The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation is a technology-policy think tank based in Washington, D.C., led by president Daniel Castro. Its AI work spans data-center siting and resource use, privacy and data-scraping rules, and the competitive position of the United States against other jurisdictions. Its published positions generally favor regulating the outputs and uses of AI systems over restricting the data they are trained on or the infrastructure they run on.
Data centers
ITIF's data-center research has two strands: resource use and public opinion.
On water, a July 2026 report by Robin Gaster argues the problem is tractable and misdiagnosed — that indirect consumption through electricity generation exceeds direct cooling use by more than tenfold, that data centers account for a very small share of total US water consumption, and that near-zero-water cooling designs exist at a modest cost premium and are being adopted by some hyperscalers. Its conclusion is institutional rather than technical: "technology exists, and policy instruments are available… What's missing is institutional coordination, regulatory specificity, and a set of standardized mechanisms and metrics" (The Data Center Water Problem Is Soluble (Robin Gaster, ITIF, July 2026)).
On public opinion, ITIF released polling conducted with Public First at an August 26, 2026 webinar titled "Can the United States Win the AI Race if Americans Oppose Data Centers?" The deck found a new data center the only one of ten local developments tested to draw net opposition, at −20, against +43 for new housing and +25 for a new solar farm, and recorded net support for a data center within three miles of home falling from +9 in January 2026 to −17 in July 2026 across both partisan groups. It also found that among respondents who said AI will make society worse, 73% opposed a local data center against 32% opposing an average of nine other developments. Castro opened the event by framing the risk the organization sees in the finding: that there is a "risk that opposition to data centers becomes, in effect, opposition to AI itself" (Public First / ITIF, \"The opposition to data centers\" (polling deck, August 2026); Source: insideaipolicy.com). The deck draws on two Public First instruments — a fifteen-country survey it calls AI Global 2026 and a POLITICO poll conducted between January and July 2026 — and states no field dates, sample sizes or margins of error for either. The findings are set out at Data Center Siting / AI Power Politics.
Privacy and training data
A March 2026 ITIF report maps how diverging national rules on scraping publicly available data shape where and how models are trained, and argues for regulation focused on model outputs rather than on data collection — the same output-over-input posture its data-center work takes toward infrastructure (see AI and Privacy).
Frontier-model regulation
ITIF opposed the forthcoming Ban AI Superintelligence Act in a release of September 3, 2026, before the bill's introduction. President Daniel Castro wrote that "banning advances in artificial intelligence would be a profound mistake" (Source: insideaipolicy.com). The bill has been announced by Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Casar but not introduced. See Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act (announced 2026).
Relationships
- related: Data Center Siting / AI Power Politics — the subject of its 2026 polling and water research.
- related: AI Data Centers, AI and Privacy — policy areas it publishes in.
- related: The Data Center Water Problem Is Soluble (Robin Gaster, ITIF, July 2026) — its report on data-center water consumption.
- related: Public First / ITIF, \"The opposition to data centers\" (polling deck, August 2026) — its August 2026 polling deck with Public First.