NYT/Siena finds 47 percent of Republicans oppose building data centres for AI

The slide is already built: median wage, property tax contribution, a rendering of the site behind trees. The rooms it goes into are now described by a New York Times and Siena College survey of 1,503 likely voters, which found 47% of Republicans opposed to building data centres to power AI ^[2].

Site-selection decks have treated that opposition as a blue-state problem, routed around by picking a county with a different voting record. The survey's Democratic figure is 75% ^[3], so the partisan gap is 28 points and it is real ^[1]. Republican opposition still sits 14 points under the all-voter number of 61% ^[1][2]. The numbers as reported do not include how many Republicans support the projects ^[1]. Forty-seven percent is not a majority of Republicans.

Officials are already out in front of the polling. Trump wrote that the campaign against data centres had largely failed once communities saw the salaries and the tax revenue ^[7]. New York paused permits for large data centre projects and has not moved since, despite Trump calling the decision terrible, which TNW describes as the largest single blocking action any state has taken ^[8]. Greg Abbott said the data centre companies had dug their own grave, a break with a president from his own party ^[9].

The regulatory content of Saturday's post is one sentence long. The government will not "hinder or stifle" the industry, Trump wrote, but will be "looking for BAD" using "our already existing Criminal and Civil Justice System" ^[13]. In TNW's account that amounts to a statement that no new AI statute is coming, and to the preemption argument in short form ^[14]. Preemption has lost a vote already: the Senate voted 99 to 1 to strip it from a defence bill ^[15], and 36 state attorneys general wrote against it ^[16]. That leaves permits at the state and county level setting the schedule for a 2028 capacity plan.

The federal government has offered an announcement instead. "I am forming the AI Force, much like I did Space Force," Trump wrote ^[10]. Space Force was created by Congress in the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2020, signed in December 2019, and sits in Title 10 as the sixth armed service ^[11]. The post named no mission and no budget for the AI Force ^[12]. The AI czar job has been empty since March, when David Sacks left; NBC News' Raquel Coronell Uribe reported that he stepped down because of limits on his term as a special government employee, a category capped at 130 days in any 365-day period ^[17][18].

The hoax framing needs the opposition to be partisan. Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis have all called for slowing development ^[22], and Geoffrey Hinton told lawmakers in a closed-door briefing this week that Congress has maybe a year to act, NBC News reported ^[23].

For each site in the pipeline, two questions decide the schedule: which body issues the permit, and what the build looks like if that body sits on it for a year. The federal answer, on the evidence of this post, is existing criminal and civil law and no new statute ^[13]. A siting team can use the measured opposition rate in the jurisdiction that issues the permit, and the NYT/Siena split says to expect a high floor for that number in both parties: 47% and 75% ^[2][3].