Here's what the plot is supposed to look like!

14/ For more interesting results see the paper here. Comments welcome! osf.io/preprints/so...

13/ As data center expansion becomes more politically salient, understanding how multidimensional concerns about climate change, electricity costs, and local environmental damage intersect with concerns about digital sovereignty only becomes more important!

12/ This suggests that existing cleavages over the energy transition will also shape the politics of data center expansion.

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

11/ Preferences toward data center attributes don't vary a lot by party ID, except when it comes to energy source: AfD voters don't care at all if data centers are run on fossil fuels or renewables; Green/Die Linke voters strongly prefer renewables over gas and coal-powered data centers.

10/ The negative effect of having a data center operated by a US firms is as large as the effect of a data center that increases local electricity prices by 20%. This is striking esp. in Germany where electricity prices are already high.

Notably, local tax & employment benefits matter very little.

9/ We then use a conjoint to see what types of data centers respondents would support in their communities:

Nationality of the company operating the data center has the LARGEST effect on support! I.e. #digitalsovereignty matters.

Impact on local electricity prices & water usage also matter a lot.

8/ We use 2 survey experiments in Germany to evaluate this question. First, we look at whether priming respondents with digital sovereignty concerns changes support for building more data centers in Germany, in general.

It does but effects are quite small.

7/ This suggests that public support will be important as governments seek to promote building more data centers.

But how does the public think about the environmental, economic, and geopolitical tradeoffs that data center expansion entails?

6/ Local opposition is also fueled geopolitical tensions and negative sentiments toward US Big Tech companies, i.e. the companies building many of these data centers.

www.wired.com/story/climat...

5/ As data center expansion accelerates, local communities across the world are pushing back, sometimes blocking new data center construction.

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/t...

4/ But data centers use a lot of electricity, straining power grids and raising local electricity prices, including in Germany. Add to that concerns about data centers' water usage, limited local job creation, and potential impacts on emission reductions.

algorithmwatch.org/en/germany-d...

3/ Data center expansion serves economic & geopolitical ends: as governments pursue #digitalsovereignty & "sovereign AI," building more domestic digital infrastructure becomes key.

E.g. see this recent statement from the Franco-German digital sovereignty summit: www.elysee.fr/en/emmanuel-...

2/ Amid the global #AI race, data center construction is expanding rapidly.

Source: www.iea.org/data-and-sta...