US Opposition Stalls 120 Data Center Projects Worth Nearly €170 Billion
Trending Topics Jakob Steinschaden
US communities are blocking data center plans before they even land. That’s slowing 120 projects worth nearly €170 billion, and the pushback is getting local fast.
Based on reporting by Trending Topics, Jakob Steinschaden — read the original for the full story.
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The AI buildout is running into a very old problem: people who live near the projects. A new quarterly report from Data Center Watch says at least 45 data center projects, worth about €58 billion, were blocked or delayed from April through June. That was more than half of the large-scale projects proposed in that stretch.
It was still a bad quarter, just not as bad as the one before it. In the first three months of the year, the same report counted at least 75 stalled or delayed projects worth around €111 billion. By Data Center Watch’s tally, that was the biggest single-quarter pileup of blocked data center projects on record. Together, the two quarters add up to about 120 projects and nearly €170 billion.
The opposition is spreading, but not just by volume. Data Center Watch now counts 843 local opposition groups across 49 states, up from 833 at the end of March. The report says the fight has become more local and more specific, with communities zeroing in on permits, land use, water and power instead of treating data centers as some abstract tech buzzword.
What stands out now is that governments are moving before a project even shows up. Santa Fe County in New Mexico approved the state’s first preemptive data center moratorium. Superior, Wisconsin, imposed a one-year pause after Google proposed a hyperscale data center in nearby Hermantown, Minnesota. Harpersville, Alabama, went for a six-month pause even without a proposal on its desk. In Independence County, Arkansas, officials pushed a moratorium out to 2031 because of water limits.
The fight has also reached statehouses and ballots. Around 30 state legislatures have introduced or passed measures on construction rules, tax incentives, utility costs and who pays them. Seventeen data center-related ballot measures have moved forward in the current election cycle, covering zoning, voter approval, energy and water use, noise and tax breaks. And the politics cut across party lines: both Republican- and Democratic-led states are tightening the screws. Still, the public mood is blunt. A Gallup poll found seven in 10 Americans oppose data centers in their area, with 48 percent strongly against them.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is what happens when “move fast and build more” runs into power bills and local permits. The industry has spent years talking about AI like it’s a force of nature; now it’s being treated like a zoning issue, which is far less glamorous and much more dangerous for the business case. That’s not a bug. That’s democracy with a utility bill.
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