A corner of Pennsylvania once known nationwide for its anti-immigration crackdown is now resisting something different: data centers. The fight unfolding near Hazleton has become one of the clearest illustrations of how the AI infrastructure buildout has forged a unified, bipartisan front in an increasingly splintered America.

Roughly 20 years ago, Hazleton passed the controversial Illegal Immigration Relief Act, which withheld permits from businesses employing undocumented immigrants and fined landlords who rented to them. Capitalizing on a period of deindustrialization and demographic change in a heavily Hispanic city, the law galvanized a base of white, working-class supporters.

Fast forward to today, and Hazle Township — where Hazleton sits at the foot of the Poconos — is making headlines again. This time the catalyst is the AI infrastructure boom. Data centers are the warehouse-scale facilities that house the servers running AI models and cloud services, and the nationwide race to build them has turned land, electricity, and permitting into flashpoints between developers and their would-be neighbors. Opponents of data centers, diverse in both class and political party, have jumbled what was long treated as a left-versus-right issue, forming a powerful united front that is pushing politicians to alter their platforms and policies in a consequential election year.

$10,000 offers and eminent domain threats

Over the summer, residents of Hazle Township received letters from NorthPoint Development, offering each of the township’s 4,500 residents a potential $10,000 payday in exchange for permission to build a 1,300-acre data center in the area — part of the developer’s proposed $165 million investment in the township.

At the same time, about 30 properties in nearby Sugarloaf Township faced eminent domain threats — the forced transfer of private property for public use — from the local utilities company over a proposed high-voltage power line that would run through homes and supply that same proposed data center, dubbed Project Hazelnut. Because data centers concentrate enormous computing power in one place, they draw far more electricity than typical local developments, and connecting them often requires new high-voltage transmission capacity.

Locals formed the group Alliance to Stop the Line and filed 20 formal protests against the utilities company over health and property-cost risks associated with the power line, while others submitted right-to-know requests under Pennsylvania’s public records law demanding transparency about the end user of Project Hazelnut — which emails revealed to be Amazon. An Amazon spokesperson told Fortune the company is “evaluating multiple sites across the Commonwealth” but does not have a definitive agreement in place with NorthPoint.

What has stood out to some locals is the demographics of the opposition. Annie Vinatieri, a Sugarloaf Township protester, observed that data center opponents are a mix of working, middle, and upper classes, mostly white, and decidedly nonpartisan — including many who are new to environmental protests.

“It’s invigorating, in the sense that you’re meeting people who might not be like-minded on a lot of things, but it feels for so many people like this a righteous cause,” she told Fortune. “We can maybe disagree on the political finer points of things, but we can find this very real camaraderie in the midst of everything.”

Why data centers became a bipartisan enemy

Data centers have become the common enemy of Democrats and Republicans alike. About 70% of Americans oppose data center construction in their local areas, according to a Gallup poll, including 75% of Democrats and 63% of Republicans.

The backlash is beginning to have material impacts on the tempo of the AI boom. At least 75 data center projects worth more than $130 billion in total were delayed or canceled in the first three months of this year, according to a Data Center Watch report in June. Over the same period, active opposition groups grew from 396 to 833.

One significant reason for the bipartisan dissent, Tatishe Nteta, a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and director of UMass Poll, told Fortune, is how tech companies have marketed the facilities to the American people.

“There has been little to no clear communication of the benefits, economic or otherwise, that are associated with data centers for everyday Americans,” he said. “And there has been extremely clear communication regarding the costs, whether those be environmental in terms of increased use of energy…but also the cost that’s associated more largely with artificial intelligence on the economic well-being of Americans.”

Nteta said the universality of data center opposition has allowed Democrats to turn it into a wedge issue. But AI infrastructure, and AI more broadly, have also struck chords with ideologies held by both Republicans and Democrats — just in different flavors, according to Ben Green, an assistant professor of public policy at the University of Michigan’s Ford School.

Environmental concerns around data center construction, for example, cut across party lines. The difference is that Democrats use words like “climate change” to define the issue, while Republicans focus more on protecting land.

“Democrats and Republicans might talk about that differently, but massive corporations coming in and forcing a community to deal with some type of project and not really giving a community any voice and operating in secrecy — no one’s really a fan of that,” Green told Fortune.

Pennsylvania’s data center profile

Pennsylvania has established itself as a nexus of data center backlash. The commonwealth is home to only 174 data centers out of roughly 4,767 projects in the U.S., but its position as a purple state led by a governor widely expected to run for president in 2028 makes it a unique case study in the national conversation over data center opposition.

Gov. Josh Shapiro announced Project Hazelnut in November 2024, immediately following an executive order fast-tracking permitting for AI infrastructure. In July 2025, he announced a $20 billion investment from Amazon for data center construction in the commonwealth — the largest capital investment in Pennsylvania’s history.

But following public pushback over data center projects in Hazle Township and surrounding areas, Shapiro walked back the permissive AI infrastructure policies. In August, he signed another executive order eliminating fast-track permits and giving local agencies — rather than the state-level Department of Environmental Protection — the power to approve data center projects.

“What I was finding after listening to the neighbors about their concerns, and then talking with some of these developers, is those developers who were wreaking havoc on the communities, they actually didn’t have any access to power,” Shapiro told CBS News Philadelphia last month.

The future of data center opposition

With Pennsylvania’s gubernatorial election coming up next month, candidates’ stances on data center development could further scramble traditional partisan divides.

According to Vinatieri, Democrats are discouraged by Shapiro’s changing stance on data centers, while Republican candidate Stacy Garrity has largely not broken from Trump’s pro-data center position.

From Vinatieri’s vantage point, there are enough disgruntled residents that a meaningful number of voters could write in Democratic Sen. Katie Muth, who has sponsored a statewide data center development moratorium.

“I’ve never seen anything quite like it before,” Vinatieri said. “It’s a powerful time and a lot is happening.”

The true test of whether the political tide around data centers is shifting on a national level will be whether candidates like Garrity change their stances, according to Green. He has already seen Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican up for reelection, move from calling the Lone Star State the “epicenter of AI development” to implementing restrictions and halting pending approvals on 1,800 data center proposals.

“Those are just signs of the strength of the backlash,” Green said. “It’s no longer possible to just push forward by making generic or super rosy statements about how great data centers are. People don’t believe it, and they will not support candidates who are trying to gaslight them with all of these hopeful claims about why data centers are great.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.