Those are some of the findings of a new poll released by the Detroit Regional Chamber Tuesday, May 26, underscoring data centers’ troubled public image in Michigan as several large-scale projects designed with artificial intelligence in mind advance.
The Detroit Chamber backs the megaprojects as a means to support economic growth, and they promise to be a major theme as the group hosts the state’s political and business elite for the annual Mackinac Policy Conference on Mackinac Island this week.
The chamber-commissioned poll of 600 likely voters, released as the conference kicked off Tuesday, found initially only one in three respondents was open to allowing a data center to be built within 25 miles of their home.
Some 55% were not, and 11% didn’t offer a definitive answer.
The voters were then quizzed on the importance of four separate sets of potential data center safeguards, with all receiving strong support.
They included a requirement that the facilities use “closed loop” systems that don’t regularly draw large amounts of water to cool computer servers, a prohibition on government officials signing non-disclosure agreements with developers and a ban on additional tax breaks for the projects.
The highest-rated of the guardrails was a guarantee that data centers — the largest of which can use more power than entire cities — pay their full costs for electricity.
Some 87% of respondents rated this protection as important.
With all of the safeguards in place, Michigan voters appear to view the facilities more favorably.
In that case, 48.7% of respondents said they were open to a data center being built in their area, while 41.3% were not and 9.3% did not answer definitively.
“Before voters allow data centers, they want basic protections of water resources and to know that their rates won’t surge,” said Richard Czuba, president of the Glengariff Group, Inc., which conducted the polling, in a statement.
With the hypothetical guardrails in place, Democrats moved more sharply toward supporting data centers, while a plurality of Republicans continued to oppose them.
There is no uniform set of state standards for data centers in Michigan. Legislation to institute them has stalled in Lansing.
Still, to receive big tax breaks lawmakers passed in late 2024 with the support of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, the facilities must abide by some minimum standards.
Some of those guidelines align with the safeguards in the poll.
They require data centers not be subsidized by other ratepayers and be largely powered by clean energy. The poll found support for the projects receiving a specific minimum amount of electricity from renewables and paying for energy efficiency upgrades for local homes, with 73.7% rating that as important.
State energy regulators and utilities also maintain they’ve structured initial data center deals in a way that shelters ratepayers from big costs necessary to serve the facilities.
The Michigan Public Service Commission maintains that protections built into its approval of power contracts for a data center now being constructed in Saline Township, south of Ann Arbor, are among the strongest in the nation. The facility will serve the AI ambitions of ChatGPT creator OpenAI and tech giant Oracle.
However, critics such as Attorney General Dana Nessel accuse regulators of acquiescing to utility DTE Energy’s demand for a rushed process.
Other potential safeguards included in the poll, like restrictions on local and state government providing additional tax incentives for data centers, have already gone by the wayside in Michigan.
Last week, local officials in Van Buren Township granted Google a tax incentive worth an estimated $124 million for a proposed data center project west of the Detroit Metro Airport. It cuts the tech giant’s local property taxes in half.
The Detroit Chamber poll was conducted April 28 to May 1, before the approval of the local tax break.
The survey also sought to gauge to what extent voters connect their own technology use with data center development.
A majority of respondents, some 58.5%, said their usage of cell phones and computers had no impact on the need for the projects, indicating voters do not connect data centers to their personal usage of smart devices, according to Czuba.
The data center industry has sought to draw this connection, framing the projects as critical to everyday computing tasks.
While demand for that computing capacity is growing, the development of energy-intensive AI models is also spurring large-scale data center projects across the country.
Some data center firms are working to combat negative public sentiment.
The companies behind the Saline Township project have mounted a public relations campaign that dubs the sprawling project “The Barn” and seeks to convince residents of its benefits, from added tax revenue to job creation.
But the findings of the Detroit Chamber poll mirror those of some national surveys highlighting Americans’ frosty relationship with the data center boom.
A Gallup poll released this month found seven in 10 Americans oppose the projects being built in their area.
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