The Annenberg Public Policy Center's survey of 1,320 American adults, fielded from 16 June to 19 July, found 61 percent opposed to the construction of new data centres in their area — 44 percent strongly — against 14 percent in support, compared with 49 percent opposed and 21 percent in support in the survey ending in March. The twelve-point move is the largest shift on any artificial-intelligence question the centre has measured in these surveys, and it is close to the only one: over the same four months Americans' expectations of AI's effect on the country were statistically unchanged, with 39 percent still expecting a negative decade, and the two-thirds who say government has done too little to regulate AI did not move either. What shifted was the building, not the technology. Opposition crosses party lines — 69 percent of Democrats, 54 percent of Republicans, 53 percent of independents — and is highest among adults under 30 at 70 percent, falling to 57 percent among those 65 and over, the reverse of the usual pattern for a new technology. It also survives familiarity: heavy AI users are far less negative about AI in the abstract than non-users, 29 percent against 54 percent, but data-centre opposition is flat across usage groups at 64, 60 and 60 percent. The absolute level is instrument-dependent and should be read with care — Gallup's telephone survey in March put local opposition at 71 percent where Annenberg's comparable spring reading was 49 — so it is the movement within one instrument, not the number, that is the finding. It is arriving in council chambers. On 17 August three North Carolina local governments took up pauses in a single day: Greensboro a 120-day moratorium on facilities drawing more than 10 megawatts, having rejected one 5-4 in July; Yadkin County a twelve-month moratorium covering data centres, cryptocurrency mining and associated uses its ordinance says are “not yet defined”; and Alamance County a hearing on the two-year pause requested by the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network and the Haw River Assembly, to allow a land-use study and confirmation that the water supply is adequate for the homes and farms already there. Two days earlier a developer withdrew an annexation request for a data centre in southeast Raleigh after opponents filled all thirty public-comment slots at the scheduled hearing. Surry County had approved 24 months in July, and an Elon University poll of 800 North Carolina adults at the end of July found 53 percent opposed against 20 percent in support, up from 44 percent opposed in March. How far this has gone is itself disputed: NC Newsline puts it at more than twenty North Carolina local governments with moratoriums, while a tally by Frank Muraca, a former state commerce department analyst, gives ten counties, seventeen cities and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, with terms from one year to 32 months — the longest state law allows without legislative approval. Nationally, Jeremy Solomon of Learnewable, which sells analysis of county ordinances and so has an interest in the count, puts roughly one in seven of the 3,144 US counties under some form of restriction and says developers are shifting toward lower-population counties in the Upper Midwest, Colorado, Wyoming and Alaska.