Suspicious About The Impact Of Data Centers? Most Americans Agree With You

Suspicious About the Impact of Data Centers? Most Americans Agree With You

Last updated: 2026/03/14 at 7:40 PM

News Room Published 14 March 2026

If you’re cynical about the impact of data centers on the environment, energy costs, or quality of life in local communities, you’ve got plenty of company. Even if most Americans aren’t taking to the streets to protest, a survey of roughly 8,500 people from the Pew Center found that far more think data centers are bad than good for the environment: 39% versus 4% of those surveyed. Meanwhile, 38% of Americans think that data centers have a negative impact on home energy costs versus just 6% who think they have a positive one.

Americans also had a broadly negative view of the impact of data centers on quality of life overall, with 30% thinking they had a negative impact versus 6% who thought they had a positive one. In contrast, Americans had a more broadly positive view of data centers when it came to their impact on jobs and the economy.

A quarter (25%) thought data centers were more harmful than beneficial for local jobs, versus 15% who thought the contrary. Just over one in five (23%) thought they had a positive impact on local tax revenue, versus 12% who thought they had a negative one. The Pew Center’s research also picked up a clear partisan divide in terms of how data centers are perceived. Half of the Democrats surveyed said that data centers are mostly bad for the environment, compared with 31% of the Republicans surveyed.

Democrats were also more likely to say data centers are mainly bad for home energy costs (44% vs. 33%) and the quality of life of nearby locals (37% vs. 24%). One quirk in the data noticed by researchers was that Americans who say they have heard “a lot” about data centers are much more likely than those who say they have heard “a little” to think they have a negative impact in all five areas surveyed.

The jury may still be out on the exact extent to which data centres actually impact electricity costs, with research from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory earlier this year saying multiple factors increase electricity costs—not just increased demand on the grid—and that data centers could sometimes even cause a decrease.

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And whether Americans really want data centres in their backyards may be immaterial in the coming decades. Many of Big Tech’s most recognisable names have made bold predictions about where data centers are heading, including figures such as Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk—though many experts have poured water on some of the more ambitious claims about data centers in space.