As data center debates rage on across the country, a new poll finds, by and large, the average person is not crazy about massive compute centers going up in their backyards.
The University of Massachusetts Amherst recently found only 1 in 9 Americans support data center construction – with many in outright opposition and concerned about AI, land use and potential rises in utility costs.
All of that and more were on display in Westfield this month ahead of a planning board meeting – complete with protesters and one of the biggest proponents of data centers – tradesmen.
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A day before Greenfield’s city council passed a moratorium on data centers and about two months after Holyoke’s banned them, Westfield residents were once again standing out against a data center project in town – though they had company.
In addition to two dozen protesters, about a hundred trades workers of all kinds flanked Court Street on Sept. 15 – complete with signs promoting the benefits a proposed data center could bring if all goes according to plan in Whip City.
Among them was Griffin Buell, an organizer with a local carpenters’ union.
“These are jobs that are family-sustaining and create middle class lives for people in the United States when those jobs are pretty hard to come by,” he said. “These are high-demand trades and, of course, when there's an opportunity for carpenters and other tradespeople to come out and give a voice for work that'll help put food on their table, they're going to come out and show up and speak out for it.”
As Servistar has previously pitched, the “Servistar Data Center Campus” would be an 8-10 year buildout, packing as many as 2,000 construction jobs along the way as it goes up off Servistar Industrial Way, near the Westfield-Barnes Regional Airport.
The 155-acre project, in one form or another, goes back to at least 2021 – a time when data center concerns had yet to crop up and headlines over the multi-billion-dollar project’s potential were still coming out.
Five years later though, as Servistar seeks a special permit extension, opposition has been calcifying – as heard at the Sept. 15 planning board meeting protesters and rallies gathered outside of.
“It is clear that big data's promises were misguided at best and deceptive at worst - the developers had their deadline and failed,” local educator Ron Roux said before the planning board.
Roux said he had already come to terms with and accepted things like the city’s tractor-trailer truck traffic or new F-35As flying out of the local air national guard base.
But, as he told WAMC, what Servistar is pitching is raising more than one red flag.
“A mile away from where I live is where seven of these buildings will be and people [at the meeting] had mentioned natural gas… if they check the [old] planning board minutes, there's no mention of natural gas,” Roux said, recounting past planning board meetings over the proposal. “It is about diesel generators burning - 13 generators and over six months, consuming 130,000 gallons [of gas]. If you do the math, that's 700 gallons of diesel just for testing and that is not even including when we start having brownouts because already I get notices of brownouts.”
For the record, Westfield’s own city council passed a one-year moratorium on data centers earlier in the year, but that did not affect Servistar.
The company’s data center complex isn’t complete, but as Servistar Realties’s Erik Bartone emphasized at the meeting, there has been progress in recent years, with little changing in the way of the proposal’s original design – one that uses a closed-loop cooling system and doesn’t draw from local aquifers.
At the meeting, Bartone also took issue with how the complex has been characterized over the years, including accusations of his company not communicating adequately with the city, which he dismissed, along with other claims.
“Everybody thinks about this as AI – ‘we don't want this here.’ This isn't an AI play - a lot of what we're looking at here are data storage requirements that aren't in existence right now and we've got a lot of companies - not only in this state but in the Northeast - that want it, and they're having a hard time finding it because of the misinformation that's out there,” he said before the board.
For residents and even officials like City Councilor Bridget Matthews-Kane, Servistar has already been on thin ice, especially after a series of permitting moves in the project’s infancy, Matthews-Kane claimed.
“Originally, Servistar told city officials it planned to file [Massachusetts Environmental Protection Act] permit applications in January of 2022 - instead, that February, it withdrew from a site study related to necessary grid improvements on the property, which has two high-voltage power lines owned by Eversource running through it,” she said, citing reporting by The Shoestring. “When Servistar withdrew from the site study, when they ghosted the city and when they refused delivery of permits - as far as I'm concerned, they broke faith with the city.”
The planning board ultimately punted on Tuesday, putting off a vote on the three-year permit extension. At least one board member stated more information was needed regarding sound levels and cooling systems.
All in all, it’s not all that surprising says Professor Jesse Rhodes, who teaches political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is also co-director of UMass Poll.
Rhodes’s outfit recently conducted a national poll on AI data centers and found 65% of respondents opposed their construction - and only a sliver supporting them.
Conducted in August, it found the disdain was bipartisan, as well - though 18 percent of Republicans were in favor, compared to just 7% of Democrats.
“The real topline result is that the construction of data centers in people's communities is very unpopular - roughly two-thirds of Americans oppose the construction of data centers in their communities, compared with only about 11% of Americans who supported that,” Rhodes said in a Zoom interview with WAMC. “And what's really striking is that, in a world where Americans are polarized on so many things, this is an issue where Americans across the board – majorities - oppose the construction of data centers. Among Democrats, there is a stronger opposition, so more than 70% of Democrats oppose constructing data centers, but still, a majority of Republicans opposes it too.”
The response also came with plenty of reasons for opposition as well, Rhodes noted.
“What we found in the open-ended responses was that the main reasons for opposing data centers in the in communities is about essentially NIMBYism - that people are worried that data centers will degrade the environment, that they will raise energy prices, that they will displace conventional and traditional forms of economic activity - and so, in short, they're really worried that data centers will really decrease the quality of life in their communities.”
As the poll and Rhodes notes, only 5% of respondents strongly support the local construction of data centers.
As he left Tuesday’s meeting, David Provost, a general laborer with the International Association of Mechanics and Machinists, said he had planned to speak against the data center in Westfield – though the sheer number of public speakers before him made many of his own points.
Speaking with WAMC, he detailed how, across the country, data centers have presented one issue after another in different communities.
“It's very interesting because Servistar is touting that they are going to be using different, more environmentally-friendly, more environmentally-conscious means of powering their facility and cooling their facility - they mentioned things like closed-loop water systems and things like using gas turbines and gas generators,” Provost recounted. “Data centers across the board have a pretty bad reputation for intentionally withholding information from the public, including data and statistics reports regarding direct and indirect water usage, in addition to electrical usage and power grid consumption. A lot of those problems end up getting passed along to consumer households, or rather residential households, in places like El Paso, Texas, in places like Wyoming, in places like Oregon, Virginia, etc.”
Also attending Tuesday was Johnathan Guido, who told WAMC that there are concerns those issues could come to town – though Guido admits, the jobs would be a plus – even if they mainly come via construction.
“I personally am against it, but I understand why [the ralliers] are for it - People want jobs. It's been a heck of a time trying to get jobs and actually get money - if it does go through, it'd make hundreds of jobs,” Guido said. “But, it would also come at the cost of us dealing with everything that you see online and on the news about data centers – I’m talking about the noise, the vibrations and just everything around it. They're [also] going to clear out a ton of trees to get rid of it."
It's not immediately clear when the Westfield Planning Board might vote on the permit extension.
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A very abridged, shortened version of this story aired on Northeast Notebook Friday, Sept. 25, 2026.
