Nearly 70% of Americans Oppose Data Centres. Architects Want In

Nearly 70 per cent of the US population opposes data centre construction, yet the country is set to double its data centre building to keep pace with the AI boom, with global spending on data centre infrastructure projected to top $800 billion per year in 2026.

The huge, boxy buildings — which house the servers powering cloud computing and artificial intelligence — have provoked backlash across partisan lines over the past two years, as plans have been announced across suburban and rural America. Usually located in sparsely populated areas, they have been largely ignored as architecture. That is changing.

"Data centers are, in general, an example of poor design," Marina Otero Verzier, the Spanish academic who won the 2022 Wheelwright Prize for her theories on data centres, told Dezeen.

Architects sidelined by engineering logic

Otero Verzier believes architects should be involved far earlier and far more deeply than they currently are. "Architects should be involved in the design of the building – from the materials used to the metabolic relations it establishes with the environment and communities – as well as in thinking about their public nature as repositories of collective knowledge and their broader urban and territorial planning," she said.

Even some developers concede the typology has suffered from a lack of design thinking. Daniel English, co-founder and managing partner of Legacy Investing, a real estate firm specialising in data centres, said architects were sidelined in early designs because the buildings were treated as engineering projects.

"Architects have a ton of value to add to the data center conversation, and I think that they got left out because it was possible to build buildings just based on efficiency," he said. "Data centres are so new that we're still figuring out what they look like."

English added: "It's not like we're not going to have data centers. The conversation today should be how to make sure that these are thoughtfully integrated into our lives."

Gensler bets on facades

At present, architect involvement in data centre design often comes from corporate firms large enough to run a full data centre division. Gensler is one of the design-forward firms competing for such commissions. It is designing a 7.5 GW hyperscale data centre in Utah for O'Leary Digital and a cluster of five data centres for Menlo Digital in Arizona. At both sites, renders show facade treatments intended to improve appearance — striated facades matching the desert mountains in Utah, Corten steel in Arizona.

"I think with good design, with proper architectural gestures, you can either make these buildings blend in or stand out, and I think that it's going to come up more and more as these buildings need to become a little bit more local," said Rob LoBuono, Gensler's critical facilities practice leader. "The architecture of the building does matter. We really do find that a well-designed building has a strong impact in the community, even if the current opinion of them is, you know, fluid."

Otero Verzier rejects the proposition that architects should be reduced to cladding. "The idea that the most architects can do is design a facade is quite sad and says more about the lack of ambition of the profession than about the reality of data centres," she said. "If, as a profession, we want to be completely irrelevant, then we can focus on designing facades for data centres."

Mixed-use visions meet security realities

During the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, Grimshaw presented an integrated urban plan based around data centre development, informed by a real project with developer Goodman. The proposal positions the data centre as "the catalyst of a mixed-use renewal precinct – next to homes, studios, shops and even an urban farm", pumping the building's waste heat back into surrounding structures.

"Close quarters aren't a liability; they're the key that lets resources circulate instead of being wasted," said Grimshaw in the brief.

English said Legacy Investing is already developing several data centres integrated into wider mixed-use schemes. But the biggest developers are not following the biennale circuit. Tom Kruger, director of data centres at Corgan, said integration within other structures and wider developments is an "exception and not the rule", citing security and power concerns that favour remote locations. "A big part of that is aiming for security and sound isolation," he said.

A more realistic mixed-use model probably looks like a contemporary tech campus, with landscaping or parklands around the buildings — a approach that architects told Dezeen still runs up against security concerns.

English offered a different analogy: parking infrastructure. "Parking to me is an interesting analogy because parking can be an entire building; it can be part of a building," he said. "In that way, compute can be part of a building; it can be a whole building." Parking lots, of course, have more often than not been blights on the urban and suburban landscape.

Going vertical and going nuclear

Recent projects show some developers pushing beyond horizontal spread. SOM designed a data centre skyscraper in Kansas City, where rural zoning laws made sprawling hyperscale development difficult. Architects Dezeen spoke to, however, said building tall makes little sense given the price tags, the sensitivity of servers, maintenance needs and construction speed.

Kruger, who has worked in the field for 16 years, said he sees data centres becoming more "elevated" from an architectural perspective — mainly through technologies that make them more energy efficient. Other proposals target existing structures: Terawulf plans a data centre in a decommissioned Kentucky smelter. Microsoft has built data centres using mass timber as a demonstration of healthier building materials, while the sector's energy demands have revived talk of nuclear power integration in the United States.

Otero Verzier envisions a more distributed future in which data centres operate as public "repositories" of knowledge rather than commercial concentrations. "As long as data centres start being designed with attention to the diverse ecologies of data – cold, hot, long-lasting, and temporary, open, public or private – to the limits and rhythms of the planet and its inhabitants, we can begin to develop more relevant architectures that do not necessarily look like closed-off boxes or bunkers, but instead take the form of public institutions," she said.

Whether that shift comes from developers genuinely concerned with buildings — or merely with their reception — efficiencies and monumental boxes remain the norm, and will probably stay that way until the AI boom slows or public pressure forces a redesign of the typology itself.