Beyond the Noise: Predicting Stakeholder Risk in Data Center Power Expansion

The Challenge

Data center growth is accelerating load growth and driving rapid investment in new energy infrastructure across the United States. At the same time, projects are unfolding under intense public scrutiny, where digital engagement can look like broad local opposition—even when it is not.

In the Mid-Atlantic, utilities and data center developers are operating in a high-velocity environment: power demand is rising quickly to support AI and cloud growth, new infrastructure must move faster than historical timelines, and public engagement is visible, active, and often critical—online, in local media, and in public meetings.

For project teams, that visibility creates a practical decision problem: Is this widespread local opposition—or concentrated digital amplification?

The Measurement Gap

Traditional monitoring tends to focus on what is easiest to count—engagement totals, comment volume, shares and reactions, and aggregate sentiment. Those metrics are useful as inputs, but they frequently fail to answer the questions that determine permitting and political outcomes:

Where is engagement coming from—local vs. non-local? Who is driving it—broad participation vs. concentrated influence? Which stakeholders matter most? How are topical concerns changing over time? And most critically, what is actually changing broader public opinion?

Reactive monitoring can show what already happened, but it cannot quantify how media cycles, organized groups, and exogenous factors like economic uncertainty are affecting wider population opinion.

AlphaVu's Approach

AlphaVu built an agentic audience model ("digital twin") of key audiences—by geography and key segments, not individuals—to predict what happens next, simulate scenarios before launch, and explain drivers with confidence and evidence.

For this analysis, AlphaVu fused survey-grade feedback with public engagement, earned media dynamics, and real-world contextual signals to continuously forecast population-level opinion. This enabled the project team to measure real stakeholder risk—not just noise—and to scenario-test engagement and messaging strategies before acting or spending.

AlphaVu analyzed engagement and opinion dynamics across multiple energy infrastructure project types in a Mid-Atlantic data center corridor, including data center-related and enabling energy projects, a wind-related project, and a natural gas infrastructure project.

Key Findings

Engagement volume did not reliably reflect localized opposition. In one project, 23% of engagement was driven by leaders of a national advocacy organization and only approximately 15 individuals were located near the project footprint.

Local participation did not necessarily translate into escalating opposition. In another project, only approximately 30% of engagement was local, there was no sustained negative sentiment trend, and concerns shifted over time from environmental to fiscal.

Data center-related criticism blended local concerns with broader national narratives, meaning "loud" discourse often behaved differently than true land-use or community-disruption opposition.

Earned and local media were the primary engagement venue and a key driver of volatility. More than 60% of engagement occurred on earned and local media pages, and week-over-week sentiment variance tracked media tone and coverage intensity.

What the Digital Twin Revealed

By continuously estimating population-level opinion and isolating causal drivers, AlphaVu revealed three high-impact patterns:

Online conversation intensity often had limited measurable impact on broader awareness and support in the projects studied. Message framing that alleviated concern was not static—it changed over the lifecycle of a project as dominant issues migrated. And earned media drove measurable change in public opinion, with its effect becoming significantly more powerful as economic uncertainty increased.

In short: who is speaking, where they are located, and what is actually moving opinion provides a materially different view of risk than engagement volume alone.

Actions the Digital Twin Recommended

Separate "visibility" from "localized project risk." Implement a proximity-and-stakeholder-weighted view of engagement so teams do not confuse high-volume discourse with high-permitting risk. Use population-level forecasting to determine whether spikes are actually shifting broader opinion or merely generating noise.

Reallocate engagement toward stakeholders who can change outcomes. Prioritize local stakeholders near the footprint and decision stakeholders—local elected officials, planning bodies, community leaders, business groups—over non-local amplification. Design engagement to the concerns that dominate locally.

Treat earned media as the core operational workstream. Proactively brief local reporters and editorial stakeholders with clear, consistent project facts. Prepare rapid-response materials for predictable narrative spikes. Scenario-test timing and messaging cadence against expected media cycles.

Manage message framing as a lifecycle discipline. Use predictive testing at each phase—early siting, permitting, construction, operational milestones—to identify the framing that reduces concern and improves support at that moment. Build a modular playbook that can shift as the issue shifts.

Incorporate exogenous factors into scenario planning. Explicitly model external inputs—economic uncertainty, energy price narratives, major news events—and stress-test communications plans against those scenarios before committing.

Deploy continuous early-warning alerts on meaningful leading indicators. Use automated alerts for shifts in key segments and in earned media tone, since those were the most predictive and consequential drivers of volatility.

Why This Matters

As data center demand accelerates energy infrastructure expansion, perception risk must be assessed with the same discipline as engineering and load forecasting. A predictive, segmented, continuously updated approach allows teams to focus resources where risk is real and local, reduce unnecessary whiplash from non-local amplification, communicate with discipline through media-driven volatility, and increase the likelihood of on-time permitting and smoother project delivery.

The loudest voices are not always the closest voices. Infrastructure leaders who measure influence and proximity—not just volume—gain a clearer, defensible understanding of real project risk and can act earlier with more precision.