US poll finds Americans would rather live next to an Amazon warehouse than a data center

The data centers powering the AI boom are meeting growing resistance, and not only from environmentalists but from ordinary residents. Two new US polls show that Americans would sooner tolerate an e-commerce warehouse like Amazon's near their home than a new data center.

Numbers without the euphoria

A TechCrunch article compiles the results of two studies, and both show there is no public consensus on data centers. A Harvard/MIT poll conducted in November 2025 among 1,000 respondents via YouGov gave data centers 40% support and 32% opposition when people were asked about building various industrial facilities near their area. That is not a failure, but it is not the level of approval the industry expects, having grown used to calling AI infrastructure "inevitable."

Data centers also scored lower than car factories and e-commerce warehouses, and only clearly better than petrochemical facilities. That is where the Amazon headline comes from: to many residents, a warehouse for online orders seems more familiar and less worrying as a neighbor than a huge facility that consumes electricity and water and barely interacts with the local community.

What exactly worries people

Most often the issue is not an abstract distrust of technology but very everyday fears. In the Harvard/MIT poll, about two thirds of participants said a new data center in their region would most likely push electricity prices up. An accompanying analysis of the study adds an important detail: concerns about quality of life explained attitudes toward projects roughly twice as strongly as electricity bills alone. In other words, people worry not only about rates but also about what happens to the area around such a facility.

• rising electricity bills
• water use for cooling
• noise from equipment and mechanical systems
• a worse quality of life near the site
• doubts that the project will deliver a noticeable return to the local economy

In the second poll, by Quinnipiac University, conducted March 19–23, 2026 among 1,397 American adults, opposition was even sharper: 65% opposed building an AI data center in their community, and only 24% supported the idea. Among reasons for opposing, 72% cited the cost of electricity, 64% water consumption, and 41% noise. The AI label itself seems to make the topic even more toxic, though that is an inference from comparing the wording of the two polls, not a direct claim by their authors.

Where the benefits argument breaks down

The industry's main counterargument is familiar: data centers create jobs, widen the tax base and attract tech business. But the new data show this narrative does not work unconditionally. Yes, in the Harvard/MIT poll, promises of jobs and economic growth did help the case for data centers. But that is no longer enough to outweigh local fears, especially if residents believe they will feel the costs immediately while the benefits stay on paper.

"I was surprised that jobs and economic growth turned out to be almost as important as worries about prices," said researcher

Stephen Ansolabehere.

This is bad news for politicians. Data centers long counted as quiet technical infrastructure that only utility executives and developers argued about. Now it is a local electoral issue: who pays for new capacity, how the area will change, how much water will go to cooling, and why a multibillion-dollar project should get incentives if it creates few permanent jobs. The more AI drives demand for computing, the louder these questions get.

What this means

The AI boom is running into public consent as well as chips and power supply. If companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google and other market players want to build new capacity faster, they will have to offer local communities not abstract benefits for the industry but concrete guarantees on rates, water, noise and tax revenue.