America has turned against data centers — Pew finds 54% now call them bad for the environment
Three stories about who absorbs AI's costs: the communities hosting the compute, the countries deciding whether to pick a superpower's side — or neither — and the creators being asked to like it.
American opinion on data centers has swung sharply negative in eight months: 54% now say the facilities are mostly bad for the environment, up from 39% in January, according to a Pew Research Center survey published Tuesday. The nationally representative survey of 10,548 US adults, fielded July 20 through August 9, finds the turn runs across every measure Pew tested — 50% now call data centers mostly bad for home energy costs (up from 38%), and 49% say they make quality of life nearby worse (up from 30%). Just 4% see them as mostly good on any of these counts. Awareness has climbed with the backlash: 88% of Americans have heard at least something about data centers, and the share who have heard "a lot" rose from 25% to 35% since January.
What makes this more than a NIMBY story is who has moved. Rural Americans saying data centers are bad for the environment jumped from 32% to 50%, and Republicans calling them bad for local quality of life rose from 24% to 42% — a bipartisan shift that is already rerouting politics. In Texas, 57% of voters oppose a data center in their community, including 43% of Republicans, and the issue could decide the governor and Senate races; Governor Abbott ordered a halt to new data center permits on Monday. We tracked the physical version of this trend earlier — local opposition blocked $68B of US data centers in one quarter — and the polling says the resistance is now an electorate, not a zoning fight. The midterms will be the first real test of whether AI's buildout costs votes.
President Emmanuel Macron used his final UN General Assembly address to pitch a third way in AI: a jointly built open-source frontier model that answers to neither Washington nor Beijing. "I don't want anyone to become the vassal of one of the great powers. Rather, we must come together to build an open-source frontier model, a cutting-edge model... We should not depend on somebody else," Macron told the assembly on Tuesday, urging countries to pool investment capabilities to build a frontier model "which we will share." The speech landed hours after Trump told the same hall there should be no global AI rules — we covered that address here in Tuesday night's brief.
The two superpowers, meanwhile, are opening their own channel: treasury secretary Scott Bessent proposed an AI safety mechanism to Chinese vice-premier He Lifeng in weekend talks, and Xi Jinping lands in the US this week for a summit with Trump. Which makes Macron's pitch the interesting third position — a sovereignty offer for everyone else, now with an actual product attached. The open question is whether "shared" survives contact with the price tag of a frontier training run.
OpenAI has hired Patreon co-founder Sam Yam to lead a new Creator Product division, pulling the creator-payments platform's founding team out after more than 13 years. Yam announced the move late Tuesday, bringing Drew Rowny and Shannon Ma — Patreon's former heads of product and engineering — with him. He promised a set of tools "critically valuable to Creators and their communities," with early access teased for OpenAI DevDay next week, and framed human creativity as "paramount" even as his new employer's models generate more of what creators sell.
The hire lands exactly where the relationship hurts: labs are fighting training-data suits while shipping models that automate creative work, and this reads as an acquihire of creator-economy credibility two days before DevDay. The tell will be the product. If Creator Product ships licensing, attribution or revenue-sharing plumbing, it is a business model; if it ships generation tools, it is a press release. We will know next week.
What to watch: whether data centers become a ballot-box issue in November, whether any government actually co-funds Macron's shared frontier model, and what OpenAI puts on the DevDay stage.
Would a data center proposal in your town change how you vote? Tell us in the comments.
Sources: Pew Research Center · CNBC · Texas Politics Project · France 24 · The Guardian · Bloomberg · The Decoder · Sam Yam on X
