“Call them surveillance centers, because that’s what they are,” Kelly Potanza said at a meeting in Rochester, New Hampshire. At a Holyoke City Council meeting, Massachusetts resident Kai Wiswall said data centers power technologies that are “breaking us apart.”

The concerns reflect a broader skepticism about AI, said Emily Bender, a University of Washington professor of computational linguistics. She said some AI applications can be useful in fields such as medicine and scientific research, but that companies are also adding the technology to products that already worked, while shifting work away from people.

Artists, translators and transcriptionists are among those losing freelance opportunities as tasks are automated, Bender said. In that context, she said, communities are being asked to accept the physical costs of data centers for an industry many residents do not believe is serving them.

A September poll conducted by the University of Massachusetts Amherst found opposition to building data centers in respondents’ communities across party lines, according to political science professor Jesse Rhodes. Environmental effects and disruptions to local communities were leading concerns. Distrust of AI and the people developing it also ranked highly, above worries about rising utility bills; about 13% of those surveyed said they did not trust the technology or its leaders.

That mistrust has helped shape local decisions. In Holyoke, residents led by City Councilor Mimi Panitch secured a ban on data centers after a developer proposed a smaller facility that, according to the account of the proposal, was not expected to have major effects on local energy prices or the environment.

Panitch said she wanted to protect the western Massachusetts city from outside companies that could override local interests. She also warned that rapid AI expansion could outpace meaningful scrutiny of safety and other risks, drawing a comparison to social media’s swift growth in the 2010s.

In Westfield, the city imposed a one-year moratorium on data centers. Earlier this month, the City Council rejected an extension of a permit for a proposed facility that had been under development since 2019.

Kristen Mello, who has opposed the Westfield project, said the debate has brought more residents into local government. “The more voices we have, the more responsive government becomes,” she said.

The pushback is taking place amid a wider data center boom, but local debates show that many residents are weighing more than construction impacts. They are also challenging the claim that AI’s expansion is inevitable — and asking whether the communities hosting its infrastructure will share in its benefits.