53% of Americans Don't Want an AI Data Center in Their Neighborhood, Redfin Survey Finds
A national Ipsos survey finds more opposition to AI data centers than to any other building type tested, including apartments.
New survey data: AI data centers now draw more neighborhood opposition than apartments or malls.
A nationally representative survey from Redfin and Rocket Mortgage, fielded by Ipsos, found that 53% of US adults oppose a new AI data center being built in their neighborhood, more opposition than any other type of development the survey tested.
The numbers
Ipsos surveyed 4,000 US adults aged 18 and older in May 2026, with a margin of error of plus or minus 1.9 percentage points. 53% of respondents opposed a data center in their neighborhood against 34% who supported one. For comparison, 39% opposed a new apartment complex nearby and 32% opposed mixed-use development, so a data center drew more resistance than either.
Separately, 58% of respondents said they believe AI advances will eliminate jobs and make housing less affordable, a belief that colors how people read new development proposals even when the proposal itself is about server racks and cooling systems rather than jobs directly.
Who opposes and why
Opposition splits sharply by age. 65% of Baby Boomers said they'd oppose a nearby data center, against 60% of Gen X, 43% of Millennials, and 42% of Gen Z. It splits by party too: 49% of Republicans said they'd favor development against 36% of Democrats, a gap that runs the opposite direction from how AI regulation debates usually sort by party.
The reasons respondents gave cluster around strain on shared infrastructure: electricity and water use, higher local energy costs, constant noise from cooling systems, and the industrial look of a data center campus next to houses. A large data center can pull enough power to show up in a utility's regional planning documents and enough water to become a line item in a local water authority's budget.
Reading the survey correctly
This is Redfin and Rocket Mortgage's own commissioned research, published through Redfin's news desk, with Ipsos handling the fieldwork. It's a distinct data point from the town-hall and reservation-level negotiations covered in an earlier piece on this site about towns and tribes bargaining directly with data center developers. That earlier story was about deals being struck locally. This one is about the baseline of public opinion those deals get negotiated against, and 53% national opposition is a harder number for developers to route around than any single town's objection.
Why a build studio cares
Every AI product this studio ships eventually runs on compute that has to be sited and built somewhere, and this survey is a live read on how contested that siting has become at the household level, not just in state legislatures or utility commission hearings. Client conversations about where to host AI workloads increasingly touch on this, not as an abstract concern but as a real constraint on how fast new capacity gets approved and built.
Next step: read Redfin's own data at redfin.com or the coverage at Inman.