Topline results and crosstabs for the poll can be found at www.umass.edu/poll

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The latest national University of Massachusetts Amherst Poll has found that just 11% of Americans say they would support the construction of an artificial intelligence data center in their local community, while 65% oppose their construction.

Nearly half (49%) of the 1,000 respondents surveyed said that they strongly oppose the local construction of data centers. Just 5% strongly support their local construction, while about 1 in 4 respondents (24%) said that they neither support nor oppose their construction.

“In an increasingly polarized America, where generational, class, racial, and partisan groups often find themselves on opposite sides of our most pressing political, economic, and cultural debates, it is striking to find an issue on which Americans are largely in agreement. Opposition to AI data centers has emerged as one of these rare areas of consensus,” says Tatishe Nteta, provost professor of political science at UMass Amherst and director of the poll. “Nearly two-thirds of Americans oppose the construction of AI data centers in their local communities, and this opposition cuts across the political and demographic spectrum. Majorities of Harris voters (81%) and Trump voters (52%), Democrats (76%) and Republicans (52%), and liberals (84%) and conservatives (51%) all oppose the construction of AI data centers in their communities.”

“The remarkable thing is that we can’t find a constituency that actually wants these data centers,” says Raymond La Raja, professor of political science at UMass Amherst and co-director of the poll. “Republicans are more receptive than Democrats, but even Republicans oppose a data center in their community by nearly 3-to-1, 52% to 18%. Among the strongest MAGA supporters—the group most receptive to data centers—just 25% support them being built nearby, compared with 42% who oppose. The politics of AI may be somewhat polarized, but resistance to putting its infrastructure next door crosses the partisan divide.”

“In order to better understand this emerging movement and the public opinion behind it, we asked respondents to tell us in their own words why they feel the way they do about AI data centers,” says Alexander Theodoridis, associate professor of political science and co-director of the UMass Poll. “This gives us an opportunity to see what Americans are thinking, uninfluenced by choices we put in front of them. We then used the latest methods in AI text-as-data analysis to classify these responses. The responses tended to cite more local or community considerations like environmental or natural resource use (28%), the impact on utility bills and costs (10%), and land use and local disruptions (15%). A smaller proportion of respondents (13%) talked about their general distrust of AI and the industry. So, a big chunk of Americans may not oppose data centers per se, but they do not want them in their backyard.”

“The conventional wisdom is that strong public opposition to data centers reflects a more general negative reaction to generative AI, but our poll results suggest this isn’t exactly right,” notes Jesse Rhodes, professor of political science at UMass Amherst and co-director of the poll. “When we asked people to explain why they opposed data centers, relatively few expressed more general opposition to generative AI. Instead, most people expressed more specific local concerns—that data centers will wreak environmental havoc by polluting fresh water, increasing fossil fuel use, and degrading farmland and forests. They are concerned that during a period of dramatic climate change data centers make a bad situation worse. So, although Americans may have serious misgivings about generative AI, their strong opposition to the siting of data centers shouldn’t be interpreted as a stand-in for these more general fears.”

Conversely, Rhodes notes that the few supporters of data centers have distinctive views. “While opponents cite negative environmental and aesthetic impacts as well as broader distrust of the generative AI industry, supporters argue that data centers are essential for economic development,” he says. “One argument is that data centers will spur local job creation and boost local economies, particularly in depressed areas. But data center boosters also argue that more data centers are needed to ensure American economic dominance, especially in competition with China. For these individuals, data centers are a key to the United States’ long-term economic competitiveness.”

“Taken together, these findings suggest that the debate over AI data centers is, at its core, a debate over costs and benefits,” Nteta says. “Opponents are overwhelmingly focused on the tangible costs that these facilities impose on their communities, while supporters point to the broader economic and strategic benefits of AI development. Americans may agree that AI represents the future, but they appear far less certain about who should pay the price for building it.”
 

Broad disapproval of the president’s handling of AI

The new UMass Amherst Poll also asked respondents how well they believe President Donald Trump has handled the issue of artificial intelligence, and he did not rate well.

“Americans aren’t giving President Trump particularly high marks for his handling of artificial intelligence,” La Raja says. “Just 23% say he has handled AI well, compared with 57% who say he has handled it poorly, and the public has grown more negative since March. The share saying Trump has handled AI ‘not well at all’ has risen from 36% to 43%. AI may be a new issue, but it is fast becoming one on which politicians are judged negatively.”

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“In recent weeks, Americans’ fears about the rapid development of artificial intelligence have been underscored by a series of troubling developments,” Nteta explains. “Hundreds of OpenAI agents broke containment and launched a coordinated cyberattack against the open-source platform Hugging Face, while Jacob Coxon, a former OpenAI and Anthropic researcher, resigned from Anthropic, declaring that the company was not ‘acting responsibly’ and warning that many in the industry believe AI ‘could kill us all by the end of the decade.’ These developments prompted Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to call for the industry to slow the pace of AI development and put greater emphasis on safety.

“The growing recognition of the potential dangers of AI among industry insiders reflects the trepidation that many Americans have toward the technology and the opposition to AI data centers in their local communities that we find in our poll,” Nteta continues. “Members of Congress on both sides of the partisan divide have begun responding to these concerns with calls for greater regulation of AI. President Trump, however, has remained steadfast in his support for continued AI development and the construction of data centers, arguing that pulling back would risk allowing China and other global competitors to overtake the United States. On this issue, Americans are not following the president. With Americans across demographic and political groups expressing concerns about the president’s approach to AI, the question is whether Trump will respond to growing public unease by changing course. But if his comments, actions and past history are any indication, Americans should not expect the president to reverse course anytime soon.”

“The reality of artificial intelligence, and the policy issues associated with it, have surged into salience among the American public in recent years,” Theodoridis adds. “Our prior polling revealed a great deal of unease regarding AI and an overall pessimistic outlook regarding what the technology will mean for society. In April 2025, we found that most Americans (64%) believed AI will increase the spread of false information and 55% were worried that AI will threaten the future of humanity. About 4 in 10 respondents (39%) thought AI will eliminate or reduce opportunities in their desired field and 36% believed AI will increase inequality in society. Fewer than 3 in 10 Americans told us AI will make them more productive (29%), make people less lonely (21%) or improve the economy (23%). Fifty-eight percent of Americans told us in 2025 that AI should be strictly regulated by the government.”

“With this overwhelming opposition coming from virtually every corner of the American demographic and political spectrum, it is curious why Speaker Mike Johnson and President Trump have been so adamant in their support for the continued expansion of AI data centers,” Nteta says. “Trump has repeatedly championed the growth of data centers and AI infrastructure, while Johnson has similarly emphasized the need to build data centers and related infrastructure in the U.S. With less than two months until Election Day and Republicans facing a challenging political environment, legislative movement on AI regulation may be the issue that Republicans in Congress need to stem the tide of a Democratic Blue Wave.”
 

Methodology

This University of Massachusetts Amherst Poll of 1,000 respondents nationally was conducted by YouGov Aug. 21-26. The respondents were matched to a sampling frame on gender, age, race and education. The sampling frame was constructed by stratified sampling from the full 2023 American Community Survey (ACS) 1-year sample with selection within strata by weighted sampling with replacements (using the person weights on the public use file).

The matched cases were weighted to the sampling frame using propensity scores. The matched cases and the frame were combined, and a logistic regression was estimated for inclusion in the frame. The propensity score function included age, gender, race/ethnicity, years of education, region and home ownership. The propensity scores were grouped into deciles of the estimated propensity score in the frame and post-stratified according to these deciles.

The weights were then raked (iterative proportional fitting) on 2024 presidential vote choice and post-stratified using a four-way stratification of gender, age (4-categories), race (4-categories) and education (4-categories) to produce the final weight.

The margin of error of this poll is 3.5%.

Topline results and crosstabs for the poll can be found at www.umass.edu/poll