Sixty-three percent of registered voters told pollsters they don't want an AI data center within ten miles of their home. Thirteen percent would welcome one. The figures come from a CNBC All-America Economic Survey of 1,000 voters. Two polling firms, one Democratic and one Republican, Hart Research Associates and Public Opinion Strategies, ran the interviews over five days in mid-October. The margin of error is 3.1 percentage points overall, and wider for the half-sample that got the proximity question.
The numbers matter because of who is saying them. President Trump has cast the race with China over artificial intelligence as a national security matter, and he wants the servers, substations and generating capacity built fast. His own coalition shares the goal. It just balks at the address.
Support in principle, resistance next door
Among self-described MAGA supporters, a little over half say companies should press ahead with advanced AI while lawmakers in Congress sort out the rules. About 27% would rather see development paused. Ask the same group about a data center within ten miles and only 29% say yes, against 40% who say no. Among all Republicans and Republican leaners, support for a nearby facility falls to 24%. Democrats are far more hostile: 80% opposed, 4% in favor.
That gap between abstract enthusiasm and local tolerance is an old story in American politics. Highways, power lines and landfills all enjoyed broad approval until someone proposed one down the road. What is different here is the scale of the buildout, and the way its costs land on a monthly utility bill. Communities have been fighting over rising electricity rates, heavy water use, noise, land use and tax breaks for the operators. Anxiety about AI taking jobs sits on top of all that, and it turns a warehouse full of servers into a symbol of who profits and who pays.
The industry disputes that reading. Dan Diorio of the Data Center Coalition pointed to jobs, investment and tax revenue, and said operators intend to pay for the energy they consume. With 63% opposed, that promise is likely to be tested at local hearings well before the year is out.
Republicans start to hedge
The survey suggests the issue has reached the ballot. Voters were asked to name their biggest worry should Republicans retain control of Congress, and 18% pointed to lax regulation of AI and data centers. That matched the share citing the continuing military campaign in Iran, and it outranked immigration deportations (15%), reduced health insurance subsidies (10%) and prolonged tariffs (5%). Even among voters who prefer Republican control, 17% flagged weak oversight of the industry, a concern outranked only by a failure to bring down prices.
Party strategists have noticed. According to Axios, the Senate Republicans' campaign arm sent AI companies a warning in August: public hostility, it said, was putting Sen. Jon Husted's reelection bid in Ohio at risk, and it described the matter as a midterm sleeper. Sleepers rarely stay asleep once a party committee puts them in writing. The senator's own record complicates his position. In 2024, while serving as lieutenant governor, he appeared at the unveiling of Amazon Web Services' $10 billion investment in Ohio. He now faces Democrat Sherrod Brown, who has made opposition to data centers part of his pitch. Husted, for his part, is promoting stalled legislation that would make large facilities pay their own grid and generation costs instead of passing them to households.
Texas offers a sharper reversal. Gov. Greg Abbott had celebrated the state as a center of AI development less than a year ago. He has since halted data center permits while grid and water impacts are reviewed, and called for an end to state tax incentives.
The mood was summed up by Brad Carson, who represented Oklahoma in Congress as a Democrat and now co-leads Public First Action PAC, an industry-backed group that presses for stronger safeguards. Voters are irritated by the facilities, he said, and they want sensible guardrails on AI, a position he called "hard to beat."
A caveat is in order. Polls on a hypothetical facility are cheap to answer, and a real project with a tax-base windfall for a cash-strapped county can look different at a zoning hearing. Still, the direction is clear enough to worry operators who planned around fast approvals.
The question now is whether the White House changes its message or only its messengers. If more Republican candidates follow Husted and Abbott, the fight before November won't be over whether to build. It will be over who foots the bill, and the industry would rather settle that on its own terms.