Commissioners in Grant County, N.M., voted 4-1 on Oct. 22 to bar new data centers from the county’s unincorporated land for a year. Residents had learned only two months earlier, from a legal notice in the Silver City Daily Press, that a developer whose only listed address is a vacant floor in a Manhattan office building wanted to build one on a cattle ranch near Hachita, Searchlight New Mexico reported.
The county joined a long list. By late July, more than 530 local laws across the United States banned data centers outright or restricted them with steep setbacks and noise limits few projects could meet, most of them passed this year, according to a tally by Heatmap News. On Oct. 6 the publication’s data service, Heatmap Pro, put the value of data center projects canceled in 2026 after sustained local opposition at at least $260 billion. About half of that came in the quarter that ended Sept. 30. That one quarter, in dollars, exceeded all the cancellations of 2025.
The figures are real, but they measure announced investment, a number developers often inflate and frequently never disclose, and they lump speculative land deals together with financed construction. Court files, utility dockets and the industry’s own capacity data tell a narrower story. Local opponents now win about half the fights they pick, mostly against early proposals at rezoning hearings and permit votes, and they have pushed regulators in several states to make data centers carry more of their own power costs. They have not yet visibly slowed the national buildout. One industry research firm that mapped every moratorium it could find counted about 2.3 gigawatts of capacity actually delayed, against a forecast of 38 gigawatts of new capacity next year.
The motives are consistent from poll to poll: water and energy use first, then pollution and noise, utility bills and the tax breaks states give the industry. The complaint about bills holds up best in the territory of PJM Interconnection, the grid that runs from New Jersey to Illinois, where data center demand has driven a run of record capacity prices. Elsewhere, the best studies so far point the other way.
Counting the cancellations
Heatmap Pro builds its database from public officials, regulatory filings and local news. By its count, roughly 25 projects were canceled nationwide after local opposition in 2025, 12 of them in the fourth quarter. At least 20 more fell in the first three months of this year, representing $41.7 billion in investment and 3.5 gigawatts of demand, and by the end of July the 2026 total had passed 50. Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s founding executive editor, posted the first-quarter numbers in May.
The data center backlash isn’t close to peaking.
At least 20 proposed data centers were cancelled following local opposition in Q1 2026, per new Heatmap Pro data.
That smashes last quarter’s record of 12 canceled projects. The number of contested projects also hit an all-time…
The longer record is what makes the trend visible. About 430 projects have faced organized opposition over the past five years, and about 40 percent of them were eventually canceled, Heatmap found. A project challenged today has roughly even odds, and in the third quarter the cancellation rate among resolved fights approached 70 percent. Geography matters. Seventy-one percent of contested projects in Michigan were canceled, 56 percent in Indiana and 17 percent in Texas.
The other major tracker, Data Center Watch, a project of the A.I. research firm 10a Labs, counts something broader: projects blocked or delayed. A project is blocked when local authorities deny its permits or the developer withdraws in the face of opposition, and if it later revives, the group moves it to the delayed column. By that measure, at least 75 projects worth about $130 billion were disrupted from January through March, the most in any quarter since the group began tracking in 2023. Another 45, worth close to $68 billion, were stopped or postponed from April through June, more than half of the large new developments the group followed that quarter, Bisnow reported.
Neither count is an audit. Only about 60 percent of projects disclose their planned investment, Heatmap said, and its figures leave out some projects frozen by state moratoriums in Texas and New York, so it calls its total an undercount. Data Center Watch keeps its project-level data in a paid report. An announced figure is a developer’s projection, not money raised or spent. For scale, Mr. Meyer wrote, the largest technology companies are expected to spend more than $800 billion on data centers and A.I. this year.
How the fights are won
The largest casualty so far died in court over a question of public notice. The Prince William Digital Gateway would have put about 37 buildings and 23 million square feet of data centers on 2,100 acres beside Manassas National Battlefield Park in Northern Virginia. County supervisors approved the rezonings in December 2023 after a 27-hour meeting. A homeowners association and the American Battlefield Trust sued, and in August 2025 a circuit judge, Kimberly Irving, voided the rezonings because the public had not been properly notified before the vote. After the Virginia Court of Appeals upheld her ruling on March 31, the county dropped its defense, having spent nearly $2 million on lawyers. Compass Datacenters walked away in April, and on July 2 QTS withdrew its last appeal, ending the project, WTOP reported.
Most fights end sooner and more cheaply, before a zoning board or a city council. In Monterey Park, Calif., east of Los Angeles, the City Council imposed a moratorium in January after an Australian investment firm, HMC StratCap, proposed a 50-megawatt facility, then sent a permanent ban to the voters. The firm withdrew before the June 2 election, and the ban passed by more than five to one. Only another public vote can undo it.
Killing a project locally does not always kill it. Tucson’s City Council voted 7-0 on Aug. 6, 2025, to end talks over Project Blue, a $3.6 billion campus linked to Amazon Web Services that needed city annexation and city water, after months of organizing over water in a desert city. The developer, Beale Infrastructure, already had approval from Pima County. The city’s water utility later revoked a construction water meter at the site after finding that a contractor had used two acre-feet of city water without authorization, Tucson Spotlight reported, and Beale said it was getting construction water from another, non-potable source. Work on the county land had gone ahead.
Money has not reliably bought consent. In Hazle Township, Pa., in the Poconos, supervisors voted 3-0 in November 2025 against Project Hazelnut, a 15-building campus on 1,283 acres whose end user turned out to be Amazon, a fact that surfaced through public-records requests. In June the developer, NorthPoint Development, sent letters offering every eligible household $10,000, payable when the first building opens, as part of a $165 million community benefits package. Residents largely turned it down, Patch reported. NorthPoint is appealing, and the township has paused data center applications through at least December. Ginny Kerslake of Food and Water Watch said she knew of no one who wanted the money.
This $10,000 act of desperation by the data center developer is not the story.
Developers win some of the counterattacks. Hill County, Tex., passed the state’s first local moratorium in May and rescinded it a month later after a developer sued for $100 million, and Hood County twice rejected a moratorium after a state senator, Paul Bettencourt, warned that it lacked the legal authority, The Texas Tribune reported. In Nashville, where nearly 600,000 people signed a petition against a DC Blox facility next to the zoo, the company is challenging the city’s moratorium in court. A three-year statewide moratorium in Pennsylvania failed in committee, 2-9, in June.
Where it started
Data Center Watch’s first report, covering May 2024 through March 2025, found $64 billion in projects affected: $18 billion blocked and $46 billion delayed. It counted 142 activist groups in 24 states, 42 of them in Virginia, the country’s largest data center market. Of the officials who had publicly opposed a large project, 55 percent were Republicans and 45 percent Democrats. Republicans tended to object to tax incentives and grid strain, the report found, and Democrats to environmental harm.
The early victories were few and very local. In Cascade Locks, Ore., a project was canceled after voters recalled the officials who backed it, and voters in Warrenton, Va., removed officials who had supported an Amazon campus. The fight over power came earlier. In March 2023, AEP Ohio froze new data center service requests after receiving more than 30 gigawatts of applications, against a peak load of 9.4 gigawatts.
The movement scaled up this year. Data Center Watch counted 396 opposition groups at the end of 2025, 833 by the end of March and more than 840 by midyear, in every state but Hawaii.
Opinion moved with it. In September 2025, a Heatmap Pro poll found Americans split, 43 percent in favor of a data center near them and 42 percent opposed. By May, in a survey of 4,118 registered voters by Embold Research, 71 percent were opposed and 21 percent in favor, and an August poll for Heatmap put opposition at 75 percent. Gallup, surveying 1,000 adults in March, also found 71 percent opposed, compared with 53 percent who opposed a nearby nuclear plant. The CNBC All-America Economic Survey, taken Oct. 14-18 among 1,000 registered voters, found 63 percent against an A.I. data center within 10 miles of home and 13 percent in favor.
The power bill
Gallup asked opponents in an open-ended follow-up why they objected. About half cited excessive use of resources, with 18 percent naming water and 18 percent energy, according to Gallup’s write-up. Sixteen percent cited pollution, noise included, and a similar share to the one citing quality of life, about one in five, named economic harm such as utility bills and the cost of living. Supporters mostly mentioned jobs.
The bill complaint has its firmest footing in PJM’s territory. The grid’s capacity auction, which pays power plants to be available at peak, cleared at record prices for the year that began in June 2025, and Monitoring Analytics, PJM’s independent market monitor, estimated that data centers accounted for 63 percent of that increase, about $9.3 billion. The auction held in July, for 2028-29, hit the price cap for the third consecutive time.
Utility regulators answered with tariffs, and those cases may have cleared out more speculative demand than any zoning board. In July 2025 the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio approved a rule requiring new data centers drawing more than 25 megawatts from AEP Ohio to pay for at least 85 percent of the capacity they reserve, for up to 12 years, whether they use it or not, POWER magazine reported. AEP’s projected data center demand then fell from about 30 gigawatts to 13 as speculative projects left the queue. The Ohio Manufacturers’ Association argues the utility is still overstating it.
Virginia followed. On Nov. 25, 2025, the State Corporation Commission created a separate rate class for Dominion Energy customers using 25 megawatts or more, effective Jan. 1, 2027, with 14-year contracts and minimum charges of 85 percent of contracted transmission and distribution demand and 60 percent of generation demand. The same order still raised a typical household’s bill by $11.24 a month in 2026. Pennsylvania’s utility commission adopted a model large-load tariff by a 5-0 vote on April 30, and Oregon regulators approved one for Portland General Electric on May 7. In Illinois, the Citizens Utility Board said on Oct. 22 that ComEd customers could be on the hook for billions in data center costs and pressed for minimum monthly fees and exit fees.
Water, noise and tax breaks
Water is among the reasons opponents cite most, and nationally it has the weakest case behind it. Andy Masley, who writes a Substack on A.I.’s energy and water use, wrote that he is “convinced that data centers haven’t harmed local water access anywhere.” Noise is another matter, Mr. Masley conceded, writing of a facility whose neighbors’ lives were upended that “This issue’s real and bad”, though the case he cited was an air-cooled crypto operation. In Hazle Township, residents put a constant hum alongside property values, water and power on their list of objections.
Tax breaks are easier to measure. In at least four states, Virginia, Texas, Ohio and Georgia, sales and use tax exemptions for data centers now cost more than $1 billion a year, according to a report this year by Good Jobs First, a subsidy watchdog. Georgia raised its estimate of the fiscal 2026 cost by 664 percent, to $2.5 billion. Ohio’s tax department disclosed in May that the state lost $555 million to its exemption in 2024 and $1.6 billion in 2025, and Gov. Mike DeWine paused it for new applicants days later. Arizona suspended its exemption for three years starting July 1. Fourteen states with exemptions publish no comprehensive annual figures on what they give up.
Secrecy runs through many of the fights. Amazon’s role in Tucson came out by accident, and in Hazle Township through records requests. In Grant County, the New Mexico Environment Department said the developer, Site Layer 1, had filed its air permit application with no documentation of community engagement, and James Kenney, the state environment secretary, wrote in September that the company had not returned his calls, voicemails or emails. Nancy Stephens, the commissioner who proposed the county’s moratorium, made her argument for it at the meeting.
If you’re driving, and you hear that there might be a danger ahead, you tap the brakes. You don’t speed up.
The case against the count
The strongest rebuttal comes from SemiAnalysis, a research firm that sells capacity forecasts to the industry. In June its analysts went after a widely repeated claim that half of the data center capacity planned for 2026 had been canceled, writing that it rested on forecasts that took announcements at face value. Their own year-end forecast for capacity built by the largest cloud companies in North America had moved about 1 percent in six months. In September they mapped more than 300 local moratoriums and bans. About 20 gigawatts of planned capacity sat inside a restricted jurisdiction, they found, but only 1,525 megawatts, or 7.6 percent, was actually delayed, in three projects in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Colorado. With New York’s order included, they put the nationwide total at about 2.3 gigawatts.
Their reasons are mechanical. County rules often stop at city limits. Moratoriums freeze new applications rather than revoke approvals. Short pauses can expire before projects scheduled for 2028 need their permits. In Texas, they wrote, the state’s freeze pushes developers toward generating their own power rather than stopping them. CoreWeave’s chief executive said last month that orders had not been affected by the backlash.
capacity exposed to a moratorium is not capacity delayed by one
Utility economists make a parallel argument about bills. A study by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Brattle Group, released in October 2025, found that from 2019 to 2024 the states with the most growth in electricity demand saw real prices fall, because fixed grid costs were spread across more sales. A working paper from the Electric Power Research Institute associated data center growth with retail rates about 6 percent lower over the same years, Latitude Media reported, though its authors warned that demand that fails to materialize would reverse the effect. Shawn Regan, writing for City Journal in July, argued that state energy policies explain the steepest increases and that data centers have, if anything, pushed rates down.
Weighed against the record, both rebuttals hold up and both leave something out. The rate studies end in 2024, before PJM’s capacity prices reached household bills, and PJM’s own market monitor attributes most of that jump to data centers. SemiAnalysis measures projects far enough along to appear in a forecast, while Heatmap and Data Center Watch mostly count proposals that die at a first hearing. Both things are true at once: opponents are winning more of their fights, and developers with financing are building where they are welcome. A JPMorgan report cited by Heatmap found that 60 percent of the capacity due to open in 2027 had not started construction as of early June. That is the part of the pipeline a moratorium could still reach.
Peter Freed, a former director of energy strategy at Meta who is now at Near Horizon Group, told Heatmap in July that the pace of moratoriums was accelerating but that sites could still be found, with more effort.
Even the major developers are having trouble with projects, but you always have trouble with projects.
Washington and the statehouses
The national politics now track the local ones. Nearly 55 percent of MAGA supporters want companies to keep developing advanced A.I. while Congress writes rules, the CNBC survey found, but only 29 percent would accept a data center within 10 miles of home, and among all Republicans and Republican-leaning voters support fell to 24 percent. Eighteen percent of voters named a failure to regulate A.I. and data centers as their top concern if Republicans keep Congress. Brad Carson, a former Democratic congressman from Oklahoma and co-founder of Public First Action, an industry-backed political action committee that favors stronger safeguards, told CNBC that sentiment toward A.I. had “deteriorated a lot over the last six months.” Dan Diorio of the Data Center Coalition told CNBC that operators are committed to “paying for the energy we use.”
In an Aug. 19 memo first reported by Axios, the National Republican Senatorial Committee warned A.I. companies that hostility to data centers was endangering Senator Jon Husted, Republican of Ohio. “This has become a sleeper issue for the entire election cycle,” the committee wrote. His opponent, former Senator Sherrod Brown, has spent millions on ads calling Mr. Husted “the face of data centers in Ohio.” As lieutenant governor in 2024, Mr. Husted helped announce a $10 billion Amazon Web Services expansion, and polls in Ohio have since turned against the facilities.
Mr. Husted’s response is the Ratepayer Protection Act, which he introduced in July. It would require states to consider standards making large users such as data centers pay for the generation and transmission built to serve them. The House passed its version 417-3 on Sept. 16, and Mr. Husted posted the vote.
The House just passed my Ratepayer Protection Act by an overwhelming, bipartisan vote (417-3).
Ohioans shouldn’t pay higher electric bills to power data centers. Big Tech should pay for the energy they use, and that’s what this bill would do.
Now it’s time for the Senate to…
The Senate was another story. A Democrat objected to Mr. Husted’s request for unanimous consent the next day, and a later procedural vote failed, 57-32, short of the 60 needed, according to Mr. Husted’s office. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, said the bill’s protections were voluntary and backed a rival from Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, the GRID Savings Act, The Hill reported. The American Prospect called Mr. Husted’s bill “toothless” because it requires states only to consider safeguards.
President Trump moved toward the ratepayers’ side in a Truth Social post on Oct. 21. “New and large, in some cases gigantic, Data Centers are mandated by me to make their own electricity and give or sell any excess back to the local community, or grid,” he wrote, and he urged companies to pay communities a “dividend,” saying unpopular projects had become “extremely popular when a financial deal is struck,” 24/7 Wall St. reported. The post named no amount, no size threshold and no enforcing agency, and no order had followed by Oct. 23, the Northeast Times reported. In a television interview on Oct. 19, Mr. Trump had pointed to a community where everyone got $10,000, the same sum Hazle Township residents turned down.
Governors moved faster than Congress. Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican running for re-election, ordered the state’s grid operator and utility commission on Aug. 3 to halt approvals for data center connections until they audited every large project. “Simply put, Texans must come first,” he said. The grid operator said it could pause only requests of 75 megawatts or more, and projects building their own power bypassed the grid, so on Sept. 21 Mr. Abbott told the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to stop issuing any data center permits until the audit is finished, Houston Public Media reported. In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed an executive order on July 14 pausing state environmental permits for data centers of 50 megawatts or more, making it the first state to impose such a freeze, until a statewide review she has said will take about a year.
What comes next
Voters weigh in on Nov. 3. Thirty-five local data center measures in seven states are on the ballot, most placed there by citizen petitions, according to the Brockovich Report. Ohio has 21 of them in 18 jurisdictions, including a charter amendment in Urbana that would bar facilities drawing more than 7.5 megawatts. Voters in Ottawa, Kan., will decide on a 25-megawatt cap that a judge put on the ballot after the city commission stalled the petition, and Edgewater, Fla., will vote on a ban. All seven Illinois measures are advisory. One, in Boulder City, Nev., would open land to data centers rather than close it. The Husted-Brown race is settled the same day.
County boards keep voting in the meantime. Manatee County, Fla., adopted a 12-month moratorium on Oct. 8, the county said, and Martin County, on the state’s Atlantic coast, holds its final hearing on one Tuesday. The Texas audit is expected in mid-December, and Mr. Abbott’s office has said he will work with the Legislature, which meets in January, to eliminate the industry’s financial incentives.
Grant County’s moratorium takes effect Nov. 21. The developer’s application for grid service from Tri-State, the regional power supplier, is due Wednesday, with results expected in February.