Local opinion: Arizona deserves the truth about data centers

Arizona communities deserve an honest conversation about data centers, and right now, they aren’t getting one. Residents have genuine concerns about how data centers affect their water supply, electricity costs, and quality of life. Those concerns deserve to be answered with transparent, accurate information. Instead, a vacuum of trustworthy facts has been filled by misinformation, leaving voters with a distorted picture of what data centers do and what they mean for local communities. A technology quietly powering nearly every aspect of modern life has become one of the most misunderstood industries in America.

The polling bears this out. A new national survey by the Joseph Rainey Center for Public Policy finds that data centers currently sit at just 29% favorable with American voters. But here is the critical finding: that opposition is not deeply held. When voters are given accurate facts,  support jumps dramatically across every issue tested.

When voters learned that modern data centers recycle water, continuously recirculating the same water through closed-loop cooling systems with minimal freshwater input, support shifted by a net 31 points, the single largest swing the Rainey Center has recorded across three waves of polling. When voters learned that data centers trigger significant grid infrastructure upgrades benefiting all residents, 42% became more supportive — a net shift of +38 points. The opposition isn’t rooted in facts; it’s rooted in ignorance.

On energy, the same pattern holds. When voters learned that data centers generate their own power under Trump's Ratepayer Protection Pledge rather than drawing from local electricity supplies — a pledge Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI have already signed — support jumped again. Your utility bill isn't going up because a data center moved in. That's not an opinion. It's what these companies have committed to deliver, and 61% of Americans want Congress to make that commitment binding federal law. What is going up is your community’s tax base. Data centers pay substantial property taxes, funding schools, fire departments, and road repairs. When respondents learned about these tax benefits, support rose by a net 36 points. Sixty-six percent of Americans also support requiring mandatory community benefits agreements, local hiring, infrastructure upgrades and direct payments to the community before construction begins. These are exactly the accountability measures that turn skeptics into supporters.

But the stakes go well beyond tax revenue. When you send an email, store a photo, make a video call or check your bank balance, where do you want that data to live? In a facility on American soil, subject to American law, or in a data center in China, accessible to a government that has demonstrated its willingness to exploit foreign data for espionage and economic advantage? The Rainey Center found that 66% of Americans say it is extremely or very important that their personal data not be stored in China or other adversary nations. If we don’t build here, it gets built there.

The Rainey Center poll found that every single piece of accurate information about data centers moved voters toward support. The path forward isn't complicated: give Arizonans the facts, and they'll make the right call.