The News
Despite increasingly critical media coverage of AI and the spread of data centers across the US, one news network has been painting a more positive picture.
More than half of the references to data centers on Fox News over the last two years would have left viewers with a favorable impression, compared to less than 10% on CNN and 5% on MS NOW, according to a new Semafor analysis of mentions of data centers on each network.
The mentions were pulled from closed captions preserved by the Internet Archive, which keeps a digital, searchable library of recorded TV news. A pair of AI models from Anthropic and OpenAI scored each reference on its content, with the network’s name removed.
Mentions of data centers have, predictably, shot up across all three networks in recent months as political backlash against AI swells and the data centers themselves have become a salient issue ahead of the midterms.
But Fox’s opinion and morning shows, including, , and leaned on the promise of AI, economic investment and the race with China, skewing Fox’s coverage more favorably, the analysis showed. The network’s news shows were more measured.
In an Aug. 23 monologue that at one point featured a chyron reading “The case for data centers,” Fox host Brian Kilmeade acknowledged “real concerns,” but argued that “saying no to data centers nationwide also means saying no to the tax dollars that can flow into a community. … If Americans don’t build the infrastructure to meet the demand, somebody else will.”
On CNN and MS NOW, the criticism focused as much on the facilities’ political toxicity as on harms like power bills or water use, casting them as unpopular with voters and a liability for politicians who back them heading into the midterms.
Data centers “are driving up energy costs, sucking up water supplies, wiping out rather than creating jobs,” MS NOW’s Katy Tur said in May. “Politicians beware.”
Polling shows that across demographic groups, Americans hold increasingly negative views of data centers: More than half of Americans say data centers are mostly bad for the environment, Pew Research Center found last month, compared with 39% in January.
Fox News did not comment for this story.
Max’s view
The pro-data center programming on Fox News comes as the right tries to define its positions in an AI-fueled, post-Donald Trump future.
Fox’s favorable data center coverage mirrors Trump’s position on their growth and the need for AI companies to help fuel the US economy.
“The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in August. “If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame.”
But anger about data centers and the rapid advancement of AI represents a faultline within the MAGA coalition that swept Trump back into office. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., have questioned some data centers in their states, while Texas Gov. Greg Abbott seems to have flipped from supporting data centers to looking to slow their growth in his state amid a tougher-than-expected reelection campaign.
Some on the right I have talked to in the last several months worry that Fox News, which Trump watches religiously, and other pro-data center voices are encouraging the president to take positions that are broadly unpopular with his rural and suburban base.
“The Big Tech oligarchs, the guys driving AI, did a terrible job,” Steve Bannon, a staunchly anti-AI Trump ally, told the Daily Signal in September. “They came in to try to muscle local communities, and particularly since President Trump’s strongest base is in exurban and rural communities, that’s where they were really the ugliest, and they haven’t made their case, and they particularly haven’t made their case at the local level about the economics of this, and the energy of this, and the water of this, and the manifestation of what these things are going to be used for.”
Room for Disagreement
Not all of Fox’s data center coverage has been rosy; its tenor grew slightly less favorable in 2026 compared to last year.
“It’s taxing our system way too much on water, agriculture land, or electricity. We’re gonna implode,” the Texas agriculture commissioner said in an interview on a weekend Fox show in August. “We just can’t do it. There’s not enough.