Pennsylvania governor signs order restricting data centers

Data centers in particular have grown deeply unpopular in the United States, The Wall Street Journal reported this week. The account cited a March survey by Gallup in which 71% of respondents said they would oppose the construction of a data center in their local area. By comparison, just 53% said they would oppose a nearby nuclear energy plant.

Political sentiment has followed the public mood. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who once embraced AI, signed an executive order on Tuesday “placing strict guardrails on new data centers,” as the Journal tells it. The move marks a turn in an environment where politicians who have championed the data centers are instead criticizing them.

The friction has become a problem the Journal described as a mounting public-relations crisis for tech giants. Microsoft, OpenAI and Amazon need widespread buy-in to avoid speed bumps, maintain political support and curb blowback, the Journal reported. To win that support, the firms are now holding listening sessions, offering job guarantees, and writing large checks to invest in nearby communities, according to the newsletter.

One example appeared in July, when OpenAI hosted an open house at the Effingham County College & Career Academy, near its planned Georgia data center. OpenAI staff ran educational booths, posters described what the facility could look like, and the evening included a taco bar, according to the account.

The Journal described the community effort as part of a wider new phase in the AI infrastructure expansion — and described the goal as trying to change the public’s tune.

The pace of the buildout itself is accelerating. The Journal’s newsletter also reported that OpenAI has signed a 10-gigawatt data-center deal in Ohio with SoftBank’s SB Energy, a project partly backed by Nvidia, expected to grow into one of the largest AI facilities to date. A separate WSJ analysis in the same edition found that nine of the country’s leading technology enterprises hold about $3 trillion in off-balance-sheet commitments that do not appear on declared balance sheets, a sum the publication attributed primarily to AI projects.

How the community-centered outreach steers public opinion remains the open question.