The numbers come first, and they are not flattering for the AI buildout.
Seven in ten Americans oppose building data centers in their area, including 48% who strongly oppose one, according to a Gallup poll released in May. A Pew Research Center survey found that among people who said they had heard a lot about data centers, 67% believed the facilities were mostly bad for household energy costs. The opposition is bipartisan: a Fox News poll found 60% of Republicans and 53% of self-identified MAGA voters oppose them.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is not disputing the sentiment. 'Clearly, people hate data centers — right now, at least,' Altman told Time. 'People are pretty negative on AI.'
The candor arrived at an uncomfortable moment. The Wall Street Journal reported, as confirmed by CNBC, that OpenAI's head of data centers Chris Malone left the company. OpenAI said it had 'recently reorganized' its infrastructure team.
The departure comes as OpenAI is planning to spend $50 billion this year on compute and is already pushing past the original 10-gigawatt target for Stargate, the infrastructure project launched with SoftBank with plans to invest as much as $500 billion in U.S. AI infrastructure. Recent additions include a more-than-1-GW Michigan campus, a Georgia project contracted for 3.2 GW of power, and an agreement to secure approximately 8 GW of IT capacity in southern Ohio. 'If anything, we should have bought a lot more,' said Sachin Katti, the OpenAI executive overseeing its compute efforts, in the same Time interview.
The public resistance is already carrying a price tag. At least 48 data center projects representing $156 billion in investment have been blocked or stalled by local resistance. Some estimates peg the electricity cost of data centers at $23 billion. U.S. power consumption grew about 1.7% a year from 2020 through 2025 after barely growing over the previous 15 years, according to the Energy Information Administration, which cited data centers as a driver.
State governments are moving to formalize the backlash. Local officials proposed more than 120 moratoriums on data center development in 38 states as of July. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ordered regulators to scrutinize data centers seeking to connect to the state's power grid; ERCOT was facing roughly 474 gigawatts of requests for new connections, more than five times the state's record peak electricity demand. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro signed an executive order on Aug. 18 imposing new energy-affordability, environmental and community requirements on data centers and removing AI data centers from a fast-track permitting program.
Texas is central to Stargate, with its flagship site in Abilene and additional pending projects in the state, making Abbott's scrutiny order a direct operational variable for OpenAI.
CEO Times take: The free market built the AI infrastructure boom; the administrative state is now moving to tax, slow and condition it. Regulatory uncertainty — not engineering limits — is the real constraint on American compute capacity. Capital rewards clear rules, and right now the rules are multiplying faster than the gigawatts. The deeper irony is that the same voters who want AI's benefits are voting, at the local level, to block the physical plant that makes those benefits possible. Policymakers who want American AI leadership cannot have it both ways: the data centers and the moratoriums cannot coexist at scale.
