• Many Americans are not happy about AI data centers and say they plan to vote accordingly.
• In a Gallup poll, 30% of respondents said AI data centers are "extremely important" in how they vote.
• AI data centers, however, are not the issue they care about the most.

Many Americans are worried about AI data centers — and they plan to vote accordingly — but the colossal AI-powering warehouses aren't their main concern ahead of next week's midterm elections.

In a Gallup poll released on Thursday based on interviews conducted earlier this month, about 30% of respondents ranked "construction of AI data centers" as an "extremely important" factor in their midterm calculus.

Another 23% ranked the issue as "very important."

When separated by political party, Republicans emerged as the group more apathetic to data centers. Only 16% of registered Republicans said they considered the issue extremely important, compared to 42% of registered Democrats.

In the poll, Gallup surveyors did not ask voters for their opinions on issues like data centers — only the extent to which they were considering each issue when they vote next week.

Overall, the state of the economy, healthcare, and the "situation in Iran" emerged as the most important topics for voters.

The massive server factories powering chatbot queries had a disastrous PR run over the last year, and have been the subject of protests across America at local town hall meetings and major rallies in Washington.

Some states have passed data center moratoriums, prohibiting their construction. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, once a champion of AI data center expansion, said in August that the state had halted as many as 1,800 data center proposals.

President Donald Trump, who has championed a national effort to build out AI infrastructure, said in August that data centers "could use a little public relations help." He encouraged major builders, including Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon, to do more for the communities where they are planned.

As the midterms approach, however, concern over AI data centers has given way to more pressing issues for voters, like the Iran war, rising energy prices, and the overall health of the economy.

The data center issue ranked 10th among the topics polled by Gallup, just ahead of climate change at 11. A whopping 87% of voters consider the economy an important issue, followed closely by healthcare at 77%.

In a September poll by the Pew Research Center, which surveyed people in August, half of rural Americans said data centers "are mostly bad for the environment" — a figure substantially higher than in January, when it sat at 32%.

For AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, and others, the issue is existential. Without AI data centers, they can't power the products they sell. Sam Altman has recently suggested that new data centers could be built far from where people live, like the desert.

"We should just go put it off in the desert, around no one where no one wants to be," Altman said in July. "This is fine. The AI system is very happy to be there."

• Mathematicians need to develop their oft-neglected social skills, a math professor at Cornell said.
• Though AI can do the legwork on complex problems, personal charisma is a human-only skill, Steven Strogatz said.
• "Rizz is more and more in demand," he added.

"Social skills" and "mathematics" are terms not often grouped together. In the age of AI, one math scholar says that needs to change.

With AI now capable of handling the geeky legwork required by complex problems, Steven Strogatz, a lecturer and Susan and Barton Winokur Distinguished Professor at Cornell University, said mathematicians should prioritize developing their personal charm in order to set themselves apart.

"I'm starting to think that what makes a future mathematician or a math professor is your unique brand," Strogatz said in an interview with Grant Sanderson, a math educator affiliated with Stanford University.

"Rizz is in more and more demand because it's something that only people have," he added.

Rizz, a Gen Z slang term, is defined by Merriam-Webster as "romantic appeal or charm." (Strogatz, who is 67, appeared to use the term solely to mean charm or charisma. He did not suggest mathematicians need to work on their romantic prowess.)

"What we're selecting for is an element of mathematical rizz," said Sanderson. "The PhDs to be are not going to be differentiated by pure problem-solving abilities."

The brusque push of AI companies into mathematics has caused consternation and head-scratching from many a math geek, as the field ponders ways to stay relevant while OpenAI floods the zone with hundreds of proposed solutions to the world's most complex problems.

Some professors have sworn off AI altogether. Most, however, are trying to find ways to incorporate the technology into their work.

In September, a group of undergraduates at Caltech announced a "mathathon" event in which participants were encouraged to use AI to solve problems in a single, no-sleep sprint. Only days after the undergrads announced the event, a coalition of over 700 academics signed an open letter calling for its cancellation, citing its promotion of AI "slop."

Though the event is set to continue, with some slight alterations, the clash underscored an internal conflict in the math community over how to adapt to AI — a development poised to impact many burgeoning careers in the field.

"We've had whole research programs wiped out on Tuesday," Tristan Buckmaster, a math professor at NYU, said after OpenAI published 700 new findings about outstanding problems earlier this month.

The issue is of supreme importance to Strogatz, who has made several media appearances in the last couple of months. In an essay published in The Atlantic on Sunday, he put the issue in stark terms.

"I am a math professor, and my field is in crisis. Nobody in math is ever going to forget the year 2026," he wrote. "Unless this is really the end of the subject, and then nobody will remember anything about math anyway."