In March, more than 100 residents of a small Missouri town
gathered in a high school gymnasium to watch a city council vote.
Things got heated.
I hope your kids hate you for life.
People were there to do quite a bit of shouting.
That's our colleague Will Parker.
And to make it clear how angry they are sometimes with, you know, a peppery, expletive-laden language.
The city council vote, and all the chaos that surrounded it, was over a proposal to build a data center.
Residents swore at the council members as they were called on to vote.
But despite the opposition, the data center proposal passed.
Nationwide, data center construction has been largely unwelcome.
One of the most recent polls is from Quinnipiac, and it showed that a majority of people, a pretty strong majority,
would oppose the construction of an AI data center in their community.
So they 're not necessarily opposed to the concept of artificial intelligence or to the concept of data centers,
but they do n't want them next door.
And it was a majority of Democrats and Republicans in that poll that said that.
So it sounds like there's a lot of not-in-my-backyard energy out there right now.
There's a lot of that, which is not unique to data centers, right?
I mean, housing is, I think, the area where most people are familiar with strong organized opposition to construction.
But it feels different.