Pennsylvania’s data-center backlash is about trust, not China

What residents are pushing back against

Data & Society spent 18 months conducting ethnographic research and interviewed 44 Pennsylvania residents between 2024 and 2026. The researchers were not measuring the facilities’ actual effects. They were studying how people understand the arguments around them.

Livia Garofalo, a Data & Society researcher, told TechCrunch that long-term fieldwork helps move beyond the AI hype bubble. Residents are trying to reconcile the idea of AI as an inevitable next industrial revolution with their concerns about the technology and the infrastructure behind it.

Pennsylvania has seen several versions of this promise before:

That history has left residents skeptical of industrial projects that promise an almost utopian future. Maya Voluhem, Data & Society’s program director and a co-author of the report, said people in Pennsylvania know industrial change and the trauma associated with it. They notice when something feels wrong.

The political shift is visible in the state’s own policy. In July 2025, Governor Josh Shapiro spoke at a summit focused on $90 billion in data-center and AI-infrastructure investment. A year later, he signed an order imposing new requirements on such projects and removing them from an expedited regulatory program.

Unions are probably the industry’s strongest source of support because of the jobs promised during construction. Even while acknowledging that data centers will not become major employers once they are finished, unions see the projects as a chance to rebuild their membership.

The coalition is broader than the politics

The report does identify an influence campaign, but not the one AI companies’ critics are accused of serving. Data Center Coalition, an industry association, created sites such as “Pennsylvania Connects” to promote projects and spent at least $19,000 lobbying the state government last year.

The researchers were struck by the variety of people opposing data centers. They describe the movement as post-partisan rather than bipartisan: people with different political views are being pulled together by disputes over what happens to their towns.

The groups involved include:

The most immediate concerns are often material. Residents fear that data centers will raise their electricity bills, reduce property values and intensify frustration with the methods developers use to secure approval. Local officials may also be asked to sign nondisclosure agreements.

Voluhem said many residents closely watch municipal meetings. They may notice an unexpected representative from Amazon, Meta, Microsoft or a data-center developer. That can raise questions, particularly when a council member they once knew stops discussing the project with them.

The missing resource is trust

This is where the industry’s problem becomes harder than a permitting dispute. A single concession cannot address higher household bills, water consumption, corporate influence, health concerns and distrust of local procedures at the same time.

I think the report’s most important finding is that data-center opposition is not one movement with one demand. It is a collision between several forms of memory and anxiety, held together by the feeling that decisions are being made around communities rather than with them.

Maya Voluhem said the researchers did not want to romanticize the protests or present them as universal harmony. But AI is forcing people to discuss together what they want their present and future to look like. The protests bring together groups that might otherwise have little in common.

The report is also quiet about a point the industry would rather avoid: even a technically accurate promise of jobs or economic growth may fail when residents do not believe the people making it. The suspicion that protests are secretly organized by China offers an easy explanation, but the fieldwork points to a more ordinary one.

Garofalo described the conflict as an intrusion into people’s personal and social relationships. Someone can sit alone at home, talk to a chatbot and feel cared for while also understanding that it is a commercial product, and that their data and attention are being used to generate profit.

That contradiction reaches beyond the data center fence. AI companies are asking communities to accept the physical costs of systems that already complicate their social lives. Until the industry can address both sides of that bargain, more compute will keep producing less trust.