Most Americans Don't Want an AI Data Center in Their Backyard. Northern Virginia Schools Are Cashing In.

Most Americans don't want an AI data center anywhere near them. In Northern Virginia, where residents have been living next to the largest such cluster in the world for a decade, the same communities are quietly counting the receipts: public-school budgets have nearly doubled, and individual property-tax rates are heading down.

That gap is the story. A May 2026 survey of 4,000 U.S. residents, commissioned by Redfin and fielded by Ipsos, found that 53% of Americans oppose building a data center in their area and 34% support it. Among the building types the survey asked about, data centers drew the highest local opposition. By comparison, 39% of respondents said they would oppose a new apartment complex nearby.

The opposition is grounded in costs that residents can see and measure. The Ipsos respondents who objected cited strain on electricity and water, pressure on energy bills, environmental concerns, noise, and the visual presence of large industrial structures. On Hacker News, where the Redfin report drew discussion this week, several readers pointed to the underlying mechanism: modern GPU racks for AI training draw 60 to 100-plus kilowatts per rack, roughly an order of magnitude more than the 5-kilowatt CPU racks that filled the previous generation of facilities. That power density changes what a substation, a water line, and a neighborhood can absorb.

The residents are not wrong about the cost. The harder question is what they are missing, because in the places where the buildout has already happened, the benefit is on the same ledger.

In Loudoun County and Prince William County, the two Virginia jurisdictions that anchor the so-called Data Center Alley, education spending has nearly doubled over the last decade, and individual homeowners' property-tax rates have moved in the opposite direction. A Northern Virginia real-estate agent quoted in the Redfin report described a buyer who, unprompted, asked her to confirm that no data center was planned near a home she was considering. The agent's account is a snapshot of buyer behavior, not a verdict on policy, but it captures the same trade-off the survey numbers do: residents feel the cost first and credit the diffuse benefit later, if at all.

The same survey carries a second, separate finding that the Redfin headline does not foreground. Fifty-eight percent of U.S. residents said they believe advances in AI will eliminate jobs and make it harder to afford housing. That is a different question from whether a data center should go in a particular zip code, and the two should not be conflated. The 53% siting-opposition number and the 58% AI-fears number come from the same poll, but they measure different anxieties. The Ipsos methodology carries a credibility interval of plus or minus 1.9 percentage points, and Redfin's role as both the survey's commissioner and the source of the Virginia analysis is worth flagging on first reference.

Which leaves the actual civic question, which the headline number and the school-budget chart together force into view. A data center pays its host jurisdiction in equipment taxes that show up in the next fiscal year's school budget. The same facility draws power from a regional grid that bills its neighbors the month after. The cost is itemized monthly on a residential utility statement; the benefit is folded into a county budget that most residents never read. Rational voters can oppose the next one and support the existing one without being inconsistent, because the math really is different on each side of the ribbon-cutting.

Some states are now answering the question in public, in writing. New York has enacted a statewide ban on building large data centers, an unusually blunt resolution to the same trade-off Virginia has been running in the opposite direction. That is the watcher item: the next fight in any given community will not be about whether AI is good or bad. It will be about whether the school's new wing, the lower tax bill, and the louder substation are being split fairly inside a single county line, and who gets the vote when the answer is written.