Source: Andrew Yang
Seventy-five percent local opposition represents a structural problem for the AI infrastructure buildout that tech companies have assumed would face only regulatory friction. It's a consumer preference issue, not a policy one: half of Americans now view data centers as net-negative for the country, which means tech companies can't engineer their way past this through efficiency gains or promises of local jobs. The backlash suggests that proximity politics will become a major constraint on where compute can actually be located, potentially fragmenting the centralized data infrastructure model that has powered cloud computing for two decades.