A recent NBC News poll found a net-favorability rating of “minus 20” for AI, while Fox News polls have found a consistently growing “concern” about AI over the past year, and a Harvard Caps/Harris poll in July found that two-thirds of voters want to slow down AI development. Despite this backlash, spending on AI infrastructure is accelerating: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Oracle are spending $600 billion on infrastructure in 2026, up 36 percent from last year. Tech companies issued more than $428 billion in bonds in 2025, and Goldman Sachs predicts that $7.6 trillion in capital will be deployed in the next five years across computing, data centers, and power. This build-out is driving up salaries for senior electricians into six-figure territory, with Mike Rowe noting electricians making over a quarter million a year. BlackRock predicts America will run out of electricians needed to build data centers. Public backlash includes campaigns to impede data center construction, citing surges in electricity costs; a typical hyperscale data center uses about 100 megawatt-hours, as much as 100,000 homes. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, worried that public absorption of AI “does feel surprisingly slow.”