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At this point, I think it’s clear that AI data centers are unpopular.
You probably know it, at least. I was preparing talk about data center opposition on a podcast today and I took the opportunity to dive back into our data, so I certainly know it. At this point, we’ve written about results from our polling that show Americans overwhelmingly oppose local data center construction, that majorities of Americans now support a national data center moratorium, and that the only group of Americans who feels more optimistic than pessimistic about artificial intelligence is … men older than 65 years old.
So I got curious: Given all that, who actually supports AI data centers?
One question from our recent Heatmap Pro poll, conducted by Embold Research, helps give us a sense. This is the profile of someone our data says would support a data center built in their local area:
The Profile of a Data Center YIMBY
A few facets stand out. These data center YIMBYs are more likely to be men, and more likely to be 2024 Trump voters, but they’re not locked into one age demographic or voting cohort. A third are Harris supporters, and roughly a third are women. Data center YIMBYs are more likely to be older than 50, but the majority isn’t overwhelming.
Perhaps more surprising: The group has many more people who voted third-party in the 2024 election (8%) than the general population (just under 2%), although that response could also include people who didn’t vote. (Alas, the data can’t quite confirm how many in this group are libertarian.)
What’s perhaps most interesting: This group overwhelmingly believes that artificial intelligence will make their lives better. And in heartening news for climate advocates, they are even more likely to support a given data center project if it is powered by renewables.
I was going to joke that the profile is essentially a newly retired engineering dad — except that, to my surprise, these data center YIMBYs are far less gender imbalanced than the American engineering profession. (They’re also less gender-imbalanced than American Tesla owners.) So I’ll leave it at that.
