Why Local Sentiment Kills Data Center Projects | Hamlet CEO

Summary · 3 min read

Sunil Rajaraman is the founder and CEO of Hamlet, which crawls, transcribes and indexes local city council meetings across the U.S. He says he discovered the problem after running for city council and describes himself as a multiple-time venture-backed founder.

Rajaraman argues that city councils, planning commissions and school boards shape daily life, but their work is difficult to follow and local government data is fragmented. Hamlet uses AI to transcribe and structure meeting records, sells the data to companies and offers free API access to verified academics and journalists. He urges people to pay attention to down-ballot elections, where turnout is 10% to 25%. On data centers, he says opposition reflects specific local concerns such as water, noise and fire risks, and that sentiment differs from one community to another.

Minute by minute

1. 1:07

   Local decisions shape daily politics. Rajaraman says important fights over cities happen in council and planning commission chambers, as well as school boards. He argues that national coverage can miss the decisions that affect people day to day, while local government remains a black box.

2. 1:58

   Recorded meetings opened a data source. Rajaraman says he found the problem after running for city council: few people attended meetings, though many cared about the issues. He says COVID pushed many cities to record meetings about six years ago, making AI analysis possible; more than half of cities have recording equipment, but some small towns still do not.

3. 3:43

   Hamlet sells data and offers free access. Hamlet sells aggregated meeting data to data-center and real-estate developers, retailers and political action committees. Rajaraman says verified academics and journalists can get free API access, and that Hamlet is developing tools for upcoming elections. He urges voters to learn about local candidates, noting city council turnout is about 10% to 25%.

4. 7:36

   Local election data remains unreliable. Rajaraman says AI tools are already being used to look up local officials, but the underlying data is often inaccurate. He describes 19,000 city websites, more than 3,000 counties and 80,000 special districts with differently structured information. Hamlet builds data pipelines, identifies speakers and assesses sentiment, a problem he says no single model can solve.

5. 9:56

   Community sentiment is the data layer. Rajaraman says many GovTech companies focus on cleaning records or making procurement easier, while Hamlet wants to understand how officials and residents think. He argues that this could serve both the company’s mission and its business. He adds that local candidates, including volunteer officials, raise money from interests such as large companies and the National Association of Realtors.

6. 12:14

   Hamlet publishes sentiment rankings. Hamlet released rankings of community sentiment toward data centers, Flock Safety and short-term rentals, among hundreds of topics it tracks, with views broken down by elected officials and public commenters. Rajaraman says one community accidentally deleted years of records and that some local governments still use 1990s-era software.

7. 14:17

   Data center concerns vary by community. Rajaraman says water use, noise and fire-department deployments are among the reasons communities oppose data centers. He notes that some developers use recycled water, but water remains a concern, and recalls a homeowner with a nearby pool receiving monthly compensation from a developer for two years. He and the host stress that residents’ concerns differ by place and may center on electricity prices or other practical effects, not AI.

8. 16:07

   Every community has its own issues. Rajaraman says local debates can involve unexpected issues, including pickleball, and that each community has its own story. He argues that understanding how Americans think requires looking closely at local concerns.

9. 16:59

   Fragmented data obscures local power. Rajaraman says GovTech companies need to structure information spread across thousands of governments. He also argues that the person who created a community Facebook group may become one of its most influential figures, illustrating how local power structures can be hard to see.

Published Oct 22, 2026.