Monrovia, Indiana: 1,600 people, 50 conversations, zero yes votes
A Google project on 550 acres came to a town of 1,600. An organiser talked to 50 residents. Not one of them wanted it — and some of them voted for Trump and wanted to know why he's on the other side.
Bryce Gustafson has been knocking on doors in Indiana for over ten years. Usually, whatever he's campaigning about, some people argue back. At a festival in Monrovia, a rural town of 1,600, nobody did. He was there about a proposed Google datacenter covering 550 acres — and out of 50 people he spoke to, not one wanted it nearby.
Half a dozen of them came up to him with a version of the same question: I voted for Trump, what is he doing supporting these things? That question is now showing up in election results, and it is the part of the story that big tech appears not to have priced in.
Three-quarters of Americans now oppose datacenter development in their own area — a shift of more than 30 points in a single year. More than 500 counties and municipalities have passed bans or moratoria, and dozens of proposed projects have been killed outright. Public opinion rarely moves 30 points on anything.
That changes what the constraint on the AI buildout actually is. The money for these projects exists. What doesn't exist, increasingly, is a place to put them. A datacenter needs land, water and power in a specific county, and that county now has a council that has watched what happened to the councils next door.
The buildout is no longer blocked by finance. It's blocked by neighbours.
Politicians have already started paying. Utah's senate president was tossed out of office for supporting hyperscale proposals. In Ohio, Democrat Sherrod Brown has built his Senate campaign around Republican senator Jon Husted's support for datacenters, and the National Republican senatorial committee has warned that "datacenters are the anchor hanging around Husted's neck". Texas governor Greg Abbott, who once called his state the "epicenter of AI development", said last week that datacenters had "dug their own grave". In Michigan, days after The Lever reported that GOP Senate candidate Mike Rogers held millions in AI-related investments, Rogers backed a one-year moratorium.
Anyone who lives near cheap land, water and a power line — which is most of rural and suburban America, and increasingly anywhere else these projects go looking. Also anyone whose electricity bill shares a grid with one: the organisers in the Guardian piece describe these sites as water-guzzling and air-polluting, and that cost lands on households, not shareholders. And anyone in their twenties betting their career on the AI boom: the thing that stalls this buildout may not be a funding round going bad, it may be a county commission meeting on a Tuesday night. Ben Inskeep of Citizens Action Coalition puts it in a way that explains why this spreads so fast: on most issues people arrive with a fixed partisan lens, and on this one they don't.
Watch the Ohio Senate race, where Brown has made Husted's datacenter support the centrepiece of his campaign, and the Lansing-area House race, where Sunrise Movement co-founder William Lawrence is leading in a district currently held by a Republican, according to a recent poll. Those two results are the clearest test of whether opposing datacenters wins elections. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have called for a national moratorium; the Guardian names no vote, date or hearing on it. Whether Democrats seize this or Republicans regain the initiative, in the article's own words, remains to be seen.
MS Now asked a woman in Hood county, Texas — a place that is 80% Republican — whether she would let the Senate fall to Democrats if that's what it took to stop datacenters. She said yes, and added that her entire community was going to break rank. People who spend billions modelling power curves and chip supply did not model that sentence.
Sources: The Guardian (Aaron Regunberg), "The datacenter backlash is bringing the entire political spectrum together – against big tech billionaires", 30 August 2026.
Три четверти американцев теперь против дата-центров рядом с домом, свыше 500 округов ввели запреты — и это уже ломает карьеры политиков, то есть стройка ИИ-инфраструктуры упирается не в деньги, а в соседей.
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