Nobody Wanted That Datacenter: How AI's Hunger for Land Is Uniting Unlikely Neighbours

Key points

• A proposed 550-acre Google datacenter in Monrovia, Indiana (population 1,600) has drawn opposition from every resident Bryce Gustafson spoke to at a recent town festival.
• Gustafson, lead organiser for Citizens Action Coalition (CAC), spoke to roughly 50 residents at the event and found zero supporters of the project.
• At least six self-identified Trump voters approached him to express frustration that the president appeared to be backing large datacenter developments.
• AI infrastructure, the physical buildings full of servers that power tools like ChatGPT, is becoming a rare cross-partisan flashpoint in US politics.

Bryce Gustafson has spent more than a decade knocking on doors in Indiana. He leads Citizens Action Coalition, a consumer and environmental advocacy group, and he's used to a split room. Whatever the issue, someone always pushes back.

Not this time.

At a recent festival in Monrovia, a rural town of about 1,600 people, Gustafson was talking to residents about a planned datacenter: a vast facility full of computer servers that companies like Google build to run their AI systems. The proposed site covers 550 acres, right on the edge of this small community.

"I had 50 people I talked to," Gustafson told The Guardian, which first reported the broader story. "Nobody wanted that datacenter in their community. And at least a half a dozen people came up to me to say, 'Hey, I voted for Trump. What the heck's he doing, supporting these things?'"

Ken Paxton's "Texas First" datacenter plan, which we covered on 25 August, showed Republicans beginning to treat datacenter siting as a political issue. What's different in Monrovia is that ordinary voters, not candidates, are pushing back first.

Why do datacenters cause so much local anger?

For residents, the objections are immediate and physical. Datacenters are large, loud, water-hungry. They consume enormous amounts of water for cooling and draw heavily on the local electricity grid, which can push up power bills for everyone nearby. A facility designed to serve global AI demand lands in a specific place: someone's backyard, someone's water supply, someone's road.

For a town of 1,600, a 550-acre industrial site isn't background noise. It's a transformation.

What does this mean for ordinary people?

AI companies are racing to build more datacenters across the United States, pressured by surging demand for computing power. That means more towns will face this choice. Our 27 August story on communities pushing back against datacenter siting found the same pattern playing out across the UK.

Local residents rarely get a formal vote on whether a facility gets built. Planning decisions often rest with a small number of officials, and companies arrive with significant legal and financial resources. That imbalance is part of what's driving the anger Gustafson describes.

The political wrinkle is real. Opposition to large tech infrastructure has traditionally been stronger on the environmental left. Trump-aligned voters joining that opposition, citing frustration with a president they supported, tells you this issue doesn't sort neatly along party lines.

Should you worry?

If a large datacenter is proposed near you, the decisions that matter most often happen early and quietly, at zoning board meetings or in planning applications most people never see. Local environmental groups like CAC are often the first to track these proposals.

Check your electricity provider's announcements. Read local planning agendas. The window to weigh in is usually narrower than residents expect.