Banning data centers would blow up the U.S. economy
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Banning data centers would blow up the U.S. economy<br>There's one thing keeping us afloat right now, and people want to get rid of it.
Noah Smith<br>Aug 08, 2026<br>∙ Paid
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Photo by Chad Davis via Wikimedia Commons<br>My last post mentioned some of the more extreme cultural stances of Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong. Hong’s defenders complained that the cultural issues were getting far too much exposure, and that pundits should instead be focusing on her main issue: a pause on data center construction.
kang@jaycaspiankang
huh? Francesca Hong dropped out of college and ran a failing restaurant lol. She's running on data centers, not woke. The establishment's derangement on her is pretty pretty telling.
Also, riddle me this: If she sucks so much why is she running away with this primary?
David Axelrod @davidaxelrod
It would be good for @AbdulElSayed if Francesca Hong loses her bid to become the Democratic nominee in Wisconsin next week.<br>He is a serious person. She is a font of zany liberal, faculty lounge exotica.<br>But the Rs, hoping to deflect attention from an unpopular @POTUS who hangs
3:57 PM · Aug 6, 2026 · 180K Views
104 Replies · 110 Reposts · 1.4K Likes
It’s pretty amazing that a pause on data center construction has become such a consensus, middle-of-the-road issue stance that it’s the thing Hong’s supporters would rather talk about! But it’s true. Poll after poll shows that Americans are decisively opposed to data center construction in their area, and the issue is becoming more lopsided by the day:<br>An August 2025 survey conducted by Embold Research for Heatmap News…found that 43% of Americans said they would support the construction of a data center near them, while 42% were opposed…The latest survey, conducted last month, found a complete collapse among supporters: Today, just 21% said they support data center construction near them, while 71% are opposed — including 55% who say they are strongly opposed…<br>A Gallup poll released in May showed the share of Americans who oppose the construction of data centers in their area, 71%, was higher than the zenith of the opposition to the construction of nuclear power plants, which topped out at 63% in 2001…A survey from Marquette Law School found 71% of voters nationwide said the costs of data centers outweigh the benefits, while 29% said the reverse. Voters said the development of AI is a bad thing for society, rather than a good thing, by a 65%-35% margin…A YouGov poll taken for The Economist found just 23% of voters who said the construction of data centers are good for the country, while 48% said they are bad for the country. That same poll found 60% opposed to building a new data center in their community.
The opposition is incredibly bipartisan, with both Republicans and Democrats lining up to block data center construction. New York put a moratorium on data center construction in July, while Texas followed suit earlier this month.<br>So far, there has been no strong move toward a federal data center pause, and the bills that have been introduced in Congress are pretty mild stuff. That’s why as long as the movement to stop data centers stayed confined to blue states, it didn’t really matter much. It was just another instance of a very traditional story that we’ve all come to expect — states like New York basically ban new physical industries, so those industries go to places like Texas. The red states get the economic activity they want, the blue states get the stasis they want, and everyone is happy.<br>Nor would a few state-level bans affect the progress of AI. AI is a creature of bits and bytes; it lives in the cloud, and it doesn’t care about the physical location of the data centers that represent the lobes of its vast, alien brain. Data centers in Texas would sustain AI progress and AI applications just as well as data centers in New York.<br>Except now Texas is pausing data centers too. If almost all states ban data centers — or if the federal government gets involved in a major way — there could be major consequences for the U.S. economy. In the long run, I think limiting the physical resources devoted to AI would be a good thing; in the short run, it will simply clobber the already-wobbly U.S. economy. A movement against data centers has the seeds of something good and useful, but it has huge risks that most Americans seem not to realize yet.<br>The big danger is that data center bans will choke off the main engine of U.S. growth, throwing a lot of Americans out of their jobs and putting a hole in Americans’ retirement savings. But before I talk about that, I should talk about why I think limitations on data centers aren’t actually a crazy idea.<br>Why data center limitations make sense in the long run
A couple of years ago, I wrote that no matter how good AI gets, comparative advantage will still mean humans are paid to do something:<br>[A]s...