Data centers are a technical marvel, but nobody wants one near their home

The MIT Technology Review opinion piece, written by Mat Honan and published on January 14, 2026, lays out a paradox: hyperscale data centers are marvels of engineering and, at the same time, are drawing growing local opposition across much of the United States.

The piece first describes the sheer scale of these facilities. A single one can span millions of square feet, require millions of pounds of steel, aluminum and concrete, and house hundreds of thousands of high-end GPUs working in parallel to run AI models. According to the article, a single chip can cost more than $30,000, and their cooling systems are complex feats of engineering in their own right. The author also notes that the amount of capital poured into building them is so large that, as many argue, it is single-handedly propping up the US stock market and economy, and recalls the announcement of a $500 billion private investment in data centers made by the US president alongside OpenAI's CEO on his first full day in office.

Against that enthusiasm, the article documents public pushback: in Virginia, the state leading construction; in Nevada, over water use; in Michigan, Arizona and South Dakota, where Sioux Falls residents berated city council members after a data center was approved. But the central case is Georgia, a politically divided state where, according to the author, almost everyone agrees they are fed up with these facilities.

Last year, the elections for Georgia's Public Service Commission turned out to be unexpectedly close and ended in an upset for the incumbent Republican commissioners. Although national politics may have played a role, the central issue was soaring electricity bills, frequently blamed on a data center boom rivaled only by Virginia's. That boom has political roots: in 2018, the Georgia General Assembly approved tax breaks for computer equipment, cooling, job creation and property.

The local example is Bolingbroke, in Monroe County (population 27,954). Commissioners were considering rezoning 900 acres near the town (population 492) for a data center. According to The Telegraph of Macon, some 900 people turned out for a meeting and opposition was nearly unanimous. The developers had promised millions of dollars for the county, that the facility would be hidden from view and that it would meet the highest environmental standards. Even so, the county rejected the project in August of last year. In nearby Twiggs County, by contrast, officials allowed a 300-acre center to move forward despite strong, organized opposition, suggesting that public opinion often carries little weight in the decision.

The author lists the obvious reasons for the opposition. First: the speed and scale of construction strain power grids and drive up bills, since capacity expansions benefit tech companies but their cost is spread among local ratepayers. As an example, a planned Meta data center in Wyoming would require more electricity than all the households in the state combined. Second: the environmental impact, as dirty energy is often used; the article cites xAI's case in Memphis with methane generators. Nuclear is mentioned as an alternative, but traditional plants take a decade or more and new reactors will take years. Third: water use, which varies widely and is often opaque, and several states are trying to require disclosure. Fourth: noise, a constant 24-hour hum, compared to "a highway that never stops." Fifth: jobs, since once construction is finished they employ very few people.

Honan suspects there is also an emotional reason, and compares it to the protests more than a decade ago against Silicon Valley tech companies' corporate shuttle buses in San Francisco. Those buses used public resources, such as the streets, without being seen to pay their share, but the protests were about something bigger: gentrification and the transformation of society by the tech industry. You couldn't stop Google, but you could stop a Google bus. The buses were eventually regulated.

According to the author, something similar is happening with data centers. We are told that AI is transforming society and is in almost every app, even for those who don't use ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. There is fear of job losses or even something worse, and, so far, the results have not lived up to the promises. Maybe you can't stop Google, but you can stop one of its data centers.

The article closes on a skeptical note about how far the resistance can go: the buses, though regulated, are still common and San Francisco is more gentrified than ever. And in Monroe County life goes on: in October, Google confirmed it had bought 950 acres of land next to the interstate highway and plans to build a data center there.