelligence is “the overriding goal” of his tenure, he says. “We’ve got to enable these data centres to get permitted and built and [have] turned on power.”<br>Currently perhaps 1-2GW of...