Jury out on whether Americans approve or disapprove of datacenters

Three-quarters of the American public have heard of datacenters, but they haven't quite made their minds up yet about whether they approve of them or not.

A survey by the Pew Research Center finds that a quarter of adults have "heard or read a lot" about datacenters, while half have only heard a little about them.

The flip side is that a quarter of respondents claim to have heard nothing about them at all - presumably they don't wonder how their cloud services are served up.

The survey was conducted earlier this year and involved 8,512 adult Americans.

Overall, it finds that people in the US mostly believe the IT industry's server warehouses have a negative effect on the environment, energy costs and local communities, but that they are generally good for local jobs and local tax revenue.

Pew says 39 percent of respondents think datacenters are ...