Opposition to data centers is growing across the United States, and, like the fossil fuel industry before it, the tech industry is pulling from tried-and-tested playbooks to bypass and securitize public opposition. The results of these efforts reveal both the patchy infrastructure for transparency and accountability in the US, as well as the speed and determination with which industry is moving to build these facilities with hundreds of billions of dollars in capital investment.

Previous efforts by other industries to manipulate public opinion have ranged from AI-driven influence operations in the utility sector to fake recycling coalitions designed to deflect oil industry accountability for the harmful effects of plastics. Such operations are often hidden behind polished, consumer-facing branding and effectively insulate corporate bottom lines from regulatory scrutiny and public accountability.

Up against a similar PR playbook, some residents in affected communities reported feeling like insurgents against both Big Tech and local elected officials. At least some representatives of the tech industry agree: in September 2025, Kevin Nichols, an employee of the advocacy group Earth Charter Indiana, attended the Midwest Data Center Investment Conference and Expo (DICE) in Chicago, where he says he observed one speaker comparing his experience promoting data centers to counter-insurgency tactics the speaker used during military service in Iraq and Afghanistan, such as “going undercover in bars and churches to gauge a community’s potential for resistance to a data center development.”

The language of intelligence gathering is apparent in a job posting from Data Center Watch, a group that tallies the number of deals “blocked or delayed” by local opposition, which tells applicants they will “conduct open-source and targeted research in various sources, including social media” as part of an effort to track “political risks emerging from local opposition to data centers.” (A representative from Data Center Watch says that it “does not maintain separate HR or recruiting functions” from 10a Labs, a company that describes itself as collecting “intelligence” for “AI unicorns, Fortune 10 companies, and US tech leaders.”)

Big Tech’s big money buys influence

Against this backdrop, Big Tech is spending big money to influence the public conversation. As the 2026 US midterm elections approach, super PACs focused on AI have already spent more than $50 million on Congressional races. According to Transformer News, by far the largest tranche of this money flows through a group called Leading the Future; its biggest donors are the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, his partner Ben Horowitz, and OpenAI President Greg Brockman and his wife, Anna.

Leading the Future—alongside Build American AI, an associated PAC—is doing more than making campaign donations. In May, Taylor Lorenz reported for Wired that Build American AI had conscripted social media influencers into a pro-data-center campaign that leaned heavily on arguments about an AI race with China. A month later, Lorenz released a joint investigation with Tyler Johnston of Model Republic alleging that Build American AI runs multiple fake “sockpuppet” accounts on X. Also in May, Johnston reported that another Leading the Future affiliated PAC, Think Big, seems to receive a large amount of its social media engagement from what appear to be fake accounts posing as OnlyFans performers.

An earlier report by Johnston concluded that Leading the Future might be connected to what appears to be an AI-generated news site called Acutus; the site repeats talking points often used by Leading the Future and frequently publishes harsh criticism of AI safety advocates. In March, Transformer reported that Build American AI had spent more than half a million dollars on ads to harvest the contact information of between 500,000 and 1,000,000 supporters on social media—a common astroturf tactic that allows groups to boast about the size of their support base even when that support may be quite shallow.

Data center front groups abound

One noticeable trend has been the data center industry’s adoption of a longstanding marketing tactic: the creation and use of nonprofit front groups. Many of these groups are registered nonprofits who keep their funding, staff, and industry relationships deliberately opaque; while they can sometimes be identified through tax filings like IRS Form 990, their websites often fail to disclose even basic information about their leadership or sources of support.

“Companies' use of third parties like corporate front groups and astroturf campaigns to secretly advance their interests has a long tradition in the US,” said Jocelyn Leitzinger, a researcher who studies activist campaigns and how corporations respond to them. “Over the past century, companies in highly regulated industries such as tobacco, fossil fuels, and pharmaceuticals have used corporate front groups to block or rollback regulations protecting consumers and the natural environment.”

An organization named Virginia Connects spent roughly $700,000 in fiscal year 2024 on mailers, text messages, and other outreach touting data center development to Virginia residents. According to its Form 990, Virginia Connects is headquartered in Richmond and connected to the Data Center Coalition, an industry lobbying group; Josh Levi, the Coalition’s head, is also listed as Virginia Connects’ principal officer.

In May, the Texas Tribune reported that Texas Connects, a similarly named nonprofit “dedicated to educating Texans about the data center industry,” was also established by the Data Center Coalition. Similar groups, for instance Indiana Connects, Pennsylvania Connects, Connected Ohio, Connected Georgia, and Oregon Connects have recently emerged with similar website templates—all linked by the same Google Ads ID, a unique identifier assigned to advertisers.

In a statement to Tech Policy Press, Data Center Coalition president Josh Levi said that America Connects—the umbrella over these similarly named groups—represents a coalition of stakeholders from the data center ecosystem working to educate and engage with communities about the benefits of data centers. The initiative initially launched in Virginia in 2024 and is expanding its education efforts into Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Oregon and other additional states.”

Similar efforts are run by other industry stakeholders. In Virginia’s Fauquier County, for example, a group named Fauquier Forward promotes data center development as a way of raising tax revenue. In October, the Fauquier Times reported that the contact listed on Fauquier Forward’s Facebook page is the co-founder of Gigaland, a data center development company. Fauquier Forward is active on social media: its TikTok page, for instance, includes dozens of videos, though it has received little engagement.

In Missouri, KSDK News reported in February that an organization called Missourians for Data and Technology Advancement, or MODATA, published an ad quoting the Jefferson County Executive—but the executive claimed no knowledge of the group, and the ad was purchased by an out-of-state PR firm called Axiom Strategies. A 2025 press release calls MODATA a “new statewide coalition,” but the group’s website does not list its members.

In a statement to Tech Policy Press, a MODATA spokesman said that “MODATA represents a broad coalition of large and small businesses, organizations, utilities, labor organizations, and developers in Missouri that support responsible data center policies in the state. We track the positive comments from elected officials and experts on our website as well and amplify those through paid and earned media.”

It is unclear how impactful these organizations have been to date. Chloe Humbert, an activist based in Scranton who has seen ads from Pennsylvania Connects, is skeptical. In a statement to Tech Policy Press, she said, “I have no idea who PA Connects’ ads would even influence. Maybe the politicians?”

Community forums as a control mechanism

There are signs that Humbert is right. Data center proponents are shifting toward strategies for keeping the public at arm’s length while courting local leaders.

Project Jupiter is a planned hyperscale data center under development by OpenAI and Oracle in Doña Ana County, New Mexico. Daisy Maldonado, a candidate for the Doña Ana County Commission, said her first clues that a data center was under development came from a man who initially identified himself as a community organizer. Later, she says she learned he worked for a company called BorderPlex Digital Assets—one of the companies involved in the development of Project Jupiter. Maldonado said the man “[recruit[ed] people to speak” positively about the project. Others report that he spoke at County Commission meetings without identifying himself as an employee of BorderPlex Digital Assets. (BorderPlex Digital Assets did not respond to a request for comment.)

Maldonado said that over time, Project Jupiter’s strategy has shifted: engagement with the public moved from public hearings to community forums where corporate officials have more control over the microphone. In the days prior to a county commission vote to issue bonds for the project, corporate and county representatives held five community forums.

“People were incredibly unhappy,” said Maldonado when asked to describe the meetings. Security and law enforcement were present for a contentious conversation with a standing-room-only audience; at the next session, Maldonado said, the audience was asked to write their questions on note cards. After pushback, organizers switched to calling on audience members; Maldonado said members of the community suspected that some participants could be industry plants.

On September 19, 2025, Doña Ana County voted to issue the bonds after an all-day meeting featuring a packed audience and impassioned public comment.

The forum-switching Maldonado described is not limited to New Mexico. In Texas, former State Senate candidate Rena Schroeder described similar dynamics with “meet-and-greets” which were frustratingly unproductive: “You go in thinking maybe you could say something, or you know, get some information, but you can't,” she said.

‘An extraordinary rap sheet’

In March, Source New Mexico reported that a group called Elevate New Mexico ran a campaign promoting Project Jupiter through mailers and digital ads. The mailer showed a smiling young woman with dark hair and brown skin, next to the words “A new day for New Mexico.”

Source New Mexico found that the woman is a stock model and that Elevate New Mexico’s mailing address is in Alexandria, Virginia. Critics told reporters it is an example of ‘brownwashing,’ a practice through which companies attempt to appropriate the identities of people of color. Companies involved in the project formed LLCs with names like “Green Chile Ventures” and “Acoma”—the latter being the name of a Native American tribe. In response to criticism from that tribe’s governor, Acoma LLC changed its name to Yucca Growth Infrastructure; YUCCA is also the acronym for a New Mexican environmental organization, Youth United for Climate Crisis Action.

In April, the New Mexico State Ethics Commission filed a lawsuit against Elevate New Mexico arguing the organization should be forced to register as a lobbyist with the state. Both Source New Mexico’s reporting and the lawsuit note that at least some of Elevate New Mexico’s digital ads were paid for by APCO Worldwide, a public affairs firm that promotes data center advisory services on its website.

Glenn Wikle, a Santa Fe-based environmental activist with Third Act Actions Lab, a nonprofit network of volunteer working groups, told Tech Policy Press that "APCO has an extraordinary rap sheet when it comes to astroturfing." Linda Edwards, also from Third Act Action Lab, noted that APCO’s previous projects include the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, an inoffensively named effort created in partnership with Philip Morris in 1993 to discredit research on the dangers of secondhand smoke. "If you go to APCO worldwide’s site, they present themselves as a PR firm that can enhance your reputation. Companies like Philip Morris turn to them for a reason,” Edwards said. (APCO did not respond to a request for comment from Tech Policy Press.)

Taking advantage of tax-desperate municipalities

Locals pushing back against data center development are up against the cascading consequences of tax reforms designed to starve local governments of revenue.

According to the Missouri Municipal League’s policy statement, “In many of Missouri’s municipalities, annual revenues are never adequate to meet the service needs and demands of citizens.” And Missouri's Senate Bill 3, which required a majority of Missouri counties to put property tax freezes and caps on the ballot last April, will likely make the problem worse.

Local officials often cite the need for revenue when justifying data center projects to public opponents. As Tiffanie Arthur, a candidate for Indiana State Representative in District 63, told Tech Policy Press, before a data center was voted down by the Washington city council, officials asked: “Do you want us to cut the fire department? Do you want us to cut the police department? Which one of these things do you want us to cut, because we don't have the money.”

In Montgomery County, Missouri, where Google’s 2024 $15 billion data center project sparked severe backlash and a Sunshine Law lawsuit from rural residents, county leadership highlighted the impact on their overall operating budget and local public health services facing tight financial constraints.

Tech industry coalitions are well aware of data center’s allure as the ultimate municipal boon. When the proposed Gateway Digital Campus in Franklin County, Missouri, faced intense, organized pushback from rural residents, MODATA promised "$50 million in… direct funding for Franklin County schools, police, fire departments, and parks."

Similarly, the tech coalition NetChoice, a Washington, D.C.-based trade association with core members and funders including AWS, Google, Meta, TikTok, and X, pushed back on local opposition to Amazon's $10 billion data center project in Montgomery County, Missouri by arguing that data centers act as reliable corporate citizens "paying local property taxes that fund schools, repair roads and bolster emergency services while easing the burden on everyday homeowners." And the Meta-linked dark money group American Edge has been ramping up the framing of data centers as indispensable fiscal lifelines. In policy briefs focusing on Calvert County, Maryland and rural jurisdictions nationwide, American Edge points to federal and state funding cuts to argue that traditional local tax bases can no longer sustain schools, roads, or public safety. American Edge CEO Doug Kelly summarized the industry's stance by declaring that leaders “should not hastily slam the door shut on the biggest economic opportunity to reach them in a generation.”

Another strategy is emerging in Missouri, where an ad is attempting to harness anti-data center sentiment to create an even more favorable landscape for corporate capital. The ad encourages voters to “make big tech pay so you don’t have to” by voting for Amendment 5. Claims in the ad have been debunked, and it is unclear who is behind it: financial disclosures reveal that earlier this year, a PAC campaign committee called Missouri Promise received a $1.9 million cash infusion from a Delaware-based non-profit corporation, Missouri Promise Inc., to flood the airwaves with ads supporting Amendment 5. Beyond that, a ProPublica investigation concluded, the money trail goes dark.

But Amendment 5, slated for the August 2026 ballot, doesn’t merely cut taxes; it would also structurally rewire public finance by replacing income taxes with sales taxes, thereby increasing local government dependence on revenue sources like hyperscale datacenters.

In Indiana, the 2026 policy statement for Accelerate Indiana Municipalities—a group representing more than 500 of the state’s cities and towns—highlights the “strict revenue controls” that local governments have contended with for several decades. They identify “...a reluctance to allow locals to have the authority to institute other types of taxes to offset the loss from the property tax caps,” and say that “despite growing demands from the federal and state levels of government and taxpayers for improved services, the state has restricted local government levy growth.”

Indiana’s Senate Enrolled Act 1 recently added to the financial squeeze on municipal and school operations. In St. Joseph County, where grassroots opposition groups formed over AWS data center development, Bill Schalliol, the county’s Executive Director of Economic Development, pointed to a negotiated side agreement explicitly designed to bankroll local emergency and municipal services, telling Inside Indiana Business, "It'll help parks. It'll help fire departments in the area, it will allow money for road improvements."

Once data center deals arrive, corporate groups such as the Consumer Energy Alliance (CEA) step in to shield tech conglomerates from regulatory accountability. According to the Energy and Policy Institute, a nonprofit watchdog organization, CEA brands itself as “the voice of the energy consumer” but is funded by energy monopolies and operated by a private public relations firm. In Connecticut, CEA has been a key political shield for the data center industry. By rebranding corporate tax preservation and grid-heavy infrastructure development as a win for "working families," as the group did in official testimony to the Connecticut General Assembly in February, it attempts to neutralize genuine grassroots pushback. In spring 2026, CEA escalated efforts focused on data center development in states including Missouri and Indiana.

Disillusionment with democracy

As communities across the country contend with the breakneck pace of data center development and struggle to express themselves through democratic means, they describe a David vs. Goliath battle against corporate interests. As Janice Bacon, of the Indiana group Protect Morgan County, told Tech Policy Press, “Everybody’s always like, ‘well why is our back pushed up against the wall? We have no recourse.’ People are just now realizing that laws have been written to cut the constituency out.”

Arthur told Tech Policy Press that local opposition to the data center transcends political affiliation. “People are waking up to the fact that it's not about right vs left but have's and have not's. They're seeing, 'It's not my neighbor that is ruining my quality of life, it's billionaires who want more and more and more and have no concern about my quality of life,’” she said.

The swell of opposition can be huge. In Henry County, Indiana, Commissioner Steve Dellinger publicly stated that the majority of constituents supported the local data center development. However, documents obtained by the community group No Henry County Data Center revealed that over 80% of the communications he received urged him to vote against it, a figure corroborated by County Commissioner Susan Huhn. But despite this overwhelming constituent opposition, Dellinger and Commissioner Joe Wiley voted to approve rezoning for the data center, with Huhn dissenting.

Local disillusionment is deepening. Kiley Blalock, co-founder of No Henry County Data Center, said, "I know we're a constitutional Republic and the point is to uphold democracy. But it sure doesn't feel like democracy at this point… It's not so much leaning towards 'what do the people want?' but 'what do these corporations want?'"

Festus, Missouri is forging ahead with data center development despite overwhelming public outcry, a landslide municipal election that ousted four pro-project city council members, an active transparency lawsuit, and a successful citizen-led petition drive that certified a recall election for the mayor and remaining officials who ultimately blocked it from reaching the ballot.

After a Festus City Council Meeting on the evening of May 11th, Air Force veteran Victor Dubbs sat on the sidewalk outside City Hall in a folding chair with a “No Data Center” sign. “We’re not against progress. We want a word. We want them to involve us in the process. They work for us,” he told Tech Policy Press.