More than 60 percent of Americans, including 47 percent of Republicans, now oppose the construction of data centers, according to a poll released by The New York Times last week and detailed in a recent Wired analysis. The finding highlights a growing rift between President Donald Trump, who has aggressively championed data center and AI development, and significant portions of his own political base. Molly McCann Sanders, president of the Eagle Forum Education & Legal Defense Fund and a self-described "crunchy MAHA mom," told Wired she loves Trump "but I think he's wrong about data centers."

The backlash extends beyond public opinion. In August, the National Republican Senatorial Committee sent a private memo to AI companies warning that "campaign or party committees can not fix the toxic brand of an entire segment of the economy." Last week, GOP strategist Tony Fabrizio issued a memo to Republican candidates claiming that "unqualified support for building more AI data centers is a losing position." An analysis of thousands of responses to Trump's Truth Social posts found that anti-data-center and anti-AI comments—including from staunch MAGA accounts—outnumbered positive comments by four to one. The Interior Department is also considering at least 12 data center proposals across at least 17,600 acres of public land, far more than had been previously reported, according to The Washington Sun.

Trump has doubled down on his defense of both data centers and AI in recent weeks despite mounting scrutiny. In late August, he wrote in a Truth Social post that only communities wanting to be "backwards and poor" would refuse data centers coming to town. Users on his own platform pushed back hard. White House correspondent Hugo Lowell told Wired that Trump "is bullish on AI" and "has been told that restricting data center development means restricting compute, which means the US loses to China." The China competition angle is being publicly echoed by tech accelerationists and White House allies, including former White House AI czar David Sacks and Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale.

The report notes that voters haven't fully decided how heavily to weigh the issue or which party to trust on it. AI and data centers rank far down the list of voters' priorities in the Times poll, and almost 20 percent say they don't know which party would handle the issue better. Some Republican candidates otherwise aligned with Trump are choosing to ignore cues from the White House. Tom Tiffany, the Republican nominee for governor in Wisconsin who has scored Trump's endorsement, has attacked his Democratic opponent David Crowley for what Tiffany claims are pro-data-center views. Virginia governor Abigail Spanberger signed an executive order on Friday that creates a state AI task force and may limit data centers, particularly notable given that the state is home to Data Center Alley, a global hot spot for the facilities.

Trump appears confident his base will ultimately follow his lead, with Lowell noting that the president "thinks MAGA at the end of the day will back him—on Epstein, on Iran, on AI." McCann Sanders sees the GOP's effort to court "the laptop class"—young men enthusiastic about technology—at the Republican midterm convention earlier this month as a huge misstep with midterms nearing. She says the only time she heard data centers brought up during the entire convention was in a debate between Lonsdale and Steve Bannon's tech editor Joe Allen. The political calculus remains uncertain, but the divide between Trump's pro-AI acceleration stance and the concerns of conservative voters like Sanders—who worries about pollution and wants to "move slowly"—shows no signs of closing. Whether the party's infrastructure push can survive grassroots resistance may determine how aggressively Republicans campaign on technology issues through the midterms and beyond.