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The American public has soured even further on local data center development since the spring, new polling shows.
Three-quarters of Americans now say that they would oppose a new data center being built near where they live, according to a new Heatmap Pro poll conducted by Embold Research, and more than six in 10 Americans say they would strongly oppose such a proposal.
That’s by far the most negative response since Heatmap Pro started polling Americans about their receptivity to data centers roughly a year ago.
If you can think of a cohort of Americans, there’s a good chance they wouldn’t welcome a data center in their area. The shift is represented across age, gender, income, partisan ID, and the rural-urban divide. Data centers are 43 points underwater with Republicans, 65 points underwater with independents, and 75 points underwater with Democrats. Notably, local data centers are 63 points underwater with rural voters, a group that has skewed more Republican over the past decade.
We’ve polled the question four times in the past 12 months and haven’t changed the question’s wording once — yet Americans have swung a remarkable 33 points against data centers in their responses. It’s a faster and deeper shift in American public opinion than I would have once thought possible on any issue.
We first polled the question last August. Back then, Americans were about evenly split on whether they would support or oppose a data center being built near their home, with roughly 43% in support and 42% opposed.
Attitudes had changed by February of this year, when we polled the same question a second time. That time, a bare majority — 51% of Americans — said they would oppose a data center. Forty-eight percent of respondents said they would support it or weren’t sure.
The shock came in May, though, when seven in 10 Americans were opposed and 55% were “strongly” opposed. Yet in the ensuing months, Americans have moved even further against the facilities.
The backlash has, at this point, broken into the mainstream: Earlier this week, the podcaster and retired Philadelphia Eagles great Jason Kelce starred in an ad that advised Americans to mail their urine to AI data centers, which he alleged were wasting water. Local and national leaders have begun to recognize the scale of the backlash, too. In the Wisconsin governor’s race, candidates from both parties have hastened to distance themselves from data centers. New York Governor Kathy Hochul declared a one-year moratorium on the facilities last month, and even Texas Governor Greg Abbot has frozen some of the state’s data centers until they complete a mandatory audit. More than 530 counties and municipalities have restricted or banned construction of the facilities nationwide, according to Heatmap Pro data.
“There’s literally not a conversation that I have, not a stop that I make, where data centers and AI don’t come up,” Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Michigan Senate nominee, said earlier this summer. Look at the polling and you can see why.
The Heatmap Pro poll of 2,045 American registered voters was conducted by Embold Research via text-to-web responses from August 8 to 13, 2026. The survey included interviews with Americans in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 2.3 percentage points.
