Nate Silver ran an interview with Jasmine Sun on why data center opposition has become so broad, published August 17. The numbers in it are worth having: Gallup has 70 percent of Americans opposed to a data center in their area, Google searches for "data center" are running about 3.5 times 2025 levels and close to ten times 2024, and the opposition is bipartisan with Democrats slightly more against. Sun's read on the environmental side is that water concerns are "pretty overblown," that data center water use is "very comparable" to nearby golf courses that draw no criticism, and that grid strain is the more serious issue, with behind-the-meter gas plants "not super great."
US golf courses applied 1.63 million acre-feet of water in 2024, down 31 percent from 2005, which is roughly 30 times what every data center in the country consumed onsite. We ran that decomposition in July. On the national aggregate Sun is not merely right, she is understating it. At the site level the comparison inverts, and that is the part the argument keeps skipping. Golf acreage is distributed across thousands of separate parcels drawing from thousands of separate sources. A hyperscale campus concentrates its entire draw on one groundwater basin or one municipal system at one point. Concentration is what a water district regulates, what a well field responds to, and what a neighbor notices. The aggregate math has been abused by the alarmed side too, and the honest position is that both figures are correct and they answer different questions.
Sun's stronger argument is that the objection is not really technological. Residents describe NDAs, dark money, and local officials selling out, and the framing she lands on is "big corporation scary" rather than "big model scary." Saline, Michigan, a town under 3,000 people, has faced developer litigation. Construction employment runs 500 to 10,000 workers for two to six years and then settles at roughly 50 permanent jobs. She notes the NDAs "made the backlash much worse by the time people do realize." That matches what we have tracked: roughly $64 billion in projects blocked or delayed by neighbors and organized opposition groups more than doubling.
Here is where the water argument stops being academic. A city council in Elko, Nevada voted last week to lock ten years of its reclaimed water to a golf course and a ranch, specifically so it could not go to data center cooling. The golf course won. Telling a room that your campus uses about what the local course uses is not the reassurance it sounds like, because the room has already decided which one it would rather irrigate. Operators who show up with a zero-evaporation design and a published makeup rate do not have to win that comparison at all, and that is the only version of this conversation that ends well.