Some argue it’s a messaging issue — others see a deeper problem.
The wild unpopularity of data centers represents an unprecedented challenge for the public relations industry.
Rightly or wrongly, vast swaths of Americans have become convinced that the infrastructure required to support the artificial intelligence revolution constitutes a major threat to their quality of life.
“How did living near a coal plant become more appealing than a datacenter . . .” Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian recently wrote on X. “It makes no sense.”
The subject is threatening to become a major topic in the midterms, as President Trump has sought to steamroll voter concerns over data centers — and lawmakers in his party have largely failed to adopt a cohesive message on the issue. “I’m telling you, it’s all a hoax,” Trump recently said. “The data centers are great, and they make people wealthy, and they make states wealthy, and it’s the oil of the next 20, 25 years.”
But most Americans aren’t buying it. A recent poll by the University of Massachusetts Amherst found 65 percent of respondents said they would oppose the construction of an artificial intelligence data center in their community and just 11 percent said they would support it.
In fact, in one Indianapolis community, the fight over data centers turned violent earlier this year when an unknown suspect fired 13 shots at a city councilman’s home after he voted in support of a data center rezoning measure. “NO DATA CENTERS,” read a note left under Councilman Ron Gibson’s doormat.
The tech and public relations sectors remain split over what, exactly, makes the data centers so polarizing. One camp argues the industry has a messaging problem, and that people just don’t understand data centers. Others argue that the industry isn’t facing a messaging problem, but a deeper and more informed opposition to data centers and the costs they impose on their neighbors.
But communications strategist John Davies tells NR it’s both: The industry has a communication problem and communities are raising substantive concerns that require the industry to change how it develops projects.
Davies, who has worked on several data center projects as the CEO of Davies Public Affairs, said the industry has gotten “pretty much everything” wrong in rolling out data centers and shaping public opinion on the issue.
“It’s like any industry that starts and is big and things happen, sometimes the initial practice is not all that great because people haven’t figured [things] out,” he said, pointing to one of the most common concerns around data centers: water usage.
The initial standard practice at the centers was to perform the cooling “in the most convenient manner,” which led to the use of more water than was necessary. “That’s a real problem,” he said, but suggested “that’s all been solved and taken care of,” pointing to the implementation of a closed-loop cooling system at many data centers, which requires the systems to take in a large quantity of water just once, and then refill smaller amounts over time, resulting in lower overall water usage.
However, not every data center is relying on closed-loop cooling systems. Some facilities still use the controversial systems that rely on evaporation to dissipate heat. And even some closed-loop systems still transfer heat to evaporative cooling towers, which then require continuous water replenishment.
Critics also frequently point to increased energy usage in explaining their opposition to data center construction. On this issue, too, Davies believes the industry has failed to push back effectively on what is a fundamental misunderstanding about how the energy industry works.
Data centers, Davies argues, provide an “absolute boost” to power development in the U.S. Having an industry that has a high power demand can help finance additional power generation and transmission infrastructure and create incentives for utilities to invest in new facilities, developers’ comms teams tell communities.
Still, it’s worth noting the increased demand does not guarantee more dependable power, lower costs, or better transmission infrastructure. In fact, a recent Berkeley Lab report found that growing demand from data centers and other large electricity users is creating challenges for electricity planners and grid operators. The report suggests data centers could account for 9.5 to 15.3 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption by 2030.
On the issue of messaging, industry professionals say timing is everything.
Many data center and renewable energy developers think they can “quietly go about [their] business and do the right thing” and no one will get upset, Davies says. This approach only breeds distrust as people observe fundamental changes in their area and feel they’re being left out of the process. Most of these people, he suggests, are in the “persuadable middle” but data center developers must do the work of communicating with local leaders to win support.
Parker Slaybaugh, vice president of LINK Public Affairs, addressed Data Center World earlier this year about his recommended three-phase strategy for building support before, during, and after project development.
Slaybaugh said education and advocacy should begin before a project is ever publicly announced. He cited a project in Port Washington, Wis., where developers conducted neighborhood-level outreach to identify priorities including renewable energy use, job creation, and tax impacts. Communications teams were then able to target messaging to address those concerns.
The project, a $15 billion data center being built by Vantage Data Centers to support operations for OpenAI and Oracle, was approved by the Port Washington Common Council in August 2025, with construction beginning four months later. The project features several of the industry changes Davies highlighted, using a closed-loop, non-evaporative liquid cooling system and drawing heavily from zero-emission sources like wind, solar and battery storage, with plans “to add new clean energy generation to the local grid without hiking residential utility bills,” according to Oracle.
The second stage of building support, Slaybaugh said, centers on the importance of community benefits agreements, such as commitments to fund local infrastructure like schools or fire stations through data center construction. The Port Washington center will generate local municipal and school district revenue, and in a show of good faith to the community, Vantage also provided free car washes to residents affected by construction dust in the area.
The benefits — and drawbacks — of hosting a data center in a community are perhaps clearer in Loudoun County, Va., than anywhere else. The county hosts more than 230 operational and developing data center buildings and touts itself as the world’s largest concentration of internet and cloud infrastructure in the world.
Loudoun County takes in more than $1.3 billion in tax revenue each year from the centers — roughly 40 percent of the county’s total revenue.
But even within the success story, problems persist; local news outlets have reported on issues regarding high electricity demands, electrical substations, water cooling usage, and continuous noise from emergency diesel generators.
After Microsoft abandoned a proposed Wisconsin data center amid local opposition, the tech giant released a data center model, “Community-First AI Infrastructure,” that focuses on dealing with several of these substantive issues. Under the model, the company promises to cover the electricity costs its facilities create, reduce and replenish water use, add jobs, grow the tax base and invest locally.
“You get better communications outcomes when you develop specific programs that address the issue, not when you modify messaging,” Microsoft chief communications officer Frank Shaw told Axios.
Even with strategic messaging and community benefits, Slaybaugh warned local skepticism may still remain. He noted Port Washington residents ultimately approved a referendum requiring voter approval for future large development projects worth more than $10 million before offering tax incentives to developers in response to the Vantage data center project.
Still, he urged data center developers to focus on their relationships in the communities where they are building. The last of his three-step process centers on “long-term integration, with companies encouraged to embed themselves in the community beyond the permitting process.”
Davies similarly said building support has to be done on a community-by-community level, project by project. “We can’t run a national campaign that says, ‘Hug a data center developer.’”
“Every data center needs to stand on its own in each community and how it’s responding to the community’s needs and fears,” he said.
And ultimately, it may not be worth a developers’ time to force a project in an area with strong opposition, because for every area that rejects a proposed site, there are likely several more communities — particularly in rural areas — that would be happy to reap the job creation and tax benefits of a data center, Davies said.
Some PR and tech leaders believe the opposition to data centers is a manifestation of the larger distrust of artificial intelligence — but the UMass poll suggests that isn’t true.
“The conventional wisdom is that strong public opposition to data centers reflects a more general negative reaction to generative AI, but our poll results suggest this isn’t exactly right,” said Jesse Rhodes, professor of political science at UMass Amherst and co- director of the poll.
The poll asked respondents to describe, in their own words, why they feel the way they do about AI data centers. Twenty-eight percent of respondents cited concerns about environmental or natural resource use; 15 percent raised concerns about land use and local disruptions; and 10 percent mentioned the impact on utility bills and costs.
Meanwhile, only 13 percent mentioned their general distrust of AI and the industry.
Davies called the data center issue the “tech battle of our time.”
“We need these data centers and what a great boom it can be for the whole nation,” he said.