Why are Americans more averse to data centers than to nuclear power plants?

AI, data centers seem to be completely high-tech.

However, a "countercurrent" seems to be blowing across the United States.

For example, this year, the city of Monterey Park in Los Angeles County, California, originally planned to build an ultra-large data center with a peak power consumption of about 50 megawatts.

But this "high-tech project" was forcibly blocked by local residents.

Moreover, with 88.34% of local voters voting in favor, Monterey Park has become "the first city in the United States to ban the construction of data centers through a citizen vote".

Monterey Park

Not only will no data center be built now, but no data center will ever be built in the future.

Facing the rapid advancement of the AI era, why are the people of a country that claims to be the global AI hegemon so disgusted with data centers?

01

Is the United States Banning Data Center Construction?

In the current international landscape, whoever has large-scale, low-cost computing power clusters holds the ticket to the next round of technological dividends.

For specific cities, data centers are one of the most important infrastructure in the AI era.

When a city builds a large-scale data center, it may drive the entire industrial chain from chips to power grids and then to AI applications.

Therefore, the layout of data centers is not only related to the local economy, but also a manifestation of a country's technological sovereignty and energy strategic capabilities.

As a result, many regions regard the construction of data centers as an important indicator for urban development.

However, in the United States, ordinary people generally have a resistance to data centers, and Monterey Park is by no means an isolated case.

It is not even the most radical one.

For example, in Festus, Missouri, a $6 billion data center project failed to land due to voter resistance, during which four council members who supported the project were directly recalled.

In Prince William County, Virginia, Blackstone originally planned to build a hundred-billion-level data center park, but it was completely dragged down by local residents and civil organizations through three years of successive lawsuits.

Behind these extreme cases, the data reveals the widespread opposition among the American public.

In May 2026, Gallup released poll data showing that 71% of Americans oppose the construction of AI data centers in their local area, of which 48% are "strongly opposed".

In comparison, even nuclear power plants, which have always been highly controversial, have an opposition rate of only 53%.

In other words, in the eyes of many Americans, AI data centers are more unpopular than nuclear reactors.

In the first three months of this year, at least 75 data center projects across the United States with a total investment of about $130 billion were suspended, delayed or canceled.

By the summer, in just over a month, three states in the United States had successively issued red alerts, with escalating intensity:

On July 14, New York State suspended the issuance of environmental approval for large data centers above 50 megawatts for one year.

On August 3, Texas froze the advancement of new data centers in the grid connection process, requiring an audit of the actual controller, source of funds, and electricity and water consumption plans of each project before deciding whether to approve them.

On August 18, Pennsylvania required data center developers to provide their own power, pay their own electricity bills, and obtain consent from local communities. No project can get a permit if any of these requirements are not met.

Data centers, which were originally the underlying infrastructure of cutting-edge technology, seem to have suddenly become a public nuisance overnight, being spurned by everyone.

American people protest against the construction of artificial intelligence data centers

02

What Are People Opposing?

Why exactly do American residents resist data centers?

What are they aiming for by launching so many massive protest activities?

This is actually a very down-to-earth, daily life-related issue.

First, electricity.

Data centers are "power hogs" that directly drive up local electricity demand.

Therefore, if these data centers are accepted, local power grid companies will need to upgrade substations and lay new lines.

In the United States, a country with a market-oriented power system, the increase in demand and the cost of new infrastructure will be directly passed on to electricity prices.

Since 2021, U.S. electricity prices have risen by about 40% overall.

AI super cluster co-developed by Amazon and Anthropic

Over time, ordinary people can easily predict:

The completion of a data center equals higher electricity prices.

This speculation has also been confirmed by the U.S. Department of Energy: data center electricity consumption in 2023 accounted for about 4.4% of total U.S. electricity consumption. By 2028, this proportion may rise to between 6.7% and 12%.

Just imagine, an American household originally spends about $1,500 on electricity a year, and after the data center is built, the electricity bill almost doubles.

For example, in Texas, thanks to its independent power grid and abundant natural gas resources, electricity prices have always been relatively low, making it a popular area for many enterprises to build data centers.

As a result, in the grid connection queue of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) this year, the demand for data center construction applications has accumulated to about 474 gigawatts, more than 5 times the historical peak power load of Texas.

A considerable part of these construction demands is just trying to "reserve a spot", rather than making a definite decision to settle in Texas.

Therefore, the Texas government can only keep raising the threshold. Otherwise, even the power infrastructure cannot be implemented in a short period of time, and the surge in electricity prices will be impossible to suppress.

Second, water.

A little-known fact is that during the operation of data centers, a large amount of water is needed to cool the equipment.

For example, a large data center, calculated at the upper limit of 5 million gallons, consumes about 18,900 tons of water per day, which is equivalent to the daily water consumption of a small or medium-sized town.

More importantly, many data centers will be equipped with supporting power plants to ensure power supply, so they will choose places with cheap land and sparse population, many of which are also facing water shortage problems. Once the data center is completed, the pressure on local water allocation will be even greater.

For example, in Newton County, Georgia, residents have been informed that water bills are expected to rise by 33% over the next two years.

A large part of the reason for the price increase is the huge water consumption caused by the construction of nearby data centers.

Elderly people who have to go to the town to get drinking tap water after becoming neighbors with a data center

Once the data center is settled, both electricity and water bills will rise.

But why should residents pay for the water and electricity bills of tech giants?

Third, noise.

To ensure the full-speed operation of tens of thousands of GPUs, most data centers are equipped with powerful heat dissipation systems. Industrial cooling fans roar at low frequency 24 hours a day, causing continuous noise pollution in the surrounding areas.

Therefore, studies have shown that residences within 3 kilometers around the data center may face the risk of depreciation.

The 50-megawatt ultra-large data center project in Monterey Park we mentioned earlier was originally only about 150 meters away from the residential area. If local residents did not join forces to resist, they might have to endure long-term noise pollution.

In other words, data centers not only compete with residents for land, but also disturb the normal life of residents several kilometers around.

Rural residents in Michigan hold a rally to protest the planned $7 billion "Stargate" data center to be built on farmland in southeastern Michigan

Developers of residential properties are not fools.

As long as the residents' resistance is not thorough enough, they will just stop launching new residential projects.

But this will obviously cause losses to the interests of multiple parties: residents cannot get new houses, the municipal government lacks new projects, and local finance loses a sum of revenue.

Apart from asking data centers to leave, there seems to be no better solution.

Fourth, employment.

The words of developers are nothing but deceptive tricks.

This also applies to the AI data center sector.

Faced with public protests against data center projects, the most common excuse used by developers is that they can create jobs.

However, the Virginia Legislative Audit and Review Commission gave figures in its official 2024 report:

A typical 250,000-square-foot data center has only about 50 long-term full-time positions, nearly half of which are outsourced personnel; the peak number of workers appears during the construction period, with about 1,500 workers working on site for 12 to 18 months.

In the end, what residents see is likely to be: after a data center is settled, the developer hires a small number of external technicians, but leaves skyrocketing electricity bills, water bills and noise to the local area.

03

The Real Reason for the Failure of Landing

However, these are only superficial phenomena, and the deeper root lies in the underlying logic of the operation of the United States.

Take the U.S. power system as an example.

The United States is indeed a highly developed economy, but its power system is incredibly fragmented.

Unlike many other countries that have a unified super grid, the U.S. mainland power system is spliced together by three asynchronous grids: the Eastern Interconnection, the Western Interconnection, and the Texas Interconnection, which operates as an independent island grid.

The U.S. mainland power grid system is mainly divided into three regions: the Eastern Interconnection, the Western Interconnection, and the independent Texas power grid.

These three major grids are almost not interconnected and operate independently of each other.

Because to build a cross-state high-voltage transmission line, layers of approval are required, involving every state the line passes through.

A series of procedures need to go through public utility commissions, relevant departments, environmental groups, land owners, etc.

Under this framework, states are happy to act independently: within their own jurisdiction, taxation, employment and supervision are easy to control, which can bring stable profits, save time, reduce troubles, and generate high returns.

This has led to a situation in the United States where 7 independent operators hold vertical monopolies and more than 3,000 power companies compete with each other.

If there is no unified standard and system, how can the whole country operate in a coordinated manner?

But the fragmentation of the U.S. power grid did not happen overnight, and it is not easy to change.

As early as 1935 during the Great Depression, the United States introduced the Public Utility Holding Company Act, under which the federal government manages cross-state wholesale electricity, while states are responsible for retail and services.

But for the power grid, whoever controls power distribution and pricing calls the shots.

With the legal right to retail electricity, the states focused on developing their own power systems and paid even less attention to building a unified national grid.

The planning and construction of a cross-state transmission line takes an average of more than ten years, not to mention adopting a coordinated model of long-distance and high-voltage transmission.

When data centers need to be built and civil rights also need to be protected, the party that can obtain commercial benefits must make concessions.

In February this year, Trump first proposed the "Ratepayer Protection Pledge" in his State of the Union address, advocating that the cost of new power transmission infrastructure upgrades for data centers should be borne by the enterprises themselves, rather than American consumers.

In response, tech giants seem to have given up hope and have decided to develop their own power supply.

Google acquired the renewable energy company Intersect Power for about $4.75 billion, not just for its power generation capacity, but also for its grid access rights and land reserves.

Microsoft restarted the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant, and one of its reactors will be retrofitted to supply power exclusively to Microsoft's data centers.