Americans’ trust in large technology companies has sunk to its lowest level since Gallup began tracking the measure, according to a survey released Tuesday.
Just 20% of respondents said they have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in major tech companies, the lowest share recorded since Gallup added the category to its annual institutional confidence poll in 2020, when the figure stood at 32%. Some 41% of those surveyed said they have very little or no confidence in big tech firms, up from 32% a year earlier, while 38% said they have some confidence in the industry.
Big Tech was the only institution among those measured this year to see a jump in the share of Americans expressing little to no confidence in it, according to the poll, which was conducted by telephone from June 1-15 among a random sample of 1,001 U.S. adults. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 4 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.
The decline coincides with growing public concern over the tech industry’s handling of personal data and its rapid buildout of artificial intelligence infrastructure. A 2023 survey from the Pew Research Center found that 67% of U.S. adults said they understand little to nothing about what companies are doing with their personal data, up from 59% four years earlier.
Opposition to AI data center construction has also intensified. At least 75 U.S. data center projects worth roughly $130 billion were blocked or delayed in the first quarter of 2026 amid local pushback, according to a report from Data Center Watch, which tracks community resistance to the projects nationwide. The group found that the number of active grassroots opposition organizations more than doubled to 833 across 49 states between the end of 2025 and March.
Sen. Josh Hawley, Missouri Republican, has been among the most vocal critics of the industry’s growing influence. In a June 7 op-ed published in The Free Press, Mr. Hawley argued that major technology companies are pushing for what he called “technocratic oligarchy.”
“Behind every fight on jobs, data centers, or safety lies a more basic question of who gets to set the rules,” Mr. Hawley wrote, adding that a country “governed by experts is not a republic.”
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