Data centers have the tech — now, they need to develop trust

The American news media have suddenly discovered data centers. It is as if editors across the country woke up all at once to find these big digital infrastructures rising in communities throughout the nation. Report after report now warns of the proliferation of data centers in America, and the dangers they pose to our very way of life.

Political strategists expect the issue of data centers to be a big part of congressional, state and local campaigns in 2026 and 2028. Candidates who land on the wrong side of the debate may find their political futures shaped not by ideology, but by how much in campaign contributions they accepted from the growing data-center industry.

In the media, developers are often cast as sinister, profit-driven carpetbaggers eager to make billions off unsuspecting communities, many of which are minority, rural or poor . And some of those concerns are warranted .

Deep-pocketed data center developers, for their part, are gaining reputations for offering eye-popping packages of investment and economic growth to receptive communities. These inducements come with promises of new jobs, training programs, infrastructure upgrades and long-term development, often in regions that have lacked them all. Reports of multimillion-dollar cash offers for land have become a staple of the anti-data center narrative, especially in cases where residents have refused the money.

Communities are being asked to accept behemoth buildings with sprawling footprints covering acres and acres of land. These facilities demand extraordinary levels of electricity and water consumption , require new transmission lines, trigger zoning changes, and introduce industrial activity on a scale many places have never experienced — and did not invite. Then there are the environmental concerns: noise, waste and potential long-term health effects , many of which may not be fully understood for decades to come.

While the developers talk in terms of investment, innovation, competition and returns, residents speak in a different dialect. They want to know whether their utility bills will go up , whether server waste will contaminate their land and crops, and whether that incessant humming sound will ever cease.

Both sides may be talking about data centers, but the real conversation is all about trust.

Gallup recently found that seven in ten Americans oppose construction of an AI data center in their local area. A Reuters-Ipsos poll reached a similar conclusion. Even in Virginia, the nation’s most mature data center market, public enthusiasm has declined sharply despite decades of substantial economic benefit.

Part of the problem is that many Americans have grown skeptical of the very companies promising to deliver the future. Big Tech spent years telling us that social media would connect us, algorithms would empower us, the gig economy would liberate us, and artificial intelligence would make almost everything better. Some of those promises proved true, to be sure. But others either have not happened or came with consequences that were ignored or discovered after the fact.

Privacy is a thing of the past. Kids have become productized. Algorithms have become editors and monitors of private life, and jobs have been disrupted. Along the way, enormous fortunes were made by a handful of companies, and technological advancement has been subordinated to trust.

Data centers have certainly inherited our distrust. According to Stanford’s 2026 AI Index , the U.S. hosts more than 5,400 data centers today. Just look at the protests, lawsuits, regulatory battles and community pushback surrounding current and proposed data centers throughout the country, and it becomes clear: Americans are willing to forgo the benefits of tech in exchange for a bit of trust.

Trust that jobs will be fixed and not fleeting. Trust that the already-high cost of living will not climb higher. Trust that the long-term impacts of today’s data center boom will not fall hardest on those communities least able to bear it.

Even with these challenges — some of them are intractable — it would be a mistake to reject every data center proposal outright. These facilities are becoming the essential industrial infrastructure of the 21st century, and they are needed provided as long as there is responsible governance and corporate operations.

Beyond local on-the-ground employment, there is the matter of competition. AI increasingly is powering the tools and systems we rely on — medical devices, electronics, vehicles, education and more. And we cannot ignore the global economic reality that the U.S. and China are locked in a high-stakes technology race .

Not only have we come to rely on AI powered by data centers, we cannot live without it. Data center developers know this better than anyone in our society. As such, they must accept an added obligation to reassure the public. They cannot merely say, “Trust us and everything will be fine.”

Data centers should be built. America needs the jobs, the investment, the computing power, the competition and the strategic advantages they provide. But the industry should understand the bargain it is now being asked to make. We do not have to worry about the technology. That will take care of itself. Our concerns are whether the data center industry can be trusted to take care of us in the process.

Communities are not being asked to approve a structure full of servers. They are being asked to trust rich and powerful companies to make consequential decisions about their future, and to believe that what is good for the corporate balance sheet will also be good for the public. Companies that balance these interests will earn more than money — they will earn trust.

Adonis Hoffman writes on business, law and policy. He served in senior legal roles at the FCC and in the U.S. House of Representatives.