Data center conversations continued to build across media and social as AI infrastructure expansion met intensifying public pushback. News coverage increased 51% in the last six months, fueled by major stories like AWS's $15B AI revenue run rate, Microsoft’s $150B AI investment, and large-scale project proposals across the Southeast. Community opposition to data centers became a defining narrative, reflected in social media conversations jumping 157% in six months. Local concerns over water, land use, power costs and demand, and transparency sparked protests and project cancellations across the country. As chatter, risk, and opportunity all increase, brands have to crystallize their unique POV — not hedge into oblivion.

No visual reflects the evolution of the data center conversation quite as clearly as the breakdown of coverage by media type. At this time last year, coverage across national, trade, and local outlets followed a similar trajectory. But as data centers are planned in more and more communities and NIMBY-ism builds, there’s a groundswell of local pushback that’s shaking up the media mix. Local coverage has increased 186% year over year. And in just the last month, local coverage outpaced national coverage by 116%. Expect this trend to continue in the months ahead, as we’ve heard from some national reporters that their readers are losing interest in the deluge of data center stories, and negative local sentiment shows no signs of slowing down.

Coverage shifted from discussing AI’s capabilities to discussing physical capacity, infrastructure strain, and resource coordination. Compared to this time last year, mentions of “infrastructure” in tech-focused media and on social increased 172% and 327%, respectively. Mentions of “power” in energy media spiked 249% year over year, and across media types, “capacity” mentions increased by more than 100% in the same timeframe. Together, these points illustrate that the questions media are asking are moving away from “What can AI do?” to “Can society support the resources needed to power AI at scale?”  

Social conversations have increasingly centered on the rapid expansion of AI-driven data center infrastructure and the growing strain it places on energy systems, grids, and local resources. Discussions shifted from compute limitations to infrastructure and power constraints, with sharp increases in mentions of infrastructure, capacity, costs, batteries, and grid impacts. Social conversations also reflected rising public concern over water usage and environmental impact, rate increases, and energy security, while companies like AWS, Meta, Nvidia, and OpenAI drove spikes tied to major AI, power, and data center investment announcements. 

To absolutely no one’s surprise, the scarcity narrative around data centers that started in 2025 didn’t go away; instead, it got a lot louder. With a 100+% increase in coverage across the board compared to last year, we witnessed the narrative shift from “can we build enough” to “who gets access to these limited resources?” So far this year, power is the headline, water is political, and chips are a matter of global competition. One conversation to keep an eye on while the resource fight plays out? Fiber/networks. Connectivity issues haven’t disappeared, but for the most part, the media has overlooked this aspect of data center buildouts. 

Every energy source still wants a seat at the data center table, but those who can deliver power fast and firmly enough to keep up with demand will eat first. Gas continued to dominate, mentioned in 27% of data center energy stories, on average. Batteries — bipartisan darlings that can play with any energy type — gained the most ground (again) due to their deployment speed and flexibility. Despite political headwinds, wind and solar stayed in the conversation, positioned as critical long-term solutions to load growth. Nuclear, on the other hand, lost momentum in the press as deployment timelines remain lengthy and uncertain.  

The most notable change in sentiment over the last year was in overall media coverage, where negative coverage increased by more than 10 percentage points following the influx of local coverage of community pushback. This wave of negative coverage from local communities is bringing the overall story to the same inflection point in the hype cycle that tech and energy media coverage reached earlier this year. Tech and energy media are moving into the slope of enlightenment phase, and the coverage sentiment reflects the story of the day rather than an overall feeling of negativity. Overall coverage is still wallowing in the trough of disillusionment and will only move on if data centers can prove their value outweighs the resource strain they create across communities.