Pennsylvania data centers: resident opposition halts massive investments

Leading AI labs are convinced that scaling compute is the path to better models, and they are backing that belief with plans for trillions of dollars in data-center construction. The American public sees it differently: polls show more than 60% support limiting new centers, especially in their own communities, and the trend is only hardening. According to Data Center Watch tracking, projects worth 68 billion dollars were disrupted by local opponents in the second quarter of 2026 alone.

The research and methodology

A new report from Data & Society offers a deeper look at the motives behind the opposition. The study is based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, during which researchers interviewed 44 Pennsylvania residents between 2024 and 2026. The authors, who are critical of how AI is marketed to the public, do not attempt to measure the centers’ empirical impact but to understand how people experience the debate around their construction. “One advantage of ethnography and prolonged fieldwork is bursting the AI hype bubble,” said researcher Livia Garofalo. Residents, she said, are trying to reconcile the dissonance between the promise that AI is the next, inevitable industrial revolution and the concerns the technology raises.

An industrial trust crisis

The industry’s “inevitability” narrative landed badly in Pennsylvania. In July 2025 Governor Josh Shapiro presided over a summit celebrating 90 billion dollars in AI infrastructure and data-center investments. A year later he signed an order imposing new requirements on such projects and removing them from an expedited regulatory track. The researchers point to the state’s industrial history — coal mining, oil, steel, and fracking — as the source of deep skepticism toward utopian promises of industrial development. “Pennsylvania residents have enormous experience with industrial change, lineages of industrial trauma, enough to smell when things don’t feel right,” said Maia Woluchem, a program director at Data & Society and co-author of the report.

Unions versus residents

Despite the opposition, labor unions have remained the projects’ biggest backers, thanks to the temporary construction jobs they create, even though the finished centers will not be a significant source of employment. Unions see the projects as a lifeline for rebuilding their ranks. The researchers, meanwhile, describe the industry supporters’ activity as an influence campaign in its own right: the Data Center Coalition set up sites such as Pennsylvania Connects to promote the projects and spent at least 19 thousand dollars on state-government lobbying in the past year.

Post-partisan resistance

The opposition has spread in surprising ways. The researchers were struck by the diversity of the opponents and characterize the movement not as bipartisan but as post-partisan. “We don’t want to romanticize that everyone’s singing kumbaya together, but AI forces people to have a shared conversation about futures they want and a present they want — these struggles are completely organic,” Woluchem said, pointing to a variety of opposition sources converging around issues of water consumption, energy, noise, and transparency.