The Bipartisan Backyard: Data Centers vs. the Midterms

Sixty-nine percent — that's the number in a brand new NBC News poll — say they don't want a data center built where they live, and it splits nowhere close to down party lines. Today on Concrete Compute: what happens when a genuinely bipartisan backlash meets a president and an industry that both want to build faster than any objection can move? Before that, in the headlines: a Polish town council kills a data center permit outright, Saudi Arabia breaks ground on a Red Sea megaproject chasing one and a half gigawatts, and Michigan's water fight picks up two more targets. Welcome back to Concrete Compute, your daily brief on the AI infrastructure buildout. It's Monday, September 7, 2026. Let's get into it.

Let's start in Poland, where opposition to a data center didn't stay a protest — it became a vote. According to DCD, councillors in the commune of Dobre, in Poland's Masovian Voivodeship, voted unanimously to strip a proposed data center off the area's general municipal plan, killing a project that would have sat on ninety hectares — that's about two hundred twenty-two acres — outside the village of Nowa Wieś. More than two hundred residents from four surrounding villages had signed a petition against it, and DCD reports the fight came down to the facility's size and a feeling nobody had been consulted. The mayor of Dobre, Kamil Wichrowski, told TVP3 Warsaw the door isn't closed forever — a significant enough investment could still bring the town back to the table. But the landowner who stood to lease the site, Zbigniew Zalewski, told the same outlet the commune needs the money to build roads, bike paths, and schools. This is DCD's own reporting, and we haven't independently confirmed the vote specifics yet — but it's a real permit, killed by an elected body, not just a debate.

Meanwhile in Saudi Arabia, ground actually broke on something. Humain — the kingdom's state-backed AI venture — and developer DataVolt started construction at Oxagon, the floating industrial district inside the Neom megaproject on the Red Sea coast, according to DCD. At the Leap 2026 conference in Riyadh, the companies said they're building out the first hundred megawatts of a three-hundred-sixty-megawatt first phase, targeting operation in 2028. The eventual campus is targeting one and a half gigawatts total — and I want to flag that's a stated goal at groundbreaking, not built or contracted capacity, and Neom's broader track record on megaproject timelines gives me a reason to hold that number loosely. DataVolt's CEO, Rajit Nanda, called it an important milestone, and Humain's CEO, Tariq Amin, said construction is underway at the speed the next era of AI demands. DataVolt also signed a memorandum of understanding with the Saudi telecom Zain KSA for an unspecified number of future data centers. This is single-source DCD reporting, so treat the specifics as reported, not yet independently confirmed elsewhere.

Back in the U.S., Michigan keeps being the state where this fight is most visible. MLive reports residents near two proposed AI data centers are organizing against them, worried about water supply and their quality of life. This isn't an isolated flare-up — Michigan's Ypsilanti Community Utilities Authority already approved a twelve-month moratorium, back in April, on supplying water to hyperscale and mid-size data centers, tied directly to opposition to a proposed one-point-two-billion-dollar University of Michigan and Los Alamos project in Ypsilanti Township. Multiple communities in Washtenaw County, plus the city of Pontiac, have passed their own moratoria since. So the question worth asking every time is what the host community actually gets in return — and in Michigan right now, the visible answer is water bans, not benefit agreements. We haven't independently confirmed every detail of this specific two-site dispute beyond MLive's reporting, but the broader pattern of moratoria across the state is well documented. And that pattern — bipartisan, water-driven, local — is exactly the shape of the story we're diving into next.

Our main story today: the bipartisan backyard, and whether it actually moves anything before November. There's a brand new NBC News Decision Desk poll — conducted between August twentieth and September first — and the number that jumped out is sixty-nine percent. That's the share of voters who say they oppose a data center being built where they live. Now, before you file that under everybody-hates-change, look at the split: fifty-seven percent of Republicans oppose local siting, and eighty-one percent of Democrats do. That's genuinely bipartisan opposition — but it's not equally intense opposition, and that gap matters for what happens next. One caveat worth stating up front: this is one national poll, NBC's own Decision Desk work with SurveyMonkey, plus NBC's on-the-ground reporting — not a full survey of every state's temperature, and that same reporting shows receptiveness varies plenty state to state. Here's the distinction worth holding onto: this poll is measuring opposition to a specific data center showing up in someone's specific town — the land, the water, the noise, the rate hike — not a broader verdict on artificial intelligence as a technology. Those are different questions, and NBC ties the sentiment directly to moratoria that local officials are enacting right now, including Republican officials, from reporting out of swing districts along Interstate 80. Take Iowa. Buchanan County supervisor Dawn Vogel, a Republican, backed a moratorium in her own county. That's not a protest sign — that's an elected official using the power of her office to pause construction. And in Ohio, a Democratic voter named Tamara Clark told NBC she's motivated by something concrete: rising utility costs, the fear that her power bill climbs so someone else's server farm can run. Now, this backlash isn't staying purely local — it's already producing state-level policy. In Ohio, Republican state senator Jon Husted is pushing a bill that would force utilities to bill data centers directly for the added water and electricity costs those facilities create, instead of spreading those costs across every other ratepayer. In Pennsylvania, Democratic governor Josh Shapiro just signed new data-center regulations — notable because Shapiro had previously been out there promoting these projects as an economic win for his state. When a governor who championed the buildout turns around and tightens the rules on it, that's a real signal, not noise. So where does the Trump administration land on all this? Not by addressing the siting fights directly. The administration's answer is something called the Rate Payer Protection Pledge, which asks companies to voluntarily self-fund their own power needs rather than lean on the grid — a pledge about who pays for electricity, not about whether the facility gets built next to your house at all. And on the politics, President Trump has been blunt: he's written that communities rejecting data centers are choosing to be, in his words, "backwards and poor." The Wall Street Journal has run its own piece framing the argument in sharper terms — though we don't have the full text in front of us, so we're characterizing that piece's framing, not quoting any one named person directly, and I want to be careful about that distinction. So you've got a poll showing sharp bipartisan discomfort, a Republican senator writing consumer-protection legislation, a Democratic governor tightening rules after promoting the buildout, and a White House dismissing the objection as economic self-sabotage. That's the fight. Now let's get into who's actually winning it.

So does any of this actually change an outcome, or does it stay noise until November? Let's stack up what we know. On one side, you've got the local officials and voters who are the actual subject of this poll. Dawn Vogel, the Republican supervisor in Iowa's Buchanan County, backed her county's moratorium — a Republican official using her actual power to halt construction, not just express an opinion. Tamara Clark, the Ohio Democratic voter NBC talked to, framed her opposition around a very specific fear: her utility bill climbing so a facility she doesn't use can run. Different party, same bottom-line complaint — who pays. On the policy side, that complaint is already turning into legislation. Ohio's Jon Husted, a Republican state senator, is pushing a bill that would make utilities bill data centers directly for the water and electricity costs those facilities create, rather than spreading the cost across every other ratepayer in the state. That is exactly the beneficiary-pays principle that should guide how infrastructure costs are assigned — my own standard, not the state's: the party creating the incremental cost should be the one who pays it. If Husted's bill becomes law, Ohio will have written that principle into statute, not just talked about it. Pennsylvania's Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, just signed new data-center regulations of his own — after actively promoting these projects as a jobs and investment win for his state. That reversal, or at least tightening, tells you the backlash reached a governor's desk, not just a town hall. And then there's the White House's answer, the Rate Payer Protection Pledge — companies self-funding their own power needs. Here's my read on that: it's a real and useful idea, but it answers a different question than the one voters are actually asking. Nobody in that NBC poll is primarily worried about who signs the check for a substation upgrade — they're worried about the substation itself showing up next to their house, the water table, the traffic during construction. A pledge about electricity financing doesn't touch land use, and dismissing the objection as communities choosing to be "backwards and poor" doesn't touch it either — it just tells the sixty-nine percent their objection isn't being heard on its own terms. And on the messaging front, the Wall Street Journal piece framing the administration and industry's case in sharper terms — again, we don't have the full text to quote directly — is itself telling. When the answer to a rate complaint turns into a label instead of a rate case, that's usually a sign the actual economics haven't been made yet. And the pattern isn't confined to the U.S. — we heard Poland's mirror version of this exact fight in today's headlines, a local body simply saying no. The legal systems look different, but the underlying complaint is the same everywhere: who consented, and who pays. Now, I want to be fair to the other side of this too. The buildout is the largest industrial construction program in a generation, and plenty of these projects genuinely do bring investment and tax base a town wants. The problem isn't that data centers get built — it's when a community bears costs nobody negotiated for it, and when the same companies spending tens of billions a year on this buildout can't be bothered to answer the water and rate questions before breaking ground. Anyone spending that kind of money can afford a better answer than a pledge that doesn't address the actual complaint — that's my standard, and I'd apply it the same way whether the company involved is popular or not. The honest uncertainty here is what happens between now and November. A poll number and a state senator's bill are not the same as a permit getting denied or a rate case getting decided in ratepayers' favor. Ohio's bill hasn't passed yet. Pennsylvania's new rules exist, but we don't yet know how they'll be applied project by project. And a sixty-nine percent opposition number, bipartisan as it is, is softer on the Republican side than the Democratic side — fifty-seven versus eighty-one — which means the coalition behind any specific moratorium or bill can fracture depending on how the fight gets framed locally. So here's the marker I'm setting for myself: if Husted's Ohio bill actually gets a floor vote before Election Day, that tells us this backlash has real legislative teeth, not just polling numbers. If it stalls in committee while more towns quietly pass their own local moratoria instead, that tells us the fight is settling at the town-council level — slower, messier, and a lot harder for any one poll to capture. Time for the Hype Check. I'm putting this one at a 6. The poll and the reporting are real, the bipartisan split is real, and it's already produced actual legislation in two states — that's substance. But bipartisan opposition is doing some unearned work when one side's opposition runs twenty-four points hotter than the other's, and until we see a permit denied, a rate case decided, or a bill signed into law because of this pressure — not just introduced — I'm not calling this a turning point yet.

If today's episode helped you make sense of the fight over where these machines actually get built, follow Concrete Compute wherever you listen — new episodes land every morning, and today's is an easy one to send to whoever's arguing about the moratorium on your own block. This has been Concrete Compute, an AI-voiced podcast, created and built by a real human using today's cutting-edge technology. Nothing you heard on this show is financial advice. I'm Brian Lampert, and I'll catch you all tomorrow — take care!