With host communities across the U.S. turning against their gargantuan data centers, America's technology giants are promising to take fewer taxpayer handouts, keep fewer secrets or shower more money onto the communities willing to allow the server warehouses.
The new raft of promises from the world's richest companies comes as anti-data center sentiment has become a potent issue in the midterm elections, with control of Congress and 36 governors'
offices on the line.
Despite backing from President Donald Trump, the data centers powering the artificial intelligence boom have become politically toxic. Community opposition that blocks municipal permits has become a bottleneck, and tech giants could face even more challenges if voters next month elect more public officials who are skeptical of data centers.
The tech industry says it has gotten the message. In addition to ramping up financial incentives, officials with Google and Meta said in interviews with The Associated Press they are trying to address mistrust by being more transparent with communities where they would like to build.
Companies are also making pledges to reduce their impact on the environment and offering assurances that data centers will boost local property values — all while maintaining AI is a positive force for the American economy, despite its skeptics.
Devi Thomas, Google’s global head of community development and engagement, told AP that she wouldn’t call resistance to data centers a “backlash,” but that “there are often community questions to be addressed.”
“Early public consultation is increasingly a very important part of the process. We have done as much as we can to make sure communities are involved early on,” Thomas said.
Earlier this month, Amazon rolled out its “Amazon Data Center Commitment," including pledges to improve the environmental rating of its backup diesel generators and disclose more about its data centers' energy and water use. It also said — as have Microsoft and Google — that it had stopped requiring government officials to sign non-disclosure agreements.
The use of non-disclosure agreements has meant people in host communities may know little or nothing about a project until it shows up on a municipal board’s voting agenda. Besides that, tech companies often have hidden their involvement in a project behind a code name and developers who do the legwork with local governments, critics and other developers say.
That practice “raises people’s suspicion as to what’s truly happening,” said Anita Verma-Lallian, a developer with data center projects in Arizona.
Meta is always evaluating how well it shares information with communities, said Lindsay Elin, Meta’s vice president of public policy and external affairs. “As part of that work, we are reviewing our use of non-disclosure agreements,” she said in a statement to the AP.
In a report this month that sharply criticized data center giants including Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft, several Senate Democrats said companies have used non-disclosure agreements to freeze out the public. The report also said the companies aggressively seek state and local tax breaks and do not cover the entire cost of the electric-grid buildout needed for energy-hungry data centers.
The dominant players in the industry — Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft — project they’ll spend more than $600 billion this year combined on capital projects, primarily data center construction in the U.S.
Even as the companies prepare to spend more to entice communities — payments that some critics call “bribes” — Trump urged them in a social media post Wednesday to pay people and communities a “dividend” if they “want to make their Data Centers popular.”
“MAKE DEALS, and get them built!!! GREAT FOR THE U.S.A.,” Trump wrote.
Meta and Amazon said recently they will each spend $1 billion on financial incentives to host communities in the coming years, on top of millions they already spend to support schools, charities and job training. Google says its investments in local programs in data center communities will reach $1 billion by the end of 2027.
Microsoft has pointed to a couple local tax breaks that it will forego. And Google recently said for all of its new data center campuses, the company will pay full real property taxes on the buildings and land.
The companies have known since last fall that community opposition was becoming a serious problem.
Data center demand began driving up electric bills last year across a 13-state electricity grid stretching from Illinois to New Jersey and Maryland, angering ratepayers. The outcry led to promises from the tech giants to pay the cost of the power infrastructure to feed their data centers, while Microsoft rolled out its five-point “Community-First AI Infrastructure” plan.
Data centers’ critics aren’t persuaded.
Sam Burleigh, who helped start Concerned Citizens of Montour County in rural northern Pennsylvania to fight a potential Amazon-backed data center project, said the company's commitments are “propaganda."
“What I see is them realizing they have more resistance than they ever dreamt of. And so now they have to find some way, some method to break through that resistance,” Burleigh said.
Kathryn Hoffman, executive director of the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, which has sued over two prospective Google data centers, said she sees Google doing more public relations outreach, but she doesn’t see it doing more to disclose critical details about its plans.
In an Aug. 18 memo, the Senate Republicans’ national campaign arm crystallized the midterm election pressure on the tech giants.
It warned the tech sector that it must “fix the toxic brand of an entire segment of the economy” or risk long-term fallout in elections. That included addressing "who benefits, who pays, and why a community should want one."
Drew Nations, a developer in North Carolina, said developers need to aggressively address quality-of-life complaints from neighbors. That includes shielding neighbors from noise and data centers from public view so they aren't an eyesore, and they need to forego “corporate welfare” such as the lucrative sales tax exemptions that nearly 40 states offer.
Those tax breaks leave regular people thinking, "'So you’re saying that this multi-multi-billion if not trillion-dollar company gets tax breaks and I don’t?'” Nations said.
Meta, Google, Microsoft and Amazon collectively reported more than $300 billion in net income in their most recent fiscal year.
Spending to promote data centers has been on the rise. The Data Center Coalition, a trade association whose members include the tech giants, said it has spent more than $10 million running pro-data center ads in 10 states on TV and elsewhere. Data center giant QTS and a group that doesn’t disclose its donors, Build American AI, also began ad campaigns this year.
Meanwhile, angry residents continue to flood once-sleepy municipal board meetings, pressuring officials to reject data center proposals.
More municipalities are passing data center moratoriums and Data Center Watch, a project of AI security consultancy 10a Labs, said it saw sustained local opposition to dozens of projects in the April-to-June quarter, its latest reporting period.
Balaji Tammabattula, chief operating officer of BaRupOn, which develops data center campuses, said the pressure of the midterms has helped developers understand how crucial community support is to a project’s success.
“It’s impossible to build without them,” he said.
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Follow Marc Levy at http://x.com/timelywriter
