Not in My Backyard: The America Revolting Against AI Data Centers
It all starts on Facebook. In the fall of 2025, in a local group in Springfield, Illinois, a post announces the construction of a new CyrusOne data center on the outskirts of the city. Within a few hours, 145 comments accumulate, an extraordinary number for a message board accustomed to lost dogs and garage sales. Residents ask about the water. They worry about their bills. Someone cites data on energy consumption with the precision of someone who spent the night doing research.
It is a scene being replicated from Virginia to Michigan, from Georgia to New York. Artificial intelligence, that immaterial entity that seems to live in the cloud, suddenly has an address, a house number, and the neighbors don't seem enthusiastic. As we recounted when analyzing the thirst of data centers, the problem is not new. But in 2025, it has become political, mixing impossible alliances and creating coalitions that no analyst had predicted.
The Burning Numbers
Before entering the political arena, it's worth stopping on the data, because they are what lit the fuse. According to the International Energy Agency, a typical data center dedicated to AI consumes as much electricity as 100,000 American families. The Environmental and Energy Study Institute estimates that large facilities can consume up to five million gallons of water per day, used to cool server racks that would otherwise melt down, exactly as we explain in the article on the geography of water and AI.
Making the problem even more acute is the geography of choices. Data centers are built predominantly in rural areas, where land costs less and political resistance, until recently, was almost non-existent. These are often the same areas that already suffer from water stress, where water wells are the norm and where a mega-industrial facility radically changes the balance of local resources. According to a study by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, about two-thirds of new US data center sites are in areas already subject to pressure on water resources.
And then there are the diesel generators, the detail that transforms an abstract environmental problem into a concrete public health issue. Data centers are equipped with diesel backups to ensure continuity in case of blackouts. These generators emit fine particulate matter and nitrogen oxides, pollutants associated with asthma and respiratory diseases. In rural communities where healthcare systems are already fragile, the impact is far from negligible. As CBS News Chicago reported, the Naperville City Council rejected a proposed data center after months of opposition from residents, concerned exactly about this set of factors: water, health, bills.
Because bills also enter the equation. The costs for upgrading the electrical grids necessary to power these facilities often end up transferred to local utilities, not investors. In some areas of the country, there is talk of increases between 20 and 50 percent in residential bills, according to local analyses and testimonies collected by Heatmap News in its research on canceled projects.
Twenty-Five No's in One Year
The erosion of local consensus has started to translate into concrete action with a speed that surprised even the most attentive observers. According to research conducted by Heatmap Pro, the most systematic available at the moment, based on public documents and interviews with counties across the country, in 2025 at least 25 data center projects were canceled following local opposition. Four times more than in 2024, when there were six cancellations. In 2023, there were just two.
Translated into megawatts, those 25 projects represent about 4.7 gigawatts of electrical demand that will not be met, a significant share compared to the total capacity planned for the coming years. And the figure is destined to grow: at least 99 projects across the country are currently being contested by activists or residents, out of a total of about 770 planned data centers. According to Heatmap estimates, about 40 percent of projects facing sustained opposition are eventually abandoned.
Between May 2024 and March 2025, according to Data Center Watch, projects worth a total of 64 billion dollars were blocked or delayed. In Michigan alone, at least 19 communities have proposed or already implemented construction bans. In all this, the total investment planned for AI infrastructure in 2026, including data centers, power plants, and grid upgrades, exceeds 500 billion dollars, according to estimates by Goldman Sachs. It is a financial shockwave that hits an unexpected wall of civic resistance.
Red against Red, Blue against Blue
The most politically interesting, and in some ways most intriguing, fact about all this is that the game does not follow political color lines. Or rather: it crosses them all, creating ideological short circuits that make any prediction about the regulatory future difficult.
Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator who embodies the American progressive left, proposed a federal moratorium on data centers in February 2026, openly denouncing the environmental and social costs of AI infrastructure. But alongside him, in this critical front, are Republican senators like Josh Hawley, the Missouri conservative who combines economic populism and skepticism toward the concentrated power of big tech. In state legislatures, as documented by the American Enterprise Institute, in recent months, lawmakers from Georgia, New York, Oklahoma, Virginia, and Maryland have introduced bills to block or slow down data centers, with cross-party majorities that would have made any political communication consultant tremble only three years ago.
The geopolitical knot makes everything more complicated. Donald Trump has made AI the symbol of American technological supremacy over China, and any limit on the construction of data centers is perceived by his administration as a gift to Beijing. The 500-billion-dollar Stargate project, announced by OpenAI, Microsoft, and SoftBank, is exactly the type of infrastructure the White House wants to accelerate. But the most astute strategists of the Republican Party have already noticed the problem: in several rural constituencies in Virginia and Georgia, explicitly anti-data center candidates won in the 2025 state elections. With the 2026 midterms on the horizon, the political calculation is becoming much less linear than it seems from Silicon Valley press releases.
As AEI analysts note, the paradoxical difficulty of moratorium proposals is that they are too blunt instruments for a very precise problem. Most of the bills use power thresholds so low that they would end up also blocking regional co-location operators, university research centers, and government agencies, far from the hyperscalers of Google, Amazon, and Microsoft that are the real targets of popular protest.
Who Pays the Bill
There is a precedent that many American residents cite when talking about large industrial investments that promise local jobs: the Foxconn case. In 2017, Wisconsin guaranteed the Taiwanese company 4 billion dollars in tax incentives for a plant that was supposed to create 13,000 jobs. A few hundred arrived. The cost for each actual job exceeded 200,000 public dollars. This ghost haunts the job promises of data centers, highly automated facilities that require relatively little personnel compared to the energy they consume.
In Aurora, Illinois, with four operational data centers and five under construction, the city has imposed a 180-day moratorium to study more stringent rules. Sustainability director Alison Lindburg explained the starting problem to CBS News: zoning codes did not distinguish between a warehouse and a data center. Aurora is now introducing binding requirements on noise, water, and energy, with continuous monitoring. Peter Freed, former director of energy strategy at Meta, told Heatmap clearly that "affordability is the first, second, and third problem" that developers hear raised. Microsoft and Amazon have made public commitments to clean energy. But skepticism toward self-imposed guardrails by companies with trillion-dollar capitalizations is, let's face it, understandable.
The Voices No One Hears
It would be convenient to reduce the protest to pure NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) syndrome, the classic "not in my backyard" that blocks any infrastructure. But the voices emerging from Time's reporting and NPR investigations suggest something more layered. Religious leaders from rural communities, Southern Evangelicals, Midwest Catholics, Southwest Native American leaders, talk about "digital colonialism": land extracted, water consumed, communities transformed into service infrastructure for a digital economy whose benefits accumulate elsewhere. It is a narrative frame that resonates in communities already marked by decades of deindustrialization.
Then there is the broader ethical dimension. John Palowitch, a Google DeepMind researcher who in 2024 saw his entire team reassigned to work on Gemini, told Time how internal directives pushed to encourage users to use AI for increasingly daily decisions: what to cook, which smartphone to buy, how to interpret news. His concern is not surveillance in the classical sense, but something more subtle: "If we become too dependent on these tools, there will be no way to break free from the big monopolies that host them."
A fear that becomes even more concrete in light of a Pew Research Center research from December 2025, documenting how 64% of American teens have already used an AI chatbot and nearly one in three does so every day.
Europe Watches, and Sometimes Acts
While the United States struggles to find a coherent regulatory framework, Europe has already started to move, with mixed results. The Netherlands imposed a moratorium on new data centers in the Amsterdam metropolitan area as early as 2022, when the concentration of facilities had put pressure on the local power grid and water system. Germany has focused on mandatory energy efficiency requirements and integration with urban district heating networks, partly transforming the problem into a resource. The European AI Act, which fully entered into force in 2025, does not directly address the infrastructural issue, but the energy efficiency directive updated in 2024 imposes reporting obligations on water and energy consumption far beyond what is provided by American legislation.
The point is not that Europe has solved the problem. But it has started to build a common regulatory lexicon. As AEI noted, the moratoriums proposed in American states are crude and indiscriminate instruments: they don't answer the real questions about who pays for the grid, how water consumption is regulated, what environmental standards apply. Without those answers, the game risks blocking infrastructure without building anything alternative.
Infrastructure or Destiny?
In his essay The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (MIT Press, 2016), theorist Benjamin Bratton already read computational infrastructures as an accidental megastructure that redraws geopolitics as much as highways or railways. Data centers are the lowest level of this architecture: invisible, essential, and now suddenly very visible.
The question emerging from the American political tumult of 2025-2026 is not whether to build data centers; AI infrastructure is now considered as strategic as highways or railways in the post-war period. The question is who decides where, how, at whose expense, and with what impact. The current model—build fast, pay incentives, promise jobs, leave environmental costs to the community—has clearly exhausted its political credit.
Technical alternatives exist that can change the trajectory: edge computing, which distributes the computational load reducing geographical concentration; direct liquid cooling, which drastically reduces water consumption; location in areas with abundant renewable energy and a cold climate, such as Scandinavia, Iceland, and, with some ambition, some Alpine regions. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have made public promises about clean energy sourcing, and some of them are credible. The challenge is that computational demand grows faster than any decarbonization plan.
As we had explored in our article on the Waymo blackout, dependence on centralized digital infrastructures creates systemic fragilities that go far beyond the individual facility. A data center that sends the local power grid into crisis, or that dries up a water source in an already arid area, is not just an environmental problem: it is an infrastructure security problem in the broadest sense of the term.
The American revolt against AI data centers is not Luddism. It is something more precise and, in some ways, harder to manage: it is the rational demand of communities that have realized they are at the intersection between the digital future and its material costs. The answer cannot only be "we will build with renewable energy" or "we will pay local taxes". It must include a genuine conversation about benefit distribution, democratic participation in infrastructural decisions, and binding, not self-imposed, environmental standards.
Otherwise, those 145 comments on Springfield's Facebook will become 1,450, then 14,500. And the 25 data centers blocked in 2025 will become a number that no industrial plan can compensate for.