On Monday, Kathy Hochul signed the first statewide data center moratorium in the country — a one-year pause on environmental permits for any new hyperscale facility in New York while the state builds out rules on energy demand, water use, and grid strain. It's not a ban. Existing centers keep running, and the pause lifts once New York has a framework. But it's the first time a governor has hit the brakes on the industry that's supposed to define this decade, and the polling data explains exactly why she can get away with this.
California Says No, Almost Unanimously
That number holds clear across the aisle — a cross-partisan supermajority, with more than six in ten opposing construction in every party group PPIC measured, in every region of the state, across every racial and ethnic group. PPIC's July survey finds 44% of Californians strongly opposed and another 29% somewhat opposed, against just 26% in favor. And 63% are worried about the environmental impact specifically.
A Referendum on AI Itself
The instinct is to read data center opposition as classic not-in-my-backyard politics — the same reflex that's fought power lines and wind farms for decades. The data says otherwise.
Milltown Partners surveyed voters in five states with active data center buildouts — Texas, Georgia, Michigan, California, North Carolina — and found opposition tracks attitudes toward AI and Big Tech, not geography. Among people who oppose data centers, only 8% say they actually know of one near their home. The Downs Center's rural survey backs this up from a different angle: electricity-cost worry is highest in rural America even though most existing data centers still sit near cities.
Proximity barely moves the needle. What drives the opposition is how people feel about AI.
That distinction matters for the industry's playbook. Tech companies have spent two years pitching data centers as local jobs and local tax revenue — Pew finds those are actually the two most positively rated impacts, with 34% calling them good for jobs and 31% good for tax revenue. None of that is moving the opposition numbers. What voters are weighing is bigger than any one building — whether AI itself has earned the trust it's asking for.
Which is exactly the argument Milltown's second release makes concrete: 49% of voters nationally now back an outright moratorium on new data center construction, against just 16% opposed.
New York voters got there first. Siena's June survey — taken three weeks before Hochul signed her order — found a plurality of voters in every party backing a one-year data center pause: 53% of Democrats, 40% of Republicans (vs. 27% opposed), and 40% of independents (vs. 24% opposed). By the time she reached for the pen, the politics were already settled.
For the industry, there is a hopeful way of looking at these morose numbers. A trust-and-fairness problem is fixable, while a technology the public simply doesn't want is not. Milltown's respondents keep circling the same grievance — the sense that AI's benefits flow to Big Tech while the costs land on the town. That's a deal problem, and deals can be rewritten. Verasight finds nearly 7 in 10 Americans back an AI sovereign wealth fund — a public that wants to share in AI's upside. Give a community cheaper power, shared revenue, a real stake in what gets built down the road, and the path back to yes reopens.
Power Struggle: The Bill Is Coming Due
Hochul's own framing for the moratorium leaned on one fact: New York's average residential electricity price is up roughly 68% since 2019. The people polled this month feel that number in every bill — it's their top complaint.
The Downs Center survey asked Americans to rate their worry about data centers on a 7-point scale, and electricity costs beat water use and farmland loss as the top concern nationally — a 5.2, well above the neutral midpoint of 4. Rural respondents are the most anxious of all: 58% call themselves "very worried" about rising bills, an 11-point gap over urban respondents at 47%.
That gap tracks something real: geography catching up with them. Pew's mapping of planned construction shows 67% of new data centers are headed for rural counties — a hard reversal from today's footprint, where 87% of operating centers sit in or near cities.
Pennsylvania shows what that looks like when it hits an election. Quinnipiac's June poll finds 76% of PA voters oppose a data center in their community — Democrats, Republicans, and independents alike — and 42% say data center policy will actually factor into their vote for governor this fall. Gov. Josh Shapiro still leads his GOP challenger comfortably, but the issue is now impacting the ballot alongside the economy, and voters are just as sour on both.
This Week's Shorter Stories
🔒 Trust in AI companies ranks dead last. Anthropic and YouGov's 52,000-person survey finds Americans trust AI companies less than any government body tested. The data center backlash and the AI trust gap are the same story told twice.
📈 One in three Americans now use AI weekly — and their concern is rising right alongside adoption, per SurveyMonkey. Adoption and anxiety are climbing in lockstep.
🌎 Californians want a cleaner environment — they just don't want to pay for it. PPIC's companion survey finds the same voters worried about data centers balk at higher costs for environmental policy generally. The data center fight is popular in part because, unlike a carbon tax, it doesn't ask voters to pay anything themselves.
Next Week
- Whether other governors follow Hochul. A one-year pause with bipartisan-sounding rationale (ratepayer protection, not climate policy) is a template other states can copy without the culture-war baggage.
- Summer grid strain headlines. Every heat-driven blackout or price spike this summer hands the moratorium crowd a fresh talking point.
- Whether the industry pivots its pitch. Jobs-and-tax-revenue messaging isn't working. Watch for companies to start talking about ratepayer protections and cheaper power directly, since that's the actual nerve being hit.
- PA's governor's race as a bellwether. If data center opposition holds at 76% through November, expect every purple-state candidate in 2027 and 2028 to run on it.
This week Poll Vault tracked 41 polls across AI and energy policy — see them all →
What Else We Tracked This Week
- Americans' Trust in Institutions Hovers Near Record Low for Fifth Straight Year — Gallup
- Trump Stuck at 42% Approval as Voters Split on Economy, AI, and Iran — The Harris Poll / HarrisX
- 95% of Americans Say the US Is Facing an Affordability Crisis — The Guardian / Harris Poll
- Most Americans Tolerate AI-Made Art But Balk at Replacing the Human Artist — Angus Reid USA
- Nearly 7 in 10 Americans Back Seizing Half of Big Tech AI Firms' Stock — Verasight
- UK Heatwave Moves No Needles: British Climate Attitudes Unchanged After Extreme Heat — YouGov
Until next time,
Alex Lundry
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