Many Americans are worried about AI data centers — and they plan to vote accordingly — but the colossal AI-powering warehouses aren’t their main concern ahead of next week’s midterm elections.
In a Gallup poll released on Thursday based on interviews conducted earlier this month, about 30% of respondents ranked “construction of AI data centers” as an “extremely important” factor in their midterm calculus.
Another 23% ranked the issue as “very important.”
When separated by political party, Republicans emerged as the group more apathetic to data centers. Only 16% of registered Republicans said they considered the issue extremely important, compared to 42% of registered Democrats.
In the poll, Gallup surveyors did not ask voters for their opinions on issues like data centers — only the extent to which they were considering each issue when they vote next week.
Overall, the state of the economy, healthcare, and the “situation in Iran” emerged as the most important topics for voters.
The massive server factories powering chatbot queries had a disastrous PR run over the last year, and have been the subject of protests across America at local town hall meetings and major rallies in Washington.
Some states have passed data center moratoriums, prohibiting their construction. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, once a champion of AI data center expansion, said in August that the state had halted as many as 1,800 data center proposals.
President Donald Trump, who has championed a national effort to build out AI infrastructure, said in August that data centers “could use a little public relations help.” He encouraged major builders, including Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon, to do more for the communities where they are planned.
As the midterms approach, however, concern over AI data centers has given way to more pressing issues for voters, like the Iran war, rising energy prices, and the overall health of the economy.
The data center issue ranked 10th among the topics polled by Gallup, just ahead of climate change at 11. A whopping 87% of voters consider the economy an important issue, followed closely by healthcare at 77%.
In a September poll by the Pew Research Center, which surveyed people in August, half of rural Americans said data centers “are mostly bad for the environment” — a figure substantially higher than in January, when it sat at 32%.
For AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, and others, the issue is existential. Without AI data centers, they can’t power the products they sell. Sam Altman has recently suggested that new data centers could be built far from where people live, like the desert.
“We should just go put it off in the desert, around no one where no one wants to be,” Altman said in July. “This is fine. The AI system is very happy to be there.”
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