OpenAI's infrastructure push is meeting a less technical obstacle: public backlash, and the company is now having to navigate that reaction alongside its buildout plans.

CEO Sam Altman acknowledged in an interview with Time that Americans are openly hostile to the facilities powering the AI boom — awkward timing for a company planning to spend $50 billion this year on compute. "Clearly, people hate data centers—right now, at least," Altman said. "People are pretty negative on AI."

His comments came the same week that OpenAI's head of data centers, Chris Malone, left the company. The Wall Street Journal first reported the departure, which CNBC confirmed, obtaining a statement from OpenAI saying the company had "recently reorganized" the infrastructure team.

A rapid, expensive expansion

Over the past year, OpenAI has dramatically expanded Stargate, the infrastructure project it launched with SoftBank early last year, with plans to invest as much as $500 billion in U.S. AI infrastructure.

By September 2025, OpenAI had announced six U.S. Stargate sites. The company said those facilities — along with its Abilene flagship and ongoing CoreWeave projects — would bring Stargate to nearly 7 gigawatts of planned capacity. Since then, OpenAI has added a Michigan campus exceeding 1 GW, a Georgia project contracted for 3.2 GW of power, and, this month, an agreement to secure approximately 8 GW of IT capacity in southern Ohio.

OpenAI says it is already planning beyond Stargate's original 10-gigawatt target — and maintains it still does not have enough computing power. That gap helps explain why the company is pushing so aggressively even as opposition around siting, power use, and permitting has grown more visible.

"If anything, we should have bought a lot more," Sachin Katti, the OpenAI executive overseeing the company's compute efforts, told Time.

Americans increasingly don't want data centers next door

Altman's read on the public mood is borne out by polling.

Seven in 10 Americans oppose building data centers in their area, according to a Gallup poll released in May, including 48% who strongly oppose one. Data centers can consume enormous amounts of electricity, and residents of communities targeted for development worry about higher power bills, water usage, noise, and the strain on local infrastructure. Some estimates peg the electricity cost of data centers at $23 billion.

The opposition is already having financial consequences for hyperscalers. At least 48 data center projects representing $156 billion in investment have been blocked or stalled by local resistance. Even though only 8% of Americans who oppose data centers live near one, the outrage has gone national.

A Pew Research Center survey released earlier this year found that Americans were much more likely to say data centers were bad than good for home energy costs, the environment, and nearby quality of life. Among people who said they had heard a lot about data centers, 67% believed the facilities were mostly bad for household energy costs.

Those concerns are colliding with a surge in electricity demand. U.S. power consumption grew about 1.7% a year from 2020 through 2025 after barely growing over the previous 15 years, according to the Energy Information Administration. The agency said data centers are helping drive the increase.

The backlash is starting to shape policy — and the midterms

State governments are now responding to frustrated constituents, with potential ramifications for OpenAI and other hyperscalers. Local officials proposed more than 120 moratoriums on data center development in 38 states as of July.

In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott ordered regulators earlier this month to scrutinize data centers seeking to connect to the state's power grid before allowing projects to move forward. ERCOT, which manages most of the Texas grid, was facing roughly 474 gigawatts of requests for new connections — more than five times the state's record peak electricity demand. That matters for OpenAI because Texas is central to Stargate, with its flagship site in Abilene and additional pending projects in the state.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro took his own steps on Aug. 18, signing an executive order that imposed new energy-affordability, environmental, and community requirements on data centers and removed AI data centers from a fast-track permitting program.

Data center backlash is also uniting people from across the political spectrum ahead of the midterm elections. While President Donald Trump champions the facilities, most registered voters oppose them — including 60% of Republicans and 53% of MAGA supporters, according to a Fox News poll.

This story was originally featured in Fortune: fortune.com/2026/08/27/sam-altman-openai-data-center-backlash