The two locality counts differ by about 200 and the panel never reconciled them; Meyer's is the one with a named dataset behind it.

The only demographic in Heatmap's polling that expects AI to improve both their own life and society: men 65 and older. Meyer's gloss is that they own the most stock.

The most useful distinction in the hour, from Heatmap's project tracking:

Meyer reads noise as a proxy for siting too close to homes. People object on environmental grounds; projects actually die on an enforceable number. Respondents also distinguish ordinary cloud data centers (email, banking, streaming) from AI hyperscale ones, and object much more to the latter.

He also flags speculative builders: not only the hyperscalers but small developers prospecting sites, sometimes with a hyperscaler waiting to move in as tenant.

• Monterey Park, CA (Rabb). A 50 MW proposal next to housing, found by someone reading a council agenda in November 2025. Outcome: three ordinances declaring data centers a public nuisance, then a June 2026 ballot measure carried with over 80%. Rabb claims the first whole-city ban by both ordinance and ballot. The council started out in favour.
• Tucson, AZ: Project Blue (Taylor). Under NDAs; residents worked out that Amazon was likely the beneficiary (it has since distanced itself). Organizing started on water, then widened deliberately by tracing AWS to Palantir hosting and from there to ICE. Council turnout up to about a thousand.
• Memphis, TN: xAI (Taylor). The urgent issue was the gas turbines run without permits, and the noise from the third site, not AI as such.

• Is it about AI? Rabb: in Monterey Park public comment it was AI, tech billionaires, surveillance and being made to use AI at work. Meyer: AI lowers trust, but the deciding factors are local and physical, and much of the energy came over from anti-renewables campaigns, which stay anti-renewable. The likely result is the same data centers, sited elsewhere and run on gas.
• Is it electorally decisive? Meyer is sceptical. El-Sayed won in Michigan as the "build it equitably" candidate; Hong lost the Wisconsin Democratic primary on something close to a statewide moratorium. The building trades (IBEW) gain members from the buildout.
• Is a moratorium a goal? Taylor sees pauses as the mood of the moment, the same as payment pauses and ceasefires, and finds that worrying. She notes the CEOs say they would pause too, if not for China. Meyer separates two kinds of state moratorium: Bernie's, which slows the technology, and Hochul's, a year spent giving towns the technical help to negotiate with hyperscalers.

Meyer's warning is the operational one. If the regulatory hook is "don't raise rates", builders go off-grid, to the South and the gas patch. Abbott's Texas "moratorium" is an audit and disclosure rule that doesn't cover off-grid sites such as Meta's. His preferred direction is to tax the load to pay for the grid, for example Groundwork Collaborative's idea of an excise tax on data center electricity funding a national grid authority.

Taylor's is the structural one: fund schools, health care and care work, and the AI tutor or robot ob-gyn pitch stops looking like a solution.

Rabb predicts siting moves to where objection is weakest: tribal land, and federal land with protections stripped. His group's next fight is Flock cameras.

• Meyer used "Fable is a very powerful model" as his example of the arms-race argument, the national-security framing that will meet any national moratorium.
• The data that settles projects is local and measurable: decibels at the property line, water draw, turbine permits. The ideological framing changes who turns up to the meeting, not what kills the project.
• Follow-up reading in this site's daily notes: 2026-10-20 (WBUR on the New England backlash; 404 Media on Texas permits continuing despite the promised halt).