When a buyer asks what a planned data center will do to a neighborhood, you have no number, so you say it is hard to know and the conversation stalls. There is a national figure now, and it says local opposition is not a fringe position but the default one.
The story is about the politics — data centers have become an election issue, and the President posted in support of the projects against rising community opposition, following a party committee memo warning about voter attitudes. The number underneath it is the part an agent can use.
A Gallup survey conducted in March and published in May found that "seven in 10 Americans oppose constructing data centers for artificial intelligence in their local area." Almost half of those surveyed were strongly opposed.
The piece reports opposition rising even in districts that have historically backed the President, including parts of Texas and Florida, with Florida seeing a wave of community opposition and municipal moratoriums. The stated concerns are consistent: strained water supplies, rising power costs and land use. Amazon, Microsoft and Google have all scrapped multibillion-dollar projects.
And yet the money keeps moving. Per MSCI, data centers accounted for nearly half of commercial real estate deal volume in July, $33.8 billion. Total volume was up 78 percent year over year, but only 1 percent with data centers taken out — the sector's own transaction volume was up more than 1,900 percent.
“seven in 10 Americans oppose constructing data centers for artificial intelligence in their local area.”
You cannot tell a buyer what a data center will do to their resale value, and you should not try. What you can do is stop treating the question as unanswerable, because the sentiment is measured and the local process is public record.
Practically, this is a disclosure-adjacent question you will get more of, not less. Know what is proposed within a few miles of the areas you sell, know whether it needs a hearing or is permitted by right, and be the agent who can say where the application currently sits.