Analysis
At a rally in Ohio, the crowd reaction to Donald Trump's defense of data centers went quiet, Fortune reports -- a small moment that captures a bigger shift: the AI infrastructure buildout has become a political liability that crosses party lines, even as the administration keeps pushing it.
Trump reportedly told the crowd "you can't just turn them off," addressing the data centers directly as both an economic necessity and a source of local frustration -- rising electricity bills, water use, and construction noise are the recurring complaints near new sites, Fortune notes, and Ohio has become one of the country's most contested data center corridors alongside Virginia and Georgia, a strain Pulse has also tracked in our look at data center water use.
The Backlash Is Getting Pricier
The friction isn't limited to rally-crowd silence. In a separate Fortune story the same day, residents fighting eminent domain near a project nicknamed "Project Hazelnut" described themselves as "mini Erin Brockoviches," and the data center operator is now paying individual neighbors $10,000 each as a direct incentive to drop opposition -- a markedly more expensive concession than the community grants hyperscalers have typically offered. That follows Amazon's own move, reported this week, to stop using NDAs with communities near its data center sites after backlash over secrecy.
Three forces are converging on the same towns at once:
- Power and water strain -- new data centers draw enough electricity and cooling water to visibly affect local utility rates and reservoir levels, the underlying complaint behind most town-hall opposition
- Eminent domain fights -- site acquisition for land and transmission corridors is pulling in property owners who never signed up to be part of an AI buildout
- Direct cash concessions -- Project Hazelnut's $10,000 per-neighbor payout shows operators now pricing opposition as a line item rather than a goodwill problem
What The Headline Undersells
A quiet rally crowd and a $10,000 payout in one county don't mean the buildout is slowing nationally -- announced hyperscaler capital expenditure for AI infrastructure is still rising, and no major project has been cancelled outright over local opposition this cycle. The risk is narrower: permitting delays, utility rate fights, and eminent domain litigation in a handful of contested corridors, not a reversal of the broader trend. Critics of the buildout also don't speak with one voice -- some object to water use, others to tax abatements, others to eminent domain -- which makes a single policy fix harder to land.
For VCs and LPs underwriting AI infrastructure deals, the diligence item isn't whether data centers get built -- they will -- it's which specific sites face multi-year permitting fights that blow up a project's timeline and cost basis. Ohio, Virginia, and Georgia are the corridors to watch for the next ruling.
