These are the fruits of those labors.
A little under a month ago, I speculated that the conversation within the professional commentariat around AI-supporting data centers had become a little too abstract.
In fact, it seemed to me that the effort by some to craft “metaphysical explanations for voters’ anxieties” around data centers might have been an overly generous dispensation:
Maybe data centers are symbolic, some posit. Perhaps these behemoths strike average folks as the lumbering manifestation of their own insignificance before the imperious tech sector. Maybe the public has taken the AI industry’s most hubristic boosters at their word, and they fear a future in which they and the skills they’ve spent a lifetime developing will be rendered redundant. “I think the data center backlash is at a deeper cultural level the expression of people recognizing that the internet is on net simply bad,” The Free Press’s Nick Clairmont optimistically intuited.
Instead, it seemed likelier to me that the public’s persistent and growing trepidation concerning data centers was attributable to the fact that voters just weren’t encountering the many fact-checks of the most popular and pernicious myths around AI-supporting server farms.
Enter the latest New York Times/Siena poll, which found that voters are not layering a sophisticated yet unarticulated apprehension about the online environment over the data center debate. Instead, a plurality is invested in the most troglodytic of the claims against digital infrastructure:
For all our efforts to find a metaphysical rationale for the public’s anti-AI/Data Center lurch – is it a manifestation of techno-anxiety, an expression of their own insignificance before Silicon Valley, or even an unexpressed hostility to the internet itself? – it turns out that… pic.twitter.com/mHP8FS641m
— Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) September 15, 2026
Moreover, for some reason, those who are attracted to the claim that data centers consume and adulterate ungodly sums of water skew younger, and their attachment to that narrative fades with age (or, perhaps, their relative exposure to TikTok):
Golly gee, wherever could this have come from? pic.twitter.com/xv8zzuPwcb
— Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) September 15, 2026
It’s not as though anyone close to the AI industry denies that Chinese agents of influence have been actively engaged in a campaign to radicalize the American people against data centers. These are the fruits of those labors.
Of all the many claims against data centers — they’re noisy, they vibrate to excess, they’re eyesores, they raise your electricity costs, etc. — the notion that they are an unrivaled strain on local water resources is the most easily disproven.
Interestingly enough, the amount of power that data centers require — a concern reflected in the Times/Siena poll’s finding that 21 percent are concerned about their impact on “local communities/resources” — is being addressed at the local level and, perhaps soon enough, the federal level.
The House is set to vote on the Ratepayer Protection Act, which would codify in federal law what has largely become best practice in the municipalities that host data centers. Namely, that they would be required to pay for the incremental cost of the power generation, transmission, and distribution they need.
But the activists hate that, too. Why? Because that bill also fast-tracks the “financing, permitting, and construction” of new data centers, as the activists at Food & Water Watch complained. The bill does nothing to address the “alarming water consumption” associated with these installations, the outlet’s latest press release reads.
Maybe we’re overthinking this.