There’s this scene in Thank You for Smoking, the Christopher Buckley book-turned-movie1, where Nick Naylor, antihero protagonist and Washington spokesman for Big Tobacco, sits down for his regular weekly lunch with his counterparts from the alcohol and firearms lobbies. They call themselves the MOD (”Merchants of Death”) Squad, and over lunch they bicker about whose industry is more loathed, whose products kill more people. Dark, delightfully satirical stuff.
Lately I’ve been imagining a present-day edition of the lunch. One of them mentions a call from a headhunter: a spokesperson role for the data center lobby. The table erupts in laughter. What kind of psycho takes that job?
A year ago, I said the hardest task in comms was audience assembly. The new titleholder involves a product that kills approximately no one, powers things most of us use every day, but, in terms of public popularity, sits somewhere above Somali pirates and below hemorrhoids.
But we come to help this woebegone comms person, not to bury them. The short version of the answer: “storytelling” or better messaging aren’t going to win the day here, and the sooner your C-suite sees this, the better off you’ll all be.
The polling is worse the more you look at it
If you’re a regular PF reader, you already know the topline figures. Per Gallup, 71% of Americans oppose the construction of an AI data center in their area — stronger opposition than for nuclear power plants, Gallup’s prior benchmark for infrastructure nobody wants. There’s no meaningful difference in total opposition across age, race, education level, income, or urban versus rural. It holds across party, too: even in battleground congressional districts, a majority of Republicans view data centers unfavorably, though Democrats are the more intense opponents.
Usually the tech industry’s move in response to this kind of problem is an awareness campaign: people just need to understand data centers better. But awareness isn’t converting. Pew found that the people who have heard the most about data center projects are also the most negative, with 67% of the heard-a-lot cohort saying data centers are bad for their home energy costs versus 42% of those who had heard only a little. Quinnipiac found Pennsylvania voters following the issue “very closely” oppose local data centers overwhelmingly (86%) and statewide opposition there climbed from 68% to 74% in five months. The people paying attention are the ones turning against it.
The rest of the internals fare just as poorly. Pew has data centers underwater on the environment (39% mostly bad to 4% mostly good), on home energy costs (38 to 6), and on quality of life for people living nearby (30 to 6). The only net-positive findings are local jobs (25 to 15) and tax revenue (23 to 12), uncontested ground nobody is fighting over. Even that is soft: 62% of battleground constituents think the job numbers are overpromised.
A hyperscale data center in your backyard offers a community almost nothing to hang its hat on. The benefits accrue privately or nationally; the costs (acreage, water, megawatts, a hum that never stops) land locally and materially.
The projects do hand local residents one asset: a throat to choke. Every anxiety about the technology (jobs, slop, surveillance, who stands to get rich) lands on the one piece of it you can raise hell against, and possibly beat. Data Center Watch lists 833 opposition groups across 49 states, more than double the count from December, with $130 billion in projects blocked or delayed in the first quarter alone, roughly matching the total for all of 2025.
Even if they don’t shoot the messengers, people still don’t trust them. Per Anthropic’s own polling fielded late last year, only 15% of Americans trust AI companies to make decisions about how the technology gets developed and used, the lowest of any institution tested, below even the federal government. The superb Substack writer Jasmine Sun recently published about her ten days driving through data center fights in Wisconsin and Michigan and heard “reflexive skepticism of every claim”: closed-loop cooling, tax revenue sums, jobs numbers, all of it.2
Nick Naylor had it easy. At least cigarettes are addictive.
The industry playbook is (mostly) grim
To address these headwinds (to put it mildly), the industry is offering... pledges. So many pledges.
In March, all seven major AI and cloud companies signed the White House’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge, voluntary and unenforced. xAI signed it 19 days after receiving a notice of intent to sue over its Memphis-area turbines. Mark Zuckerberg’s “The Future is for Everyone” essay, published the morning I’m writing this and running the same play as last summer’s, unveils a “Community Compact” and points to Richland Parish, Louisiana, where teachers got a $50,000 bonus out of the tax revenue Meta’s campus threw off. The essay promises “ensuring energy prices don’t rise.”
Soothing words. But the actions to date tell a different story.
Without any permits whatsoever, xAI threw up dozens of gas turbines alongside neighborhoods in South Memphis for its Colossus data center and only took them down only under legal threat. Then they repeated the same move across the state line in Southaven, where 69 of them are still running. The decommissioning starts eight days from now and doesn’t finish until mid-2027. xAI is the only operator facing a federal Clean Air Act suit over its buildout, though Trump’s Justice Department has moved to have it dismissed on national security grounds.3
Apparently Elon’s pledges are about as trustworthy as his Mars colonization timelines.
In Tucson, county officials signed a five-year NDA for “Project Blue,” a mysterious data center fronted by a shell entity. In reaction, the city council refused it city water in a unanimous vote, causing Amazon to walk, and the developer built in the county anyway. In Gilroy, here in the backyard of Silicon Valley, a $2 billion Amazon facility was approved with a single city staffer’s signature under 45-year-old industrial zoning rules, and residents found out when shovels hit dirt.
Perhaps no one has a bigger chasm between their pledges and their record than Meta. Richland Parish, where Zuck’s morning’s essay talked about funding teacher bonuses, is also where six of ten new gas plants are going. Meta more than tripled its order for the Louisiana campus, $11 billion and 7.5 gigawatts, better than a 30% increase to the state’s entire grid capacity. The ratepayers who funded the first three plants may be left holding the bag for the last twenty-five years of the ones that follow. In Wisconsin, where Meta negotiated in secret as “Degas LLC,” the utility commission criticized the company’s secrecy in the same breath that it approved the contract, a rebuke with nothing attached to it.
If you’re looking for one industry player doing things right, or at least better, it’s Microsoft.4
It is the only hyperscaler that has changed its terms materially, and it started before the present backlash peaked. It stopped requiring NDAs from local governments and is unwinding the ones it has. It told an Ohio legislative committee it would take no local tax abatements at its four Licking County sites. In Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, the site of the Foxconn fiasco, the village skipped the NDA, held upwards of sixty public meetings, and negotiated a tax guarantee; Microsoft is on track to pay $19.7 million there this year. The result is an operating facility and a town that mostly tolerates it.
The rest of the lot don’t have bad comms. They have bad facts. Microsoft changed theirs. The rest haven’t.
Don’t bring empty rhetoric to a money fight
If I were put in the Nick Naylor role for the data center lobby, I’d start where the leverage actually is. The job of comms here is to make the terms of the negotiation legible, credible, and safe for an official to sign off on. But first the deals on the table must change.
Insist on regulation. Attach enforceable guardrails to a proposed data center and local opposition falls from 57% to 38%. Head-to-head, a regulated data center beats an unregulated one, 74 to 6. The industry’s super PACs — Leading the Future and Build American AI, better than $50 million into this year’s congressional races — are meanwhile chasing federal preemption, which polls at 16%. The federal wind is at their backs. Campaign for binding standards anyway, loudly, first, where the people are.
Tear up the government NDAs, now. Microsoft has done it, but no one has matched it. A public official telling a constituent they’re not allowed to say anything about a project, or even about the existence of an NDA, is a trust vaporizer on contact. It also burns the only credible messenger in the room. Americans trust independent experts at 43%; they trust AI companies at 15% and their own state and local officials at 19%. Rather than protecting a surrogate, the NDAs convert a neutral official into evidence of a cover-up. The shell companies and codenames go in the same bin.
Sign contracts, not pledges. Power bills are the loudest grievance; half of Gallup’s opponents cite resource use, with water and energy tied at 18% each. Eat the grid-upgrade costs, including the share that lands on residential bills, and put it in writing with the utility. Anthropic committed to exactly this in February, covering “the shares of these costs that would otherwise be passed onto consumers.” New Jersey went further and made it law, the first state to put data centers in their own ratepayer class — 85% of projected power costs, locked for a decade. Water belongs in the same contract, and here the engineering has largely already won: the $31 million reclaimed-water plant Microsoft financed in Quincy, Washington has been running since 2021. Publish per-site consumption, metered, audited by someone the county hires. Then do the same for noise, the cheapest differentiation left on the table: the acoustic engineering is mature, ordinances are tightening anyway, and I can’t find a hyperscaler that has offered a decibel commitment at the property line up front.
Retire the jobs slide, or at least stop centering it. It argues the one thing the public already grants, even though 62% think you’re inflating it anyway. You can’t win a fight nobody is picking. Microsoft’s no-abatement move in Ohio shows somebody has figured this out. It’s the tax base, stupid.
Now the concession: nobody has proven that this slate of reforms will flip a net-no to a net-yes. The polling suggests the path is walkable. Nobody’s walked it. Yet.
Which brings us back to the MOD Squad table. In Thank You for Smoking, Nick Naylor’s superpower was changing the subject: don’t argue health, argue freedom.5 Data centers don’t get that move. The subject is the well, the meter, and the air, and the subject lives next door and votes.
Executive produced by Trump AI czar David Sacks, his first foray into the film industry post-PayPal. A beloved movie of this newsletter all the same.
Jasmine is doing the best first-person writing about AI as a cultural phenomenon, full-stop. Subscribe now.
Because of course.
This is no accident. Microsoft vice chair and president (and formerly general counsel) Brad Smith is as canny an operator as there is, and over his 33 years in Redmond has seen every conceivable kind of tech-and-government battle imaginable. And chief communications officer/friend of the newsletter Frank Shaw (17 years in the role this year, and even more before that leading the Microsoft account at WE) has been right there with him as savvy strategist and partner. If the company seems like the mature actor in contrast to others, that’s because it is.
How’s this for poetic irony: APCO Worldwide, which ran Philip Morris’s secondhand-smoke campaign, is now running ads for data center front groups.
You're so right about the regulation part of the data center lobbying game plan. I wrote about this for Slate years ago regarding the 2009 tobacco bill, which gave the FDA regulatory powers over the industry. The by-product of course was that tobacco won an eternal reprieve from those calling for an outright ban, an ideas which was starting to get some steam back then.
The FDA can fiddle at the margins, control marketing, test scientific claims, but forevermore tobacco is a product upon which a bureaucracy depends on for its survival (the regulatory body is funded by user fees). It will never be banned, it will never be replaced, it will always contribute to the tax base, the incumbent companies will remain entrenched, and disincentives to innovate on safety mean that consumers will bear the brunt of regulation in the end.
In other words, regulation is a perfect blueprint to sustain and lock in an industry whose existence is being threatened. Like data centers. I would imagine we'll see a similar user-funded, mostly toothless regulatory body voted into existence before long.
They needed to start so much smaller. Start with "it’s been X number of years since Google changed search, but we feel it’s time for search to get smarter. Think of AI tool XYZ as a concierge to help you find the information you need, whenever you need it.” This is far less appealing to Wall Street than the Metropolis-level dystopia they’ve proposed, but it might have better reflected use cases for consumers and been less threatening overall. Not unique to AI industry inasmuch as trying to talk to Wall Street without Main Street finding out is harder than ever to do.