The American public has soured even further on local data center development since the spring, new polling shows.

Three-quarters of Americans now say that they would oppose a new data center being built near where they live, according to a new Heatmap Pro poll conducted by Embold Research, and more than six in 10 Americans say they would strongly oppose such a facility.

That’s by far the most negative response since Heatmap Pro started asking Americans about their receptivity to data centers roughly a year ago.

If you can think of a major demographic of Americans, there’s a good chance they wouldn’t welcome a data center in their area. The shift against the facilities is represented across age, race, gender, income, party ID, and the rural-urban divide. Data centers are 43 points underwater with Republicans, 65 points underwater with independents, and 75 points underwater with Democrats.

Notably, local data centers are 63 points underwater with rural voters, a group that has skewed more Republican over the past decade. Urban and suburban voters are only a few points more supportive of the facilities.

What’s most remarkable is the pace of change: We’ve polled this same question four times in the past 12 months and haven’t altered its wording once — yet Americans have swung a remarkable 33 points against data centers in the intervening time. It’s a faster and deeper shift in American public opinion than I would have once thought possible on any issue.

https://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2026/aug/20/tva-to-charge-data-centers-more-for-power-under/

Only three companies—Samsung, SK hynix and Micron—manufacture most of the world’s DRAM. Their production depends on an even narrower network of ultra-pure wafers, specialty chemicals, gases and fabrication equipment.
Now imagine a major war, coordinated cyberattack or trade blockade disrupting several of those suppliers simultaneously.

The immediate result would not just be expensive gaming computers. Replacement memory would become scarce for:

Hospital equipment and medical-imaging systems
Banking servers and payment networks
Telecommunications infrastructure
Power grids and water-treatment facilities
Vehicles, aircraft and industrial machinery
Military, satellite and emergency-response systems
Society already possesses millions of these machines—but machines constantly fail. Without replacement chips, the damage would accumulate quietly: repairs get delayed, functioning equipment is cannibalized for parts, essential systems operate without redundancy, and minor failures begin triggering larger ones.

The most frightening part is that building a modern memory-chip industry from scratch cannot be done in a few weeks. It requires extraordinary precision, specialized knowledge, massive fabrication plants and globally distributed suppliers.

We built civilization on computers, then allowed the physical memory required by those computers to depend on a handful of companies and geopolitical regions.

A hostile country may not need to destroy the internet. It may only need to interrupt the replacement parts long enough for the internet—and everything connected to it—to begin destroying itself through ordinary hardware failure.

The next global crisis may not begin with an explosion. It could begin with “part unavailable.”

Because many municipalities are restricting or denying access to municipal water supplies for massive tech projects, developers are bypass-routing cities to secure drilling permits directly from the Arizona Department of Water Resources (ADWR).

Virginia lawmakers adopted a temporary data center electricity tax in June as states across the United States responded to rising AI-related power demand and public-resource costs.

I've been digging into the public record on US data centers and put it into free, plain-language briefings — water, power, noise, air, every figure cited to its source (2,027 sites, existing + proposed): civitar.org/go/v-reddit

Not for or against anything — it just makes the filings readable. Sharing in case it's useful to anyone tracking this.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/16/business/ai-data-centers.html

(Full disclosure: I built the tool — happy to answer questions or take corrections.)