Today in public markets Nvidia Earnings are coming out after the bell. Meanwhile Nvidia is raising prices by as much as 15% in spite of having a monopoly and operating like an AI bank for Neo Clouds for expensive and largely community opposed AI infrastructure projects. First, a bit of context.
In 2025 we saw a declining sentiment towards AI even as Agentic AI failed to move the needle for many businesses. In 2026 we are seeing an acceleration of the backlash against AI datacenters spread to the AI industry as a whole. I’ve been covering this and while it’s not my most popular work, I believe it’s an important coverage to portray the real impacts of the technology. I believe in 2027, the AI backlash becomes way more political in the United States and elsewhere.
The AI pushback might be one of the biggest bottlenecks to AI in the late 2020s, for the 2028 elections, and in the 2030s in the United States. Huge lawsuits against Advertising platforms could reshape the future. AI datacenter moratoriums (tracker) have accelerated in a marked way in 2026 spreading rapidly. While the U.S. is tough on trade with Canada, it’s actually pushing datacenters on them as well.
With an affordability crisis in the U.S. intensifying as wealth inequality accelerates due to the AI boom, the optics for AI looks very bad for huge swaths of the population. With less than three months until the midterm elections, opposition to AI data centers is becoming a “bipartisan rallying cry” in a growing number of U.S. states.
“Polls show that roughly 70% to 75% of Americans oppose building large data centers near their homes, and more than half support a national moratorium.”
A Spring 2026 (May) Gallup poll found that 70% of US Americans would oppose a data center being built in their local community – and more than half support a national data center ban.
In the three months since the Gallup Poll that number has likely increased! For my American readers, you may know that in mid August Pennsylvania, Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro signed an executive order placing harsh standards on data center development in his state.
Is the AI Backlash getting Political in 2026?
Meanwhile in Florida, Rep. Byron Donalds introduced the “Protecting Ratepayers Act,” which aims to “ensure that private developers, rather than American taxpayers, bear the investment costs of data center developments that advance our country’s technological dominance,” according to a release. The primary purpose of the bill is to address the soaring energy and electricity demands driven by the artificial intelligence where U.S energy and rising costs for the data center boom is just one symptom of how ordinary Americans aren't feeling the benefits of AI but bearing the actual costs. You can see where this is heading, the backlash against datacenters has become a key issues for the American Midterms.
AI is going to become so political as ordinary citizens must endure a less human American internet, and in their backyard. The National Republican Senatorial Committee, or NRSC, warned last week that data centers have become a “sleeper issue” for the entire midterm election cycle. The memo says Republicans want the AI companies to do whatever it takes to stem the public backlash. But the AI companies are a big part of the problem. AI CEOs and top Republicans share in the rising panic as the situation is getting more toxic by the month. There’s a human side to the AI boom that Silicon Valley and Wall Street clearly didn’t plan for. Washington is going to feel the heat.
Reasons why Americans Oppose Datacenters
People have a lot of good reasons to oppose this kind of infrastructure:
Water usage
Energy consumption
Environmental impacts
Loss of farmless (wildlife, nature, deforestation, eyesore)
Qualif of life concerns e.g. housing, property values, construction, traffic
Costs - higher utility bills, using taxpayer dollars, cost of living increases
Pollution, noise, air & water contamination
Impacts on health, impacts on heat and light generated from the areas
Dislike AI, toxic for digital environments
Jobs, anxiety, impact on human labor and job security
Fossil fuel relapses, e.g. use of gas turbines
Arrival of jobless warehouses (brief temporary employment only)
(There are many others)
Canadians also Oppose Datacenters
With the recent trade bullying by the U.S. against Canada, I’m sure Canada also opposes U.S. datacenter constriction on their land more than the May polls indicated in the Spring (of 2026).
It doesn’t help that Donald Trump has facilitated BigAI & BigTech corporate interests at nearly every step while failing where it matters most to voters, the U.S. economy.
As AI datacenter projects become much bigger relatively quickly in the 2020s, the outrage is increasing in proportion. Canada currently has only five hyperscale data centres with a capacity of at least 50 megawatts, but 159 facilities were proposed or under construction across the country as of July, according to a recent York University study. There are now many ways to track the biggest AI Datacenter projects like Clearview. Nvidia partnering with Wall Street for $500 Billion in financing is a sign of the times. The AI boom is happening nearly too quick for people, consumers, communities and workers to respond to in a coherent manner.
“Nothing is driving more new U.S. economic investment or political volatility”
But the cost of consequences of AI Infrastructure impacts us all. Like Axios insinuated recently, nothing is driving more new U.S. economic investment or political volatility. And with the amount of capital on the line, it’s only going to get worse. Technology and the reaction of people is squeezing us into the future, and many are convinced it’s not a better future.
Amid the frenzy to build more datacenters, the U.S. is embracing dirty gas-fired capacity. The US is now building twice as much gas-fired capacity as China, and more than any other country in the world, after a stunning 76% increase in under-construction projects in the first half of this year. Planned gas power projects designated specifically for U.S. data center supply reached 189 gigawatts (GW). That represents a 40-fold increase since early 2024 and nearly double the volume recorded at the end of 2025. As you might have heard, SpaceX is also deploying billions of dollars in natural gas turbines to power massive artificial intelligence data centers and upcoming chip manufacturing facilities. This doesn’t sound ecologically clean.
If you care about the environment, datacenters are a disaster. Driven by AI infrastructure expansion, total U.S. gas power projects in development (across all sectors) surged to 378 GW, making the U.S. the global leader in new gas-fired power development—building roughly twice as much capacity as China.
Trump administration’s demolition of environmental regulations and China’s rapid adoption of clean energy is making the U.S. appear very behind the times and a laggard in energy policy. Such is the commercial and Government pressure to push AI Infrastructure on to the American people and their land.
We have to do better, there’s a reason there’s a bit of rage now involved. The backlash against datacenters and AI isn’t AI populism, it’s just common sense of the people. The datacenter backlash is making environmental activism a hot subject now on Substack. There are days where I wonder if America even cares about the consequences of the Generative AI boom on their resources, society and digital ecosystems.
What becomes clear is that U.S. policy is not leading the world in the right direction. A recent poll by Heatmap found that three-quarters of Americans do not want to live next to a datacenter, a huge increase in opposition in the past year. This of course is compounding already negative sentiment towards AI and Generative AI specially in the workplace and on internet platforms.
You can win in AI and still do the right thing, if you are willing to bear the costs. While BigTech spends close to $800 Billion in capex, apparently that’s not something they are willing to do.
SpaceX AI is using unpermitted turbines powering its xAI data centers near Memphis. SpaceX intends to build $100bn launch facility in Louisiana that is going to be a disaster for local wildlife. The launch area will be called Starbase. It will be used to "support thousands of Starship flights a year with missions launching to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars and beyond," SpaceX announced this week.
AI Anxiety is Turning to American Anger with regards to AI and Datacenter Projects
For the Datacenter backlash, there are now crowd-sourced websites to track the rapid, unregulated expansion of artificial intelligence data centers and their real-world impact on U.S. communities.
BigTech cannot do enough lobbying and PR to stop the enormous opposition they are finding among real people and not just their employees. According to Pew Research, today (mid August), 52% of Americans say they are more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life – up from 37% in 2021.
How do you even feel nostalgia for the world that Generative AI has taken away from us? The internet and it platforms are nearly unrecognizable while wealth inequality and concentration risks are creating a K-shaped economy that will churn the Middle Class for years and decades to come.
GenZ and Alpha Cohort Grow “Concerned” over AI
Young people for the first time in the 2020s are more concerned than exciting about AI and its impact on their future.
For me the datacenter pushback and the declining AI sentiment are really two sides of the same coin. A world where utilities now forecast a sixfold jump (Axios) for 2030's peak electric demand growth from predictions just three years ago. That's driven by data centers, and our aging systems can't keep up. The way we view the future of AI is altering our behaviors.
In August 2026, the Trump administration intervened in the bond market by more than doubling its government bond buybacks to lower soaring long-term borrowing costs and calm a major sell-off. Bond yields hit nearly 20-year highs, raising borrowing costs for consumers and threatening global stock markets. Meanwhile debt maring in AI and off-the-books funding is approaching dangerous levels while the U.S. National Debt has surpassed $40 Trillion for the first time. We are watching Scott Bessent and Donald Trump closely because the leverage on AI infrastructures and U.S. policy on Iran and AI are all interrelated. Billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller used synthetic AI in an Op-Ed to criticize the move stating that he was “proud to use AI”.
Generative AI is skewing rule of law in the U.S. Fed chair Kevin Warsh appointed a powerful VC to a lead a taskgroup on AI while said VC is a prominent lobbyist. Clearly all of this is endangering the credibility of AI, the U.S. administration, the Fed and the AI infrastructure roll-out. It’s become a caricature of how U.S institutions are supposed to behave. No great wonder why the AI backlash is accelerating. There’s a weird vibe in all of this capital and splurging on construction projects that benefit huge corporations over America’s people.
How do you protest a future that American capital is pumping due to a planned equity boom? Where the U.S. administration is working closely with Nvidia or Wall Street or Silicon Valley interests with regards to the AI boom and datacenter contribution Manhattan project? The U.S. Midterms has AI on the ballet now.
We are entering uncharted territory. Where the U.S. is starting wars, betraying allies and pretending like building datacenters is a matter of National security. But this could lead to a significant generation of political crisis. On the ground things look entirely different:
Politicians have no choice a crucial turning point has arrived in the Summer of 2026, which has seen politicians across the political spectrum embraced various curbs on data center construction. Donald Trump has embraced datacenters but has not done a great job at explaining why they are good for America or Americans. Saying nonsensical things like the follow:
"If I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big plant in, an AI plant or a data center," Trump said, "I would absolutely want it because the jobs are enormous and the money paid, the taxes paid, are just enormous." - Donald Trump on AI Datacenters.
Datacenters have very temporary construction booms are function as more or less empty warehouses with serious consequences for communities and their well-being. To make matters worse, the American financial elite following the playbook of the likes of Eric Schmidt - have framed this in an Anti-China light where even Trump framed now frames data centers as a necessary component of a top national and economic security priority: winning the AI race against China. There are a lot of Venture Capitalists manipulating geopolitics and Washington now at this point for profit.
And we wonder why the backlash towards Generative AI is increasing?
To watch Democrats or Republicans alike try to appear anti-datacenter is just too much to believe:
To campaign against datacenters this late (of the AI boom) in the cycle just because of Midterms feels completely lacking in genuine concern. Over the last few weeks, the U.S. public’s support for AI data centers has continued to collapse since the spring. In the U.S. only capital or politics really moves the needle. So is the lead up to the 2028 elections going to be the journey for AI’s real reckoning and human bottleneck?
More Americans strongly oppose AI datacenter construction in their communities.
Data centers are 43 points underwater with Republicans, 65 points underwater with independents, and 75 points underwater with Democrats. - According to HEATMAP’s poll.
Generative AI and its compute infrastructure are increasingly viewed as toxic to society and communities.
“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.
There are now reports that for Anthropic, its IPO filing will show AI backlash as a risk factor. There’s a human vs. AI aspect to all of this that is growing. Anthropic is expected to have a $100 Billion and $2 Trillion dollar market valuation IPO, the biggest in history surpassing SpaceX earlier this year. However increasingly Dario Amodei and Mark Zuckerberg are under public scrutiny for many of their comments appearing out of touch with public sentiment around AI. On an internet boosting corporate interests with unwavering Technological optimism, the reality couldn’t be more different on the ground and in real American communities.
The backlash around AI is a case of class warfare and yet another technology that make the rich richer and the poor poorer, especially in America. Dario Amodei’s fear mongering and skepticism is of another variety altogether. Sam Altman’s claims of AGI for his company now a few years later seem fairly self-promotional. Eric Schdmits one of the masterminds behind the U.S. vs. China theme, is littered with conflicts of interest and Donald Trump a President who did over 20 thousand stock trades in 2025. Nobody seems to be taking the AI backlash seriously, the actual function of how people accept Generative AI and its compute warehouses as a good or a bad thing. Clearly we are not impressed. AI is accelerating a crisis of trust that was already increasing in the U.S.
Fed Chair Warsh’s AI task force members all appear to believe AI will be a transformative technology, while it’s certainly going to be radically inflationary. If Nvidia and Apple are increasing prices, that’s not a good thing. Capex and bottlenecks create price spikes, and Trump’s horrid foreign affairs and trade policies compound the perception that AI is corrupt and controlled by the few, as opposed to being in the interests of the many.
Meanwhile, AI has not demonstrated significant productivity gains or empowered people in the ways in which we were promises in the early 2020s. The capital is clearly not being well spent for the majority of Americans in the bottom half of that now infamous K-shaped economy.
If we need State politicians to tell us the score on Datacenters and AI, we have a crisis brewing. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is the latest governor (Axios, Shapiro) to sharply change course on the AI data center boom he once enthusiastically courted. Do we need Politicians to flip sides and make dramatic pivots just to see what the people are saying?
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, also a Democrat, last month ordered a one-year moratorium on hyperscaler data centers. Can the national moratorium on AI datacenters please stand up? Can Trump also pivot is he too bought and sold by America’s elite? Crazy how late red-state Republicans have been to suddenly realize they were at risk of losing an election over something voters vehemently opposed. It’s puzzling.
American politics is a shifty thing where today - 69% of Democrats, 54% of Republicans and 53% of independents oppose new data centers in their area. But Generative AI isn’t local, it’s all around us. The backlash to datacenters is just one part of the legal and negative AI sentiment disputes we have with the onslaught of the so-called technological transformation. It’s not just about the financial cost, it’s about the cost to the fabric of our community and social connections. Is AI really empowering us or stripping us of our unique value and place in the world in the years ahead? We need to ask bolder questions.
Is spending this much on Capex and Datacenter subsidies with taxpayer dollars rational when the National Debt has surpassed $40 Trillion? It’s totally irrational. America, where the elites are doing exactly what the general public opposes the most and for the most part, getting away with it. Meanwhile the Fed is waiting on its AI taskforce with leaders that have huge conflicts of interest on the topic. Do I ask a powerful VC if AI is good for America and improving productivity? It’s so absurd. Of course Warsh’s AI task force members all appear to believe AI will be a transformative technology, with far-reaching effects on growth and productivity - they are lining their pockets full.
No wonder the AI backlash and datacenter opposition is growing. When you have leaders like Sam Altman, Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg involved - fairly unpopular tycoons, it’s no great wonder. This isn’t the AI we were led to believe would help us be better people in the world or manifest a future with more opportunity. For many Americans, it’s turning out to be just the opposite.
Thanks for reading!
In swing states, datacenter moratoriums were born.