Americans want the benefits of AI, but not the machinery. Gallup now finds 71% oppose an AI data center in their area, making local server farms more politically toxic than nuclear plants. That is a remarkable achievement for a building whose main offense is using electricity, water, and enough concrete to make a county commissioner feel briefly important.

The deeper story is not just NIMBYism. PJM is admitting the grid has moved from surplus to scarcity, FERC’s chairman is questioning whether the nation’s largest power market is governable, and Eversource is openly resisting data centers to protect customers from higher prices. The AI boom has finally reached the physical world, where the future must compete with substations, gas turbines, transmission studies, utility bills, and the ancient American right to hate whatever is being built nearby.

Gallup’s first major survey on local AI data center construction found that 71% of Americans oppose building one in their area, including 48% who strongly oppose it. That is worse than nuclear power. In the same survey, 53% opposed a local nuclear plant, meaning AI infrastructure now carries a heavier local political burden than the technology that spent decades as the national mascot for public fear.

The opposition is broad and intense. Majorities oppose local data centers across party, age, income, race, education, and geography, with Democrats the most strongly opposed and the Midwest and South showing the highest total opposition. The reasons are familiar from local fights: water, electricity, noise, traffic, land use, higher utility bills, and a general suspicion that the benefits go somewhere else while the infrastructure lands next door.

Grid Take: The AI industry has a real case to make, but it cannot make it with server-rack glamour shots and sleepy talking points about jobs. It has to explain why load growth can support new generation, why large customers can improve system economics, and why the alternative is not a pristine meadow, but a slower, weaker future built somewhere else.

FERC Chairman Laura Swett used PJM’s annual meeting to say what many around the market have been whispering for years: PJM may be too large, too politically divided, and too slow to govern itself through the next era of load growth. She called PJM’s governance structure “unacceptable” and warned that confidence in the grid operator’s decision-making has “completely eroded.”

The timing matters. Swett’s broadside came just days after PJM released a unusually frank market-design paper arguing that the region has moved from managing surplus to managing scarcity, with data centers able to arrive far faster than new generation can be built. PJM laid out three broad reform paths: stabilize the existing capacity market, ration reliability among customer classes or regions, or shift more weight away from the capacity market and toward energy and ancillary-service markets.

Grid Take- PJM is becoming the test case for whether American electricity institutions can survive abundance. Without a governance structure that can move at industrial speed, every fix for generation, interconnection, transmission, and capacity gets fed into the procedural woodchipper.

FERC’s 2025 State of the Markets report found that the U.S. had more than 50 GW of operating data center capacity at the end of 2025, representing 24% compound annual growth since 2020. MISO saw the fastest growth, with a 43% compound annual rate, followed by ERCOT, SPP, and the Southeast at roughly 28% to 30%.

The facilities are also getting much larger. FERC staff said average data center size rose from about 25 MW in 2020 to nearly 80 MW for projects coming online last year, which turns data centers from ordinary commercial load into system-planning events. At that size, a project may require new generation, transmission upgrades, substation work, gas coordination, and much better forecasting about which loads are real and which are just queue confetti.

GridTake - The 50 GW number moves data centers into grid reality. The country can argue about AI hype all it wants, but the installed base is already enormous, projects are getting larger, and the regions with the fastest growth are where the next fights over gas, transmission, storage, and capacity markets will land.

Eversource CEO Joe Nolan said he is “not interested” in data center development in the company’s service territory, arguing that the projects are “of no value” to residential customers and will only drive up energy prices. His comments came during the company’s first-quarter earnings call, where he also said Eversource is “resisting data centers” while relying on offshore wind, hydro, and other clean energy injections to help manage costs in New England.

The posture is striking because New England is already an expensive and constrained power market. Eversource reported that average market prices for Connecticut Light and Power’s wholesale sales rose to $112.71 per MWh in Q1 2026, up from $99.02 per MWh in the same period last year, while the company is also dealing with earnings pressure from FERC’s transmission return-on-equity decision. In that context, Nolan’s comments are more than CEO color. They are a regional strategy: defend existing customers by keeping new large load away.

GridTake - The concern about customer costs is real, especially in New England, where energy policy often resembles scarcity with a better press kit. But resisting load is not a strategy for abundance; it is a strategy for managing decline more politely.

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"Every nation has their own electricity and water. Every nation should have their own AI infrastructure." — NVIDIA’s Liron Freind-Saadon

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