A Unanimous Vote and an Empty Docket
On a Wednesday evening in February 2026, the New Brunswick City Council voted unanimously to kill a proposed 27,000-square-foot AI data center. Hundreds packed City Hall. Hundreds more stood outside. The building was full twenty minutes before the meeting started. Within an hour the project was pulled, the land reverted to a public park, and residents were chanting in the street.
A local organizer grabbed a megaphone and delivered what has become the emerging consensus of a growing share of the American public: a direct and profane rejection of Big Tech infrastructure in their communities.
New Brunswick is not an outlier. It is a data point on a trend line that anyone building in the physical world needs to understand.
The Numbers Are Unambiguous
Between May 2024 and June 2025, an estimated $162 billion in US data center projects were blocked or delayed by organized community opposition. One hundred and eighty-eight groups across more than two dozen states are now coordinating legal strategies, expert testimony, and messaging against data center development. Two-thirds of tracked projects under protest were blocked or delayed.
The Pew Research Center's June 2025 survey of over 5,000 American adults found that 50% are more concerned than excited about AI in daily life — up from 37% in 2021. Fifty-seven percent rate the societal risks of AI as high. Only 25% say the benefits are high.
YouGov tracked the same question at four intervals between December 2024 and June 2025. The share of Americans who believe AI's impact on society will be negative went from 34% to 47% in six months.
On data centers specifically, only 40% of Americans would welcome one in their community. That makes data centers less popular than gas-fired power plants, wind farms, and nuclear facilities.
This Opposition Is Structurally Different
What makes AI infrastructure opposition distinct from previous technology backlashes is its political structure.
A December 2025 Navigator Research poll found that 75% of Democrats and 75% of Republicans prefer a careful, considered approach to AI development. In a political environment where parties diverge on virtually everything by 20 points or more, AI opposition does not map onto partisan lines. It is bipartisan in a way that almost nothing else is.
72% of voters want to slow down AI development. 82% do not trust technology executives to regulate AI. 80% prefer cautious implementation even if it means letting geopolitical competitors get ahead.
By the end of 2025, data centers were a campaign issue in at least a dozen states. In Georgia, eight municipalities enacted moratoriums. In Maryland, 20,000 people signed a petition against a single proposal. In Texas, candidates ran against data centers and won.
This is not a communications problem that better PR will solve. It is a structural mismatch between how AI infrastructure is being deployed and what the communities hosting it are willing to accept.
The Cost-Benefit Distribution Is Inverted
Every technology that has faced broad public opposition and survived did so because it had a local constituency fighting on its behalf. Nuclear power had the defense establishment, the utilities, and construction unions. Fracking had local jobs, royalty payments, and cheap natural gas flowing directly into the communities that bore its environmental costs.
AI infrastructure has none of this.
The costs of a data center are concentrated and tangible: higher electricity bills, water consumption, construction disruption, lost farmland, noise. The community that hosts the facility pays these costs directly.
The benefits are diffuse, abstract, and largely captured by a handful of firms and their shareholders in a handful of zip codes thousands of miles away. No one shows up to the public hearing to defend the data center because no one in the community has a reason to.
This is the inverse of the structure that allows controversial technologies to survive. When costs are diffuse and benefits are local, the technology has a natural constituency. When costs are local and benefits are diffuse, the opposition has the field to itself.
What the Built World Already Knows
None of this is new to people who build things for a living.
Every real estate developer, every infrastructure firm, every construction company that has ever worked in a community understands that the physical world operates on consent. You cannot build a hospital, a housing development, or a power plant without the community's participation. Not because of regulation alone — because the project will not succeed without it.
The entitlement process exists for a reason. Community engagement exists for a reason. The months spent in public hearings, design reviews, and neighborhood meetings are not bureaucratic overhead. They are the mechanism by which a community grants permission to alter its physical environment.
The AI industry has attempted to bypass this mechanism — deploying trillions of dollars into physical infrastructure while treating the communities that host it as obstacles rather than stakeholders. The result is predictable to anyone who has ever tried to build anything.
Community Sentiment Has Always Mattered — It Was Just Too Expensive to Track
Developers have always known that political and community sentiment can make or break a project. A rezoning vote, a vocal neighborhood association, a shift in local council composition — these are not edge cases. They are the primary risk factors in any physical development.
But historically, understanding community sentiment at the depth required to act on it has been prohibitively expensive. Tracking local council minutes, monitoring public comment periods, analyzing neighborhood-level political dynamics, mapping stakeholder networks — this work required teams of consultants, lobbyists, and local advisors billing hundreds of hours before a single shovel hit the ground.
Because of that cost, community engagement was pushed to the end of the development process. Developers would identify a site, complete feasibility, secure financing, and only then — often after millions had already been committed — begin the work of understanding whether the community would accept what was being proposed. By that point, the engagement was defensive. It was reputation management, not partnership.
This is how $162 billion in projects gets blocked. Not because the opposition is irrational, but because no one asked the community what it wanted until it was too late to change course.
This No Longer Has to Be the Way
At Build, political and community sentiment analysis is not a late-stage add-on. It is embedded in the development process from day one.
Our platform surfaces community and political dynamics alongside site feasibility, market data, and financial modeling — at the earliest stages of project evaluation, before capital is committed and before positions harden. Understanding local council composition, recent voting patterns on development issues, active community organizations, and the history of entitlement outcomes in a given jurisdiction is no longer a six-figure consulting engagement. It is a workflow that runs in parallel with every other dimension of site analysis.
This changes the economics of community engagement entirely. When you understand sentiment before you select a site, you can choose locations where the project aligns with what the community actually wants. When you understand the political landscape before you file for entitlements, you can structure proposals that address real concerns rather than reacting to opposition after it has already organized.
The developers who will navigate this era successfully are the ones who treat community sentiment as a first-class input — not a problem to manage at the end, but a signal to incorporate at the beginning. The technology to do this at scale now exists. The question is whether the industry will use it before the window closes.
The Window Is Still Open
The pattern from other industries is instructive. Tobacco chose denial and lost the ability to advertise. Fossil fuels chose to fund climate skepticism and became a permanent political target. Social media chose growth over self-regulation on child safety and now faces punitive legislation on multiple continents.
In every case, there was a window — a period where honesty, conversation, and genuine partnership with affected communities could have changed the trajectory. Once that window closed, it did not reopen.
For AI infrastructure, the window is still open. But it requires something the industry has so far been unwilling to offer: a genuine acknowledgment that the communities hosting this infrastructure have legitimate concerns, legitimate standing, and legitimate power over what gets built in their neighborhoods.
The built world has always operated on consent. The firms that understand this — and build it into their process from the start — will be the ones still building when the window closes for everyone else.