How sovereign control, decarbonization and energy costs shape public support for data centers

Abstract

The rapid expansion of data centers has created new political challenges. Governments want to build more data centers to reap the benefits from the artificial intelligence (AI) economy and achieve their digital sovereignty agendas. However, data centers require enormous amounts of electricity and water, threaten emission-reduction targets, and often raise local electricity prices. As a result, local communities increasingly mobilize against data center construction. We use a vignette and conjoint survey experiment in Germany to evaluate how publics think about the environmental, economic, and (geo)political tradeoffs that data centers entail. We find that directly priming people with digital sovereignty concerns only marginally increases support for building more data centers. Yet, support varies substantially based on characteristics that people do have strong views about: decarbonization, geopolitics, and local environmental and economic impact. Geopolitical concerns are particularly salient: people strongly favor data centers operated by German or European firms over US or Chinese operators. These nationality effects are large even when compared to the effects of electricity price increases and variation in energy sources. Our findings suggest that public opposition to data centers depends on pre-existing political cleavages and that sovereignty concerns loom large. Investigating how publics think about the environmental, economic, and geopolitical tradeoffs that data centers entail, results show that public opposition depends on pre-existing political cleavages as well as concerns about digital sovereignty.