Several weeks ago, Jason Kelce (football player, podcaster, Taylor Swift’s brother-in-law) starred in an ad asking Americans to pee in jars and send them to their nearest artificial intelligence data center. The spot — a collaboration between Liquid Death and Kelce’s own Garage Beer — was nominally about water consumption. Mostly, though, it was evidence that hating on data centers has gone fully mainstream.

The polling backs this up. The University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center found that opposition to local data centers jumped twelve points in four months this year — from 49 percent in March to 61 percent in July. And an August Heatmap Pro poll pushed the number to 75 percent, with more than six in ten Americans strongly opposed — the most negative result since the outlet began tracking the question a year ago.

Americans are wary of AI data centers, and politicians have taken note (much faster than they usually do). In July, New York Governor Kathy Hochul imposed the country’s first statewide moratorium. Weeks later, Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott — a longtime data center recruiter — paused new grid connections pending an audit. And just this month, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro — who celebrated Amazon’s data center investment as recently as last year — signed an executive order marketed as the nation’s strictest guardrails on the industry.