AI Infrastructure Buildout Faces Mounting Political Risk as Moratorium Support Nears Majority

A new poll from Milltown Partners, a global public affairs and communications firm that advises leading AI labs and tech startups, found that 49% of American registered voters support a temporary moratorium on new data centre construction — a finding that points to growing political risk for the AI infrastructure sector at the precise moment capital commitments are accelerating. The survey of 6,872 registered voters, conducted between May 10 and May 20, reveals that opposition is driven far more by broad unease about AI's economic trajectory than by any direct proximity to the facilities.

Sentiment Outpaces Direct Experience

The gap between what voters fear and what they have actually witnessed is striking. Only 8% of respondents who oppose data centres say they are aware of one near their home, suggesting the structures have become a proxy for wider grievances about technological disruption and its costs. Separate Pew Research Center polling from April reinforced the point: living near an existing or planned data centre has little bearing on a person's views of them.

On local siting specifically, the public is more evenly divided — 38% would support a data centre being built near their home, while 34% would oppose it. The margin widens sharply when a moratorium is the question: 49% back a construction pause against only 16% in opposition, with 27% neutral and 8% undecided.

A Macro Trigger Dressed as a Local Story

Tom Brookes, a researcher at Milltown Partners, traces the sentiment to a backdrop of economic insecurity that pre-dates the AI boom. The AI transformation is arriving, he argues, at a moment when Americans already feel angry, pessimistic and financially precarious — a combination that makes large, opaque infrastructure projects easy targets for displaced frustration.

The political cross-current runs across party lines. Both Steve Bannon on the right and Bernie Sanders on the left have framed AI as a threat to working people. Andy Hall, a professor at Stanford's Graduate School of Business and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, warned last month that a two-percentage-point rise in unemployment attributed to AI could trigger a significant populist reaction — a scenario that would sharpen legislative pressure on the entire buildout chain.

Geography adds further complexity. Two-thirds of planned data centres are in rural areas, even as 87% of existing facilities are concentrated in cities, according to Pew, meaning the next wave of investment is expanding into communities with less familiarity with the technology and potentially less tolerance for its side-effects, including water consumption and grid strain.

Automation Steps Into a Labour Gap — and Into the Debate

The backlash is arriving as the sector confronts an acute operational constraint. Zhou Xian, co-founder and chief executive of Genesis AI, told Axios that data centre operators face a severe labour shortage even as construction scales. Genesis AI has launched a general-purpose robot designed to navigate complex environments, including data centres — a development that, if it gains commercial traction, may deepen rather than defuse public concern about AI's effect on employment, handing critics the very evidence they need.