A New York Times and Siena University poll released Tuesday puts a hard number on something the AI industry has been sensing for months: 61 percent of likely voters oppose building data centers to power AI. Only 14 percent strongly support it. The Verge AI reports that the survey covered 1,503 likely voters in early September, before the recent AI safety slowdown debate picked up steam.
That’s not a soft signal. That’s a majority of the electorate saying no to the physical backbone of the entire AI boom.
The numbers
The headline figure is bad enough, but the breakdown is where it gets interesting. According to The Verge AI, the split runs along party lines, though not the way you’d expect:
- 2024 Trump voters: roughly even, 49 percent support to 45 percent oppose
- Harris voters: 74 percent opposed
- Non-voters: 67 percent opposed
So the only group where data centers come close to breaking even is Republican voters, and even there it’s a coin flip. Everyone else leans hard against.
Among the opponents, 56 percent want limits on construction while 38 percent prefer a total ban. Read that again. Nearly four in ten people who oppose data centers don’t want fewer of them. They want zero.
Why people are against it
The reasons matter because they tell you what the industry would actually need to fix. As detailed in The Verge AI, the top concerns were:
- Environment and water usage: 32 percent
- Impact on local communities: 21 percent
- General distrust or dislike of AI: 18 percent
- Regulation concerns: 10 percent
- The economy: 9 percent
What stands out here is that the biggest objection isn’t about AI at all. It’s about water and power. That’s a concrete, local, fixable problem, at least in theory. The 18 percent who just don’t like AI are a harder audience, but they’re not the majority of the opposition.
This isn’t a one-off
The Times/Siena data lines up with everything else we’ve seen this year. An NBC News poll in March had AI polling lower than ICE. A Gallup poll in May found seven in ten Americans opposed building AI data centers in their own area. Three different pollsters, three different methods, same answer.
Politicians have noticed. Local zoning fights over data centers have been heating up across the country, and the recent AI safety slowdown discussion in Washington didn’t come from nowhere. When something polls this badly for this long, it stops being a niche issue and starts becoming a campaign talking point.
The catch: nobody votes on it
Here’s where the picture gets more complicated. The same poll asked voters which issue matters most in deciding their midterm vote. AI and data centers came in at under one percent for most demographics. The only exception was the 18-29 group, where three percent picked it. Everyone else went with the economy, foreign policy, inflation, and opposition to Trump or Republicans.
On who should handle the issue, voters mostly just picked their own party. Among the 554 respondents asked, 40 percent trusted Democrats, 42 percent trusted Republicans, and 18 percent didn’t know or refused to answer.
So the opposition is wide but shallow. People don’t like data centers, but they’re not going to the polls over them. Yet.
Why this matters for the industry
This is significant because the AI buildout depends on public tolerance in a way that software never did. You can ship a model from anywhere. You can’t build a gigawatt campus without local permits, water rights, and grid capacity, and all of those run through politicians who read polls.
A few things worth watching:
- Water and energy transparency will become table stakes. If 32 percent of opponents cite the environment, companies that publish real consumption numbers and fund local infrastructure will have an easier time than those that don’t.
- Local politics gets harder before it gets easier. County commissioners and state legislators face far less pressure from the economy-first voter than national candidates do. That’s where the bans will start.
- The youth signal is worth noting. Three percent sounds tiny, but it’s triple the general population, and that group votes for a long time.
The gap between how much people dislike data centers and how little they vote on them is the whole game right now. The industry has a window to change the story before that gap closes. Whether it uses that window is another question.
The Verge AI has the full poll breakdown and crosstabs.