Playbook to oppose data centers
Winning fight against AI data centers gives people a “taste of political power.”
It’s clear that communities now have an effective playbook to block data center construction. This week, researchers flagged the first quarter of 2026 as producing the “most blocked and delayed data center projects on record,” NBC News reported.
Data Center Watch, a project from AI intelligence firm 10a Labs that tracks data center fights around the US, reported that protestors “blocked or delayed at least 75 projects nationwide worth about $130 billion from January through March,” NBC News reported.
That’s “the most in a three-month period since the group began tracking in 2023,” and it shouldn’t be parsed as “a cyclical spike,” the researchers said. Instead, there’s been a “structural shift,” as “communities have internalized an opposition playbook, legislative sessions introduced formal regulatory uncertainty, and the number of active opposition groups more than doubled to 833 across 49 states,” researchers said.
The political momentum behind data center protests is expected to influence the upcoming midterm elections, with both parties increasingly sympathizing with resistance as opposition intensifies.
Sociologist’s unique take on data center opposition
Sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom has been spending time with organizers in North Carolina to better understand the playbook that’s fueling this momentum. In an op-ed for the New York Times encouraging Democrats to make data centers a key campaign issue, she noted that she “wasn’t sold on data center resistance as a political possibility,” but “time on the ground changed my mind.”
Not only are people crossing political divides to oppose local construction projects, but also people “are passionate enough to attend political education sessions about water rights, land use, and thermodynamics,” McMillan Cottom wrote. As she explained, people aren’t just educating themselves to keep noisy factories from driving up utility costs, threatening public health, or wasting local resources; some people are, for the first time, experiencing what it’s like to work with their neighbors to overcome adversity through political will:
“I have been watching this new groundswell of dissent firsthand in community meetings, organizing sessions and civic trainings here in North Carolina. The resistance has lifelong joiners, alumni from environmental and housing movements and young organizers. There are also a lot of people who have never dreamed of being disagreeable in public, much less considered joining a raucous social movement. The imminent risk of living next to a data center may be why they show up for a meeting, but they’re committing to the issue for bigger, deeper reasons. Political corruption and corporate malfeasance make them feel politically impotent. Voicing their objections, sharing their anxieties with others, recalling politicians who override them and in some cases beating the opposition is giving them something few politicians are offering—a taste of political power.”
Although it may be hard for Democrats to craft a national message that capitalizes on anti-data-center sentiment, McMillan Cottom suggested that, if they could, it would be the “greatest untapped opportunity” to win more elections.
Data Center Watch noted that the record of $130 billion data centers blocked or delayed in early 2026 was close to matching the value of the total number they recorded for all of 2025, about $156 billion. The researchers suggested that the back half of 2025 marked a “turning point, as data center opposition emerged as a national-level narrative” that showed the AI industry can no longer see the fights as individual zoning disputes. It “is now reshaping elections, regulation, and site viability nationwide,” Data Center Watch reported last year.
For officials hoping to quickly build data centers to propel America’s AI ambitions, facing the mounting opposition as the playbook has come together has been tough, NBC News reported. Where before, officials were criticized for quietly signing deals without discussing construction with nearby residents, now they’re encountering backlash before any deal is in the books, Data Center Watch found.
“In some cases,” researchers reported, “opposition mobilized before any project was officially filed, the mere rumor of a data center was enough to trigger organized resistance.”
AI industry struggles to counter narrative
AI firms and data center developers, as well as officials who hope to benefit from striking deals, are beginning to counter the data center hate as best they can.
Most recently, OpenAI released a report claiming that China was trying to influence the US data center debate by using ChatGPT. OpenAI quickly banned the bad actors, they reported, who were creating comics and memes to post on X, as well as generating social media comments, supposedly in the hopes of swaying US sentiment.
There has also been a push to paint public dissent as “naïve,” McMillan Cottom noted, “or, worse, un-American.”
Proponents of data centers argue that debates over electricity price hikes or water resources are misinformed. In a recent Atlantic piece claiming “the data-center panic is overblown,” it’s emphasized that only drought-stricken locations or areas with strained grids need to worry about those concerns. And economists suggested that communities risk overlooking little-discussed long-term benefits, like employment gains that “are likely to grow as new data centers attract businesses that use AI.”
In Loudon County, Virginia, The Atlantic noted, 53 million square feet of data centers have been constructed over the past 20 years. Although data centers account for only about 3 percent of the county’s land area, they generate “almost half of its property-tax revenue—a projected $1.3 billion in 2026,” The Atlantic reported. Although some data center projects were removed from residential zones due to noise complaints, communities have largely benefited from letting data centers in, with lower tax rates and more affordable housing.
This week, Meta claimed a similar data center PR win in Louisiana. One of the tech giant’s data center projects more than doubled Richland Parish’s sales and use tax, leading some teachers to get $50,000 bonuses, due to an ordinance that “lets the school board collect a 1 percent sales tax to fund teacher bonuses,” The Wall Street Journal reported. Scott Franklin, a director of the parish’s chamber of commerce and a farmer who sold the land to Meta for the data center, told WSJ that “anybody that complains about teachers getting a $50,000 check, they just instantly lose all credibility with me.”
But The Atlantic story seems to gloss over one of the biggest complaints that locals have about data centers: a lack of comprehensive environmental reviews. Mostly, communities simply don’t want local officials to take the kind of shortcuts to expedite data center approvals that Donald Trump and other Republicans have called for.
In Illinois, Governor J.B. Pritzker is pushing lawmakers to develop a legislative framework for responsible data center development in the state with proper environmental reviews at its center. And other cities, counties, and states are pivoting to get residents more information as deals are increasingly obstructed by residents loudly vocalizing opposition. Most recently, a data center developer in Utah vowed to handle all communications himself to make his construction project more transparent, after backlash reduced the total approved land area for the site by 50 percent.
Dems slow to embrace data center resistance
McMillan Cottom suggested that no public officials on the right or the left have perfected their messaging to align with anti-data center sentiments. It may be money standing in the Democrats’ way of fully embracing the data center resistance, she suggested, as many AI firms are donating hundreds of millions to campaigns to sway elections.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s plans to tax AI firms to force more transparency are “wonky,” she said. And Sen. Bernie Sanders’ call for Americans to profit off AI—which Trump, to some degree, agrees on—depends on creating a wealth fund that at least one critic warned “would enshrine the tech sector’s as-yet-unproven claims of its importance.”
Perhaps Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has come closest to plugging into the nationwide rage. After joining Sanders in calling for a nationwide data center moratorium in March, she used jars she claimed were filled with dirty data center water to press the Environmental Protection Agency over its alleged failures to investigate a Meta project in Georgia.
Meta has denied that its Georgia data center is polluting waters. But analysts think that Ocasio-Cortez’s instinct to use the jars to symbolize data center opposition seems more likely to strike a nerve and drum up support than even the most genuine pushes to regulate or tax data centers, so long as the long-term harms of construction remain unknown and the risks of AI remain abstract.
The Atlantic’s piece concluded that the “reasons for resisting data centers may ultimately have less to do with the tangible costs than the symbolic ones.”
Along similar lines, McMillan Cottom suggested that “the voters showing up to fight data centers demonstrate that a lot of us want something different.” And what many politicians and AI fans see as a sea of unsubstantiated backlash is actually “the righteous rage driving millions of Americans to look up from their enemy and finally see, instead, a neighbor and future worth fighting for,” she wrote.
Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.
