-
Click here to listen to this article - Share via
See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search. Set us as preferred
A Gallup poll released last month ought to alarm anyone who cares about whether the United States can best China in the artificial intelligence race. More than 7 in 10 Americans now oppose the building of AI data centers anywhere near where they live — and 48% are strongly opposed, a level of local resistance that exceeds opposition to new nuclear power plants.
The opponents are not fringe, and their concerns — higher utility bills, water draw, noise and competing land use — are legitimate, specific and grounded in how these facilities operate. In L.A.’s neighboring Monterey Park, voters overwhelmingly cast ballots to ban all data centers in their city. Nationally, opposition seems to only be gaining momentum.
If the AI industry and its investors continue to treat this opposition as a public-relations nuisance rather than a policy problem requiring engineering and contract redesign, they will hand the AI race to Beijing without ever losing a chip-design contest in Washington.
The strategic stakes are real. By most estimates the U.S. holds a roughly seven-month lead over China in frontier AI capability, and that margin exists almost entirely because of “compute” or processing power advanced by GPUs, the world’s leading semiconductor chips, along with the megawatts of power and the cooling that turn algorithms into productive data. Every credible roadmap to 2030 assumes hundreds of billions of dollars in new domestic data-center buildout to meet the growing demand for AI’s expansion and capabilities. Stretch that buildout across five extra years of permitting fights, and America’s lead quickly disappears.
Now consider where the buildout happens: in counties, at planning commissions and utility board hearings, in front of elected officials whose phones light up with constituents worried a new 500-megawatt campus down the road will draw down their aquifer and double their electricity bill.
Those constituents are not crazy to worry. On a recent drive to Charlottesville, Va., I was struck by the sight of a 550,000-square-foot data center along Interstate 66, the kind of facility this debate actually concerns. A single hyperscale facility can consume several million gallons of water each day for cooling, while the status quo of rate design in most states permits utilities to spread the cost of new transmission and generation across all customers, meaning the retiree in the bungalow helps pay for the substation that serves the cloud provider. That is a politically unsustainable arrangement, leading to the polling now showing up in Gallup.
This is the part the accelerationist wing of the industry has not absorbed: In a federal system, no one bulldozes through local objection at scale. You can win a zoning fight. You cannot win 5,000 of them while the political class reads the same poll everyone else does.
The good news? The underlying economics are forgiving, if anyone bothers to design for them. Three structural fixes would convert most opposition into grudging acceptance, and even a meaningful share of that opposition into active support.
First, interruptible load. U.S. electric grids are built to meet absolute worst-case demand: late afternoon on the hottest summer days. The rest of the year, substantial portions of that capacity sit idle. A data center that contractually agrees to throttle down or switch to on-site battery storage during the few hundred hours per year of peak demand allows utilities to spread enormous, fixed infrastructure costs across a larger base, which lowers the bill for every other customer. The technology exists. The contracts do not, because no one has insisted on them. Similarly, water consumption can be mitigated by best practices zoning codes that require closed-loop water cooling systems to lower usage by 80% to 95%.
Second, cost allocation in customer rate design. New transmission, new substations and new generation built specifically to serve a data-center campus should be paid for by the data-center operator, not by residential ratepayers. Where the new infrastructure produces system-wide savings, those savings should flow back to local households. A handful of states are inching toward this through “large-load tariff” reform; none has yet built the model that ought to become the template.
Third, host-community benefits that are proportional to the imposition. Loudoun County, Va., the world’s largest concentration of data centers, collects roughly $890 million in annual data-center tax revenue, about 38% of its general fund. That revenue has allowed the county to lower its residential property tax rate every year for a decade. Loudoun County has its frictions with industry, but the local political coalition in support of data centers is durable because residents see the money. Elsewhere, residents see only the cooling towers.
None of these ideas undermine competition or seek unfair advantage from regulators. It is the price of operating at scale inside of a democracy, and some industries have learned to pay up. Pipelines fund landowner trusts. Wind farms pay county royalties. Ports finance neighborhood mitigation. Industries that pay grow; industries that don’t, stall.
The real choice in front of the American AI buildout is not between speed and regulation. It is between an industry that does the unglamorous work of being a tolerable neighbor and one that loses to China while filing briefs against local counties.
Beijing is not waiting for the planning commission to adjourn.
Warren Wimmer is CEO of Global Leaders Assembly Foundation, a former energy and infrastructure lender, and Principal at Wimmer Associates
Insights
L.A. Times Insights delivers AI-generated analysis on Voices content to offer all points of view. Insights does not appear on any news articles.
Viewpoint
Perspectives
The following AI-generated content is powered by Perplexity. The Los Angeles Times editorial staff does not create or edit the content.
Ideas expressed in the piece
The column argues that the United States’ current lead over China in artificial intelligence rests largely on superior access to “compute” — advanced chips, abundant electricity and large-scale cooling — and that this edge will evaporate if the country cannot rapidly build hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of new data centers by 2030.[2][3]
It contends that local opposition to new AI data centers has become a critical national vulnerability, citing polling that shows strong resistance to siting these facilities near residential areas and noting that this backlash is now more intense than opposition to new nuclear power plants.[1]
The piece emphasizes that community worries about higher utility bills, heavy water use, noise and competing land uses are not irrational, pointing to large hyperscale facilities that can occupy hundreds of thousands of square feet and consume millions of gallons of water per day, as well as rate structures that often spread grid-upgrade costs across all customers.[1]
The article warns that in a federal system where zoning, planning commissions and utility boards are local, the industry cannot “win” thousands of permitting and zoning fights one by one; instead, prolonged disputes could stretch AI infrastructure buildout by years and effectively hand the global AI lead to Beijing without the United States ever losing its advantage in chip design.[2][3]
To address this, the column proposes that data centers sign “interruptible load” contracts, under which facilities agree to curtail power use or switch to on-site storage during peak demand hours so that expensive grid capacity can be used more efficiently and household electricity bills can fall rather than rise.
It further argues that zoning and engineering standards should require closed-loop water cooling and similar best practices to cut water use by 80% to 95%, directly targeting one of the main sources of local concern about siting data centers in water-stressed areas.[1]
The piece calls for reforms in how utilities allocate the costs of new substations, transmission lines and generation that primarily serve data centers, asserting that these capital expenses should be borne by data-center operators rather than spread to residential ratepayers, with any system-wide savings explicitly shared with local households.
It highlights Loudoun County, Va., where tax revenue from a dense cluster of data centers has grown to a large share of the county’s general fund and helped finance repeated cuts in residential property tax rates, as an example of “host-community benefits” that can build durable local political coalitions in favor of data-center growth.[1]
The column suggests that the AI and cloud industry must treat being a “tolerable neighbor” as core infrastructure work—much like pipelines, wind farms and ports that routinely fund mitigation and community benefits—arguing that such arrangements are the necessary price of operating at scale in a democracy and the only realistic alternative to losing ground to China while fighting local zoning boards.[2][3]
Different views on the topic
Analysts tracking local land-use fights note that, rather than simply needing better contracts or benefit packages, many communities view data centers as fundamentally poor neighbors, citing noise, visual impacts, traffic, and especially high water and energy consumption; from this perspective, moratoria and bans in places like suburban jurisdictions are a reasonable safeguard, not a problem to be engineered away.[1]
Reporting on the “Not In My Back Yard” backlash indicates that some residents see tax incentives and subsidies for data centers as a raw deal, arguing that the fiscal benefits are uncertain or unevenly distributed while the environmental and quality-of-life burdens are concentrated locally, leading many neighborhood groups to oppose new facilities outright rather than negotiate for concessions.[1]
Policy commentators also point out that the constraints on AI-related infrastructure are not limited to local zoning boards; critiques of the current system emphasize that federal permitting for transmission lines, generation and major energy projects is a core bottleneck, and urge broad national reforms to environmental review and siting rules rather than relying primarily on bespoke local agreements with each host community.[2]
Think tanks focused on technology and industrial policy have proposed concentrating AI-heavy computing in specialized “compute zones” or designated regions with abundant power and favorable siting conditions, effectively arguing that the solution is to channel new capacity into a limited number of willing hubs instead of trying to make large data centers politically acceptable in every county.[3]
Some observers note that local resistance is highly uneven and that several rural Western areas and red states are actively courting data centers for jobs and tax revenue; this view holds that the national AI buildout can shift toward jurisdictions with fewer zoning hurdles, suggesting that America’s AI lead is not uniformly “at the mercy” of local opposition everywhere.[1]
Water-policy and climate advocates stress that moving data centers into arid or drought-prone regions to escape East Coast land-use conflicts can exacerbate water scarcity and increase stress on power systems; these critics argue that aggressive AI-driven demand growth should be subordinated to, or at least tightly conditioned on, strong conservation measures and a rapid buildout of clean energy, even if that slows the pace of AI expansion.[1]
Community groups fighting large projects often reject the framing of an AI “race” with China as a justification for fast-tracking local infrastructure, warning that appeals to national competitiveness have historically been used to override environmental justice and neighborhood concerns; instead, they argue that local residents should retain broad discretion to block or radically scale down projects that threaten to raise bills, deplete aquifers or alter community character.[1]
Some infrastructure specialists caution that heavy reliance on host-community benefits, such as tax revenue sharing, can create volatile local politics if economic cycles, corporate tax strategies or technological shifts reduce the expected payouts, leading to skepticism that such deals provide a stable long-term basis for public support comparable to more diversified development strategies.[1][3]
More From the Los Angeles Times
Podcasts
Senator Allen has put his money on fire mitigation and bringing stakeholders together in communities up and down the state to reduce their risk and stay insured. In this episode, Host Kate Cagle speaks with Allen about his plans.
The Hillside Strangler murders terrorized Los Angeles in the late 1970s. The killers were a pair of sadistic cousins. One confessed. The other was set to stand trial—until L.A. prosecutors flinched.
Modern LA earned its first smoggy nickname 450 years ago, as the “bay of smokes.” At the La Brea tar pits, we take a short walk through a long history with curator Regan Dunn, who explains how and why the first Angelenos would have set fires that filled the broad bowl of LA and foretold the curse of smog.
