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XWalk into almost any public meeting about a proposed data center, and the industry's opening argument is nearly always the same. Someone explains, patiently and in good faith, that data centers power the Internet (email, banking, streaming, navigation, hospital records, 911 dispatch) and that daily life would be unrecognizable without them. Someone else, anticipating the water question, notes that a golf course or a modest agricultural operation uses more water in a year than the facility down the road ever will.
Both statements are true. Neither one answers the question the room truly asked.
The public is not questioning whether digital infrastructure is valuable. Nobody at a rezoning hearing believes the Internet should go away and pointing out that people rely on it dozens of times a day doesn't move the conversation forward - it was never the disagreement in the first place. What residents are asking about is narrower and more local - this facility, on this parcel, drawing on this substation and this water system, in this community. A defense of data centers as a category doesn't answer a question about one specific project, no matter how accurate it is.
The same mismatch shows up with water. Comparing a facility's annual water draw to a golf course or a farm is usually accurate at the macro level, data centers account for a small share of most regions' total water consumption. But it answers a question nobody asked. A community isn't trying to rank data centers against other water users nationally. It wants to know how much this specific building will use, where that water will come from, and what happens to the facility's draw if the region enters a drought. A comparison to an unrelated industry, however statistically fair, tends to read as deflection rather than an answer, even when it's offered sincerely.
The trend line makes the stakes clear. A Heatmap Pro poll conducted by Embold Research found that 75% of Americans now oppose a new data center being built near where they live, with more than six in ten saying they'd oppose one strongly. Only 4% of Americans now say they'd "strongly support" a data center proposed in their area, down from 13% a year ago.
A full year of the industry's standard arguments ran alongside this collapse, not ahead of it, which is the clearest evidence yet that broad, category-level messaging isn't holding ground on its own.
None of this means the industry’s instincts are wrong. The intent behind both arguments is usually sincere, and the underlying facts are usually accurate. The problem is scope. "The Internet matters" and "we use less water than a golf course" are answers to the question "should data centers exist." They are not answers to the question a community really asked, which is closer to “what will this project cost us, who benefits, and what happens if something goes wrong?”
Closing that gap is mostly a matter of specificity, not persuasion. Part 2 of this series, "The Questions Communities Are Really Asking," walks through the nine questions residents raise most often and what it looks like to answer each with a real number, a name, and a commitment instead of a category-level defense.
Next: Part 2, "The Questions Communities Are Really Asking," walks through the nine questions residents ask first - electric bills, noise, sightlines and light, air quality, water use and water bills, property values, taxes, and long-term community benefit - and what a specific answer to each looks like.
Meeting the colocation demands of tomorrow, RadiusDC owns and operates facilities in strategically located population centers throughout North America. Serving a wide variety of network operators, carriers, MSOs, and content providers, RadiusDC supports the increasingly urgent requirement to expand IT infrastructure to the network edge. For more information, please visit radius-dc.com.
Jaymie Scotto & Associates (JSA)
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