Locals opposed to a proposed Amazon Web Services data center had their say at a community meeting in Tucson, Arizona, on August 4, 2025Wild Horizons/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
On Election Day, Peter Hubbard was one of two Democratic candidates who took a decisive—and surprising—victory in Georgia. Hubbard was elected to the Georgia Public Service Commission (PSC), the body that regulates the state’s electric utility. It’s the first time Democrats have won statewide seats in statewide elections in Georgia in nearly two decades.
Residents have complained for years about a series of rate hikes from the PSC. But during Hubbard’s campaigning, he noticed another topic coming up again and again with his future constituents. “The number one issue was affordability,” he says. “But a very close second was data centers and the concern around them just sucking up the water, the electricity, the land—and not really paying any taxes.”
Georgia has become a hot spot for data center development over the past few years: Some research indicates it’s one of the fastest-growing markets for data center development in the country (thanks, in part, to some generous tax breaks). It’s also now a nexus for organizing against those same data centers. Community opposition to data centers, a new report finds, is on the rise across the country. And red states, including Georgia and Indiana, are leading this wave of bipartisan opposition.
The new report was released by Data Center Watch, a project run by AI security company 10a Labs that tracks community opposition to data centers across the country. The company has been keeping eyes on this topic since 2023, and released its first public findings earlier this year. (While 10a Labs does offer risk analysis for AI companies, report author Miquel Vila says that the Data Center Watch project is separate from the company’s main work, and is not paid for by any clients.) But this week’s report finds that the tide has turned sharply in the months since the group’s first public output. The second quarter of this year, the new report finds, represented “a sharp escalation” in data center opposition across the country.
“The little guy finally won, which rarely happens in any industry, let alone where the Magnificent Ten play.”
Data Center Watch’s first report covered a period from May 2024 to March of 2025; in that period, it found, local opposition had blocked or delayed a total of $64 billion in data center projects (six projects were blocked entirely, while 10 were delayed). But Data Center Watch’s new report found that opposition blocked or delayed $98 billion in projects from March to June of 2025 alone—eight projects, including two in Indiana and Kentucky, were blocked in those three months, while nine were delayed. One of those projects, a $17 billion development in the Atlanta suburbs, was put on hold in May after the county imposed a 180-day moratorium on data center development, following significant pushback from local residents.
There are some “methodological caveats” to the new Data Center Watch report, Vila acknowledges. The new report, which is based solely on public documents including media reports, legal filings, and social media, covers a period of time when data center construction in the US exploded: Industry website ConstructConnect estimates that US spending on data construction by August of this year exceeded all spending in 2024. More data center projects may simply mean more communities are reacting to ones coming to their backyards; more media attention on these projects also may juice up opposition. But the sharp increase in other data observed by Data Center Watch between March and June—including nearly 50,000 signatures on petitions opposing specific data centers across the country in that time period—indicates that there has been “a turning point” in the issue, Vila says.
“Before, [resistance] was something that could happen,” he says. “Now it seems that it’s very likely that when you are developing [a data center], potentially someone is going to organize.”
Hubbard, who won the Georgia PSC seat, isn’t the only political candidate who has had opposition to data centers play a role in their race, nor is Georgia the only battleground. In Virginia, the country’s data center hub, governor-elect Abigail Spanberger said she wanted to have data centers “pay their own way” for power. Last week, climate journalism site Heatmap profiled John McAuliff, a former Biden climate adviser who won his election based in large part on opposition to data centers. Separate polling from Heatmap, also released last week, shows that less than half of Americans from all political persuasions would support a data center.
Josh Thomas is a Virginia state delegate from Prince William County, which, the county claims, has the highest concentration of data centers in the world. He introduced multiple bills during the last legislative session to rein in data centers in Virginia, and data center issues figured prominently in his most recent election. (His opponent, a Republican, alleged that Thomas did not go far enough in trying to stop data center sprawl.)
Thomas, who won reelection last week, points to the local pushback against the proposed Prince William Digital Gateway, which would put more than 30 data centers on the edge of a national reserve located in the north of the state. A group of homeowners have challenged the project in court, and a judge voided zoning in August, which temporarily halted construction.
“The little guy finally won, which rarely happens in any industry, let alone where the Magnificent Ten play,” he says, referring to the US’s biggest tech companies. “I think that rallied people politically in Virginia.”
Thomas, like Hubbard, also says he sees a lot of his constituents concerned about how data centers will affect their electricity bill. “People are just a lot more cost-conscious,” he says. Energy bills, Thomas says “are something that was kept relatively static for a number of years.” But in Virginia, electricity load from data centers are helping to drive up utility bills, Thomas says.
“I have Republicans and Democrats coming to me saying, ‘How can we help with this issue?’”
Both Thomas and Hubbard are Democrats, but opposition to data centers, the Data Center Watch report stresses, has been thoroughly bipartisan. And some national Republican politicians, including Sen. Josh Hawley, Rep. Thomas Massie, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, have begun to speak out against them.
“People you have got to pay close attention to your local city, county, and state approvals of data centers and demand your water and energy bills be protected!!!” Greene, who has criticized data center expansion for months, posted on X on November 7.
Big tech companies have to date made few public statements about pushback to data center projects. While some, like Meta, provide public-facing information on their data centers, others in the industry lean heavily on nondisclosure agreements when building new data centers, providing little to no information to communities about these projects—including which tech companies may be involved.
In a statement, Dan Diorio, the vice president of state policy for the Data Center Coalition, a leading industry group, said that the industry is continuing to see “significant interest” from communities across the country in hosting data centers and that members are committed to “continued community engagement and stakeholder education,” as well as “being responsible and responsive neighbors in the communities where they operate.”
“The US data center industry provides significant benefits to local communities—creating hundreds of thousands of high-wage jobs across the nation, providing billions of dollars in economic investment, and generating significant local, state, and federal tax revenue that helps fund schools, transportation, public safety, and other community priorities,” Diorio said. “All told, US data centers supported 4.7 million jobs and contributed $162 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2023.”
The sea change in public sentiment may not be enough to stem the market enthusiasm for data center build-out. While $93 billion in delayed and blocked investments is certainly not a small number, it’s chump change compared to the massive influx of cash from big tech companies that is, analysts say, currently driving the US economy. (Meta alone said last week that it will invest $600 billion into AI infrastructure, including data centers, over the next three years.) And even though some communities are successfully pushing back against data centers, those wins can be temporary. The ruling on the Prince William Digital Gateway, for instance, was stayed in October, allowing construction to resume as the case moves towards trial next year.
Still, Thomas has big plans for data center reform in Virginia’s next legislative session, including reintroducing a reform bill of his that passed the legislature in May but was vetoed by Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
“I have Republicans and Democrats coming to me saying, ‘How can we help with this issue? My constituents are talking about it like they never have before,’” he says. “Our coalition of data center reform-minded legislators has just grown to a very large number.”
