AI Data Centers Have Become The Harder Backyard Sell

What this establishes institutionally is that AI developers have lost the advantage of abstraction. Model launches can be sold as software; data centers cannot. Gallup’s local-area polling, as summarized in coverage of , puts the fight at the zoning-board layer, where residents argue over farmland, power, water, and daily disruption. Once the debate moves there, lab branding stops doing useful work: the project becomes another industrial neighbor asking a community to accept concentrated costs.