The Washington Post put out a piece this morning that is interesting mostly for the graphic purporting to show “the moment when Republican politicians turned against data centers.”
It’s the kind of research that’s pretty easy for anyone to do with AI now, and I encourage more people to try: The Post says it had GPT 5.6 Luna do sentiment analysis of 4,300 social media posts and newsletters from politicians with the phrase “data center” in them.
The key finding is that Republicans started souring on the phrase during the summer of 2025, while Democrats were already net-negative about it several months earlier.
The recent partial recovery shown in Republican sentiment, starting in April, matches my impression of a party that lacked any coherent view about data centers more recently trying to form a pro-growth front in their defense, thanks in part to pressure from the White House. But at the same time, as we’ve recently reported, Republican leadership seems to be warning the tech companies that the facilities are becoming so politically toxic that support can only go so far — that Republicans with any sense of self-preservation will be forced to take anti-data-center positions if the industry doesn’t clean up its image.
Separately, an interesting new fissure in Republican data center support was described by an Associated Press article about 200 activists in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again movement writing a letter to President Trump complaining about his embrace of coal power for data centers. They wrote:
We understand the importance of American leadership in artificial intelligence, national security, innovation, and economic growth. But American AI leadership should not come at the cost of a more toxic burden for American children.
For his part, Trump has continued to promote “big beautiful coal” and said this week that:
If I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big plant in, an AI plant or a data center, I would absolutely want it because the jobs are enormous and the money paid, the taxes paid, are just enormous.
But data center negativity is the highest I’ve ever seen it, and shows no sign of letting up. I predict Trump will either carve out a more nuanced position before the midterm elections or signal that he won’t try to punish Republicans up for (re)election if they campaign against data centers — something he may already be doing. Asked by a reporter on Friday if he wanted Republicans to share his stance on data centers, he said he wanted them “to do what they want.”
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.