Everyone can find a reason to dislike data center construction
Frontier AI labs are convinced that scaling up computation is the path to improving artificial intelligence, and they’ve put their money where their mouths are, to the tune of trillions of dollars of planned data center projects. Surveys of public opinion say that more than 60% of Americans favor limiting new data centers, particularly in their communities. And the longest-running surveys show that sentiment is growing fast.
- ▪Frontier AI labs are convinced that scaling up computation is the path to improving artificial intelligence, and they’ve put their money where their mouths are, to the tune of trillions of dollars of planned data center projects.
- ▪Surveys of public opinion say that more than 60% of Americans favor limiting new data centers, particularly in their communities.
- ▪And the longest-running surveys show that sentiment is growing fast.
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| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/22/everyone-can-find-a-reason-to-dislike-data-center-construction/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 22 Sep 2026 13:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-22T13:03:51.600Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-22T13:03:51.600Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 2L_ze3bl-n5u · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Frontier AI labs are convinced that scaling up computation is the path to improving artificial intelligence, and they’ve put their money where their mouths are, to the tune of trillions of dollars of planned data center projects. The rest of us? Surveys of public opinion say that more than 60% of Americans favor limiting new data centers, particularly in their communities. And the longest-running surveys show that sentiment is growing fast. Data center projects worth $68 billion were disrupted by local opponents in the second quarter of 2026, according to the trackers at Data Center Watch. AI companies and their investors have a hard time reconciling the growing demand for their products with opposition to the key infrastructure behind it.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
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