Gallup published its first poll on the topic in May, surveying 1,000 US adults between 2 and 18 March, and found that 71% of Americans oppose building data centres in their local area: 48% strongly opposed, against only 25% in favour1. The same Gallup wave recorded 53% opposition to new nuclear plants. The headline number is the first national quantification of what the moratorium calendar has been signalling for months, and it lands harder than the comparison to nuclear because it removes the radiation framing operators had quietly used to position data centres as the safer build.
The reasons matter as much as the topline. Half of opponents cite excessive resource use, split evenly between energy and water, and 16% cite pollution. That breakdown puts the Amazon Boardman nitrate settlement and the Loudoun water-draw disclosures squarely on the resource-use side of the argument rather than the build-footprint side. It also signals that opposition is not aesthetic or property-value-based, the kind of objection planners can negotiate around with setbacks and landscaping. It is rooted in finite-resource arithmetic that operators cannot redesign their way past.
The industry's response has so far leaned on the 67% of supporters who cite job creation, a number drawn from the same poll. The arithmetic does not survive contact with the operating data: a hyperscale campus the size of the Loudoun cluster supports staffing levels in the dozens once commissioned, not the thousands the framing implies. Camden County, Georgia lost the job-creation argument; the same case now meets Denver, Seattle and Minneapolis councils in the week of 18 May. With Gallup at 71%, an industry communications campaign built for the boom phase has to retool for a backlash that now has a national poll behind it.
