There’s no vaccination to protect local officials from the NIMBY virus now sweeping the country. A year ago, states and localities were racing to recruit data centers. Since then, an anti-data-center movement has sprung up and no one knows how to deal with it.

In June 2025, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Amazon executives celebrated a $20 billion deal for the company to build new centers and make a big investment in AI education. “We are already all in on AI,” Shapiro bragged. Pennsylvania, he said, had a “united front” focused on winning “the battle of AI supremacy.” Not to be outdone, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced last November that Texas would become the “epicenter of AI development.” More than 1,800 data centers were in development in the state, spurred along by big incentives and sales tax exemptions.

There’s been no bigger cheerleader for this campaign than President Donald Trump. Any community that opposed the data centers, he wrote on Truth Social, would “end up being backward and poor,” but “if they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign.”

But in late summer, officials across the country suddenly slammed on the brakes as public opposition ignited. Abbott announced a moratorium so the state could conduct an audit of the projects, especially to assess their use of power and water. Shapiro issued an executive order slapping restrictions on the centers, complaining about “predatory” projects and said he was determined to stop “bad proposals from infecting our commonwealth.” Across the country, more than 100 cities and towns imposed moratoriums on the projects.

Red or blue, urban or rural: it hasn’t mattered. In just months, data centers that had been hailed as major engines of development have become political pariahs, as local citizens took stock of how much water the centers would use, how much power they would consume, and how much land they would gobble up.

Three-fourths of Americans now oppose these projects. Most opposition is coming from places where developers proposed to build new centers, but Americans just about everywhere now worry about water and electricity use as well as what the large, noisy facilities would do to undeveloped land.

Public NIMBY uproar used to be movements focused on local projects — a highway through the neighborhood, the loss of local parkland, a new factory nearby. What’s different this time is that anti-data-center movement is fierce, simultaneous, and practically universal. It poses a huge problem for developers, who suddenly are finding their elaborate plans upended, with no way forward.

Why is the outburst of NIMBY opposition so different? I want to suggest that this stems from resistance to the COVID-era role of experts, who told us what we needed to do while leaving many unconvinced. Resistance to experts and scientific judgment has grown, from the ferocious Capitol Hill attack on Dr. Anthony Fauci to the anti-vax fever emanating from the Make America Healthy Again movement.

This is indeed a new phenomenon. From the 1960s to the beginning of COVID-19, trust in scientific experts was strong, consistent and bipartisan. With COVID-19, however, trust hit a major divide. In 2021, trust in science among Democrats was 65 percent. Three years later, it was 49 percent. Among Republicans, trust in 2021 was far lower, at 32 percent, and it plummeted to just 25 percent in 2024. Independents, as is usually the case, were halfway in between.

COVID-19 triggered a broad distrust of scientific experts. The data center industry has been infected by the problem, and people simply are not trusting reassurances that data centers would cause no harm. A social media spark fed a political wildfire that has swept across the political spectrum: people on the right are worried that data centers would gobble up their farmland, drain their wells, and take away their right to use their property; people on the left complain that data centers harm the environment and lead to more air pollution in the quest for more power generators. Meanwhile, the expert claims that data centers will produce lots of new jobs have been very tough to pin down.

Where are we going to put the data centers if everyone uses them but no one wants them? Asked about how to tackle the dilemma, Harvard University’s Roy Perlis said “we know we have to do something” to improve trust in experts, “but it’s not clear what we can do that’s not going to make it worse.”

Candidates who, just a few months ago, thought that data centers would be a winning issue are scrambling to get out in front of the tsunami of opposition. Data center developers, facing soaring demands for information processing but encountering mass opposition to plans for building new facilities, are falling back to regroup.

We’re all big consumers of artificial intelligence, even if many of us don’t recognize it. Our consumption is going to skyrocket, from the creep of AI into the search engines on our smartphones to the improved service we’re demanding from companies all around us. The collision between data center opposition and data center demands is a problem that will have to be solved. For now, though, only one thing is clear: no one knows what to do.

Governing's opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing's editors or management.