Data center developers: overdoing the resource contest, losing the culture conflict?
Stakeholder politics have become one the largest limiting factors on the rate of AI development in the United States. The first three months of 2026 produced the biggest single-quarter concentration of blocked and delayed data center projects on record. At least 75 projects valued at about $130B were disrupted by local opposition, according to Data Center Watch. Negative sentiment appears to be gaining ground. A July 2026 POLITICO Poll found that 41% of Americans would oppose a data center being built within three miles of where they live, up from 28% in a previous iteration of the poll in January.
Yet, reacting to widespread opposition against data centers in recent months, hyperscalers have created a new vulnerability. They have hyper-focused on resource distribution (who spends what, who gains what, who loses what). But in prioritizing the delivery of benefits to communities in exchange for their permission to build, developers risk losing the broader culture struggle. In turn, this oversight could drive the business costs of conflict up, not down.*
A central problem for data center developers — one that operators could inherit — is that they are doing little as an industry to show the public how decisions about distributions of costs and benefits are being made, and neither are they emphasizing how community governance contributes to those decisions. There are exceptions that I’m tracking: for example, Compass Data Centers.
In effect, the public’s desire for self-determination is being quashed by the leading hyperscalers. And this is a dangerous recipe in the context of a common sentiment by which AI feels like a coerced negotiation to much of the public, a step-change that’s imposing uncertainty on ways of living, working, and learning. A survey of 1,909 Americans conducted in spring 2026 by Zencity found that 50% believe that local residents should make the final decision about whether to approve a new data center (i.e., by a vote). Just 9% think that city staff should decide independently and 21% think that elected officials should decide using public comment as a basis.
Constructively, how can builders of AI infrastructure move forward?
Strategic considerations for AI data center developers
A stakeholder relations strategy for an AI data center project will falter if it is more technocratic than culturally attuned, as I wrote in my post on Microsoft's Community-First AI Infrastructure plan. The strategy needs to respond to a full range of community concerns, some of which operate on emotional registers that are not captured through debate or education on substantive resourcing issues such as power or water. Increasingly, it must also respond to community expectations for benefits, not just risk mitigation.
But by and large, community benefits distribution so far appears to be reactive, transactional, and powered by corporate decision-making. Hyperscalers are trumpeting economic growth through efforts like bestowing grants on schools, partnering with general contractors to hire workers in the building trades, and funding workforce development programs. Developers and operators are highlighting gains in resource efficiency, partnerships with local colleges, protection of greenspace on their campuses, and making gifts to local charities. Efforts like these can be constructive, but they have a counterpart that is easy to overlook.
The missing counterpart is systematic decision-sharing. While corporate communication about decisions already made are highly visible in the form of press releases and announcements, far less visible to local residents are the mechanisms for how these choices arise and the possibilities for having a voice.
To fill the gap, I am exploring certain strategies for data center developers and investors:
Community development priorities identified through systematic consultation with local residents, not standard templates.
Community benefits frameworks, including:
Good neighbor agreements (GNA): May be used as a step toward a community benefit agreement (CBA, see below). A record of mutual commitments between a project and a local community, creating the institutions through which future engagement runs. It sets up a joint committee, defines how community representatives are chosen, and establishes a grievance channel.
Community benefit agreements (CBA): Legally binding contract between a project developer and local community organizations to direct benefits from a project to the community’s priorities.
Host community agreements (HCA): Legally binding agreement between a project developer and the municipality where a project will be sited.
Community benefits plans (CBP): Voluntary roadmap reflecting how a developer plans to engage with communities across project stages. Although it does not involve enforcement mechanisms, it can pave the way for legally binding agreements.
Better understanding of rituals for promoting project legitimacy, social cohesion, community continuity, and anxiety reduction.
There are of course many best practices in corporate-community relations unmentioned here, but the cultural setting of data centers demands attention on those that offer self-determination, reflecting the parties’ own priorities and creativity. To understand one major reason why, see the Postscript below.
Glyptique Consulting LLC helps clients assess social license to operate in the data center sector by evaluating performance against emerging industry trends; designing communication strategies for developers, operators, and investors; and advising on how firms can become leaders in community relations practice.
Schedule a conversation to discuss how social license to operate applies to your portfolio and which strategic moves would strengthen community relations positioning at your firm or investees.
August 4, 2026
Postscript:
Why community perception of self-determination is imperative
AI data centers have become tangible signifiers of powerful corporate interests to Americans who feel powerless against them. In an article for the Washington Post, reporter Shira Ovide sketched what observers have been saying for a few months now: the physical infrastructure of AI has come to represent political and economic systems that are stacked against the majority of Americans. In this new symbolic sense, people are feeling that data center development is rigged.
This thesis is borne out in social media sentiment. The Soufan Center’s analysis of anti-data center narratives and threats, reported in May 2026, indicate growing frustration with perceived indifference on the part of corporations and government to AI’s consequences for ways of life and concentration of wealth.
Stakeholder politics for data center developers is now interacting with national politics. A string of Democrat and GOP notables – both elected officials and candidates for office – are playing the part of anti-tech crusader.
How are these cultural forces surfacing in the siting controversies for new data center development and expansions? They are showing up in people’s insistence that they have a say in how project decisions are made.
In the county next to me — and counties around the United States — residents are speaking out against data center projects that gain momentum without public notice. A letter to the local newspaper in Gilroy, California is paradigmatic:
“[Land] was handed to a trillion-dollar corporation on a holiday weekend, with no public meeting, no community vote, and no debate. Gilroy’s identity is on the line. We have nearly 40 wineries. Our agricultural heritage is not decoration – it is our economy, our identity, and our future. Data centers of this scale generate industrial heat, alter humidity, and extract water at volumes that directly threaten the microclimate that our vineyards depend on. This was never studied. Never disclosed. Never debated – because we were never given the chance. Gilroy cannot be a wine country and a data center corridor. That is a choice. It was made for us, in secret.”
To anticipate future scenarios for stakeholder politics in the United States related to data centers, I study the rhetoric of Senator Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) as one source for how populist views feed into public perception. Writing in June 2026 for the traditionalist media outlet, First Things, Hawley surfaced a populist appeal for self-determination:
“Who decides? Who will set the terms of the artificial intelligence era? So far, I regret to say, the country has not been offered an answer it can live with. … We are told that this technology is too complex for ordinary citizens to understand or to govern. The responsible course, we are told, is to leave its design and deployment in the hands of a small number of brilliant people in a small number of California office parks. We are being told … that Silicon Valley oligarchs should be allowed to reorder our society from the top down. … It is the administrative state, now venture-backed. And I have the same objection: A country governed by experts is not self-governing.”
I find myself turning back to the prescient book published in 2016 by sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. Spending time in Louisiana for five years to learn why populist politics are on the rise, she uncovered what she calls a “deep story” tying together the views of this community where people were raised with ideas of fair competition and social ascent through hard work. It created a need to restore ways of life and free decisions. In that story, she wrote (p. 222),
“[S]trangers step ahead of you in line, making you anxious, resentful, and afraid. A president allies with the line cutters, making you feel distrustful, betrayed. A person ahead of you in line insults you as an ignorant redneck, making you feel humiliated and mad. Economically, culturally, demographically, politically, you are suddenly a stranger in your own land.”
Her research drew from people struggling with problems related to the major industry of the region, oil drilling. Will a similar story now be retold by a newer industry, digital infrastructure?
AWS data center under construction in Gilroy, California (August 3, 2026). Photo: Jordan Famularo
