People rage – A community fight over a proposed San Francisco Bay Area data center shows how resentment toward these facilities is often less about kilowatts and more about fear of AI itself—an invisible technology that lands physically in the form of server buildings.
In my backyard, locals didn’t wait for the first shovel to hit the ground.
A data center planned for the San Francisco Bay Area—already approved by the local municipality—would take over a former golf course. The project spans about 347,000 square feet. It is large, though not on the scale seen in the Midwest, where facilities can top 1 million square feet.
Even before construction starts, residents are already flooding city council meetings with protestors and gathering more than 18,000 signatures opposing the new building. A social media post I wrote about the story has drawn 44,000 views and 100-plus comments.
On paper, the objections sound familiar and wide-ranging. In a time when energy is already expensive. many Americans worry that data centers’ electricity demand will raise their utility bills. Others point to the massive diesel generators many facilities maintain for when the power grid goes down—and fear those generators will belch smog and cause health issues. The more environmentally minded often cite alleged massive water usage, sometimes described in millions of gallons per day. And for some people, the targets are simpler: they find the sites noisy, ugly, and intrusive.
But when you look closely at the underlying claims, the popular outrage doesn’t always match the numbers.
A comprehensive study of the economics of data centers recently found that they actually reduce electricity prices slightly. The Atlantic reported that fears about AI data centers driving up electric prices are often oversold. Texas, described as leading America’s data center boom, has electricity prices among the lowest in the country. The data shows prices are more tightly linked to grid investment and factors like wildfire risk than to the presence of data centers.
Water use figures, too, are frequently treated like a straight line from data center demand to catastrophe. Researchers say the most alarming statistics are often taken out of context, including counts that incorporate upstream reservoir evaporation. In my own local case. the data center claims it will use less water than the golf course it’s replacing.
Even the “ugly” argument cuts differently depending on perspective. The American heartland contains plenty of logistics centers and shipping warehouses that don’t prompt tens of thousands of people to sign petitions.
And there are also counterweights that boosters can point to. The Atlantic also shared that tax revenue from data centers can deliver major benefits for small towns. Unlike older facilities, the AI-focused builds can attract AI firms and create high-paying local jobs.
So if the facts don’t cleanly align with the loudest fears, why do these buildings trigger such deep, durable anger?
There’s a quieter reason that shows up again and again in the reaction.
Americans are terrified of AI. The concern is not abstract to them—people worry it will take their jobs, upend their children’s futures, steal personal information, and damage American culture.
A recent Pew study found that most Americans think AI will be bad for society. Sixty-three percent say AI is moving too fast. Almost three-quarters believe AI will make their data less secure, and most—71%—feel governments will fail to regulate it.
That fear and anger is real. The difficult part is that AI is largely invisible.
Smartphones are another much-maligned technology, but they’re not hidden in the same way. You’re probably holding one right now. They can be banned in schools. parents can pledge not to buy them for their kids. and individuals can act out their frustration by using signal-blocking bags or other workarounds. Some people even switch to dumbphones.
AI works differently. Although it is everywhere, it isn’t physically embodied in the way a phone is. As a photojournalist. I’ve experienced the gap firsthand: it’s easy to photograph self-driving cars by going to downtown San Francisco and capturing images of a Waymo. It’s also straightforward to photograph a Bitcoin ATM.
Depicting AI, though, is another story. Journalists often fall back on vague illustrations of neural networks, strained visual metaphors—like a white robot at a computer—and photographs of AI leaders.
When a technology is hard to see, it is also hard to protest in a tangible way. AI sits in an abstract cloud, changing society in earth-shaking ways while remaining physically absent from daily life. For most people, the rare places where the invisible tech collides with the real world are buildings like data centers.
That’s why they have become such clumsy, imperfect stand-ins. They’re not “AI” in any technical sense. But they’re the only visible, touchable piece of the boom that many communities can point to.
People aren’t only furious about power draw or water use. They’re furious at a technology they find terrifying and bewildering—and these isolated server sites are where that emotion lands.
AI companies, then, can’t treat the backlash as a mere misunderstanding of diesel generators or cooling systems. Patronizing messaging—like framing data centers as obviously good for the local tax base or as guaranteed drivers of grid investment—is likely to fail with communities already boiling over.
What many people want isn’t another technical explainer about water usage or carbon emissions. They want their fears heard. They want opportunities to shape AI policy. They need transparency from the companies building frontier models. And they need government oversight that doesn’t look like it’s arriving after the damage.
With the stakes rising, the cost of staying focused on data-center specifics—and ignoring the deeper root—may be growing.
Violent threats against data centers and even individual AI workers are on the rise. Last year, a man was arrested in San Francisco for firebombing OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s house.
In that atmosphere, the urgency isn’t only economic or environmental. It’s social. If people don’t get credible outlets for their fears. the physical manifestation of the AI boom—from its buildings to the people tied to it—will remain in the public’s crosshairs. both figuratively and. alarmingly. literally.
AI backlash data centers electricity prices diesel generators water usage San Francisco Bay Area local protests Pew study AI regulation Sam Altman firebombing