Americans Are Packing Town Halls To Stop AI Data Centers. And It's Working.

Call it rage against the machine. Or whatever sounds right locally, but even in tech-friendly communities, the popular uprising against data centers has now caused $260 billion worth of them to be canceled. This year. 

The primary issues are noise, heat, potential health impacts, property value degradation and the rising costs of electricity and water. It does not help the data center/AI cause that these projects tend to be either intentionally vague or downright dishonest about their scale and impact - and that they are being promoted by tech billionaires whose disdain for the public has become increasingly evident. This movement, which echoes - and encompasses - previous popular US uprisings of the past two decades also promises to be a deciding factor in the upcoming midterm elections. JL

Anthony Lopopolo reports in Quartz:

Developers have called off at least $260 billion in planned U.S. data center projects this year. The cancellations are coming faster, too. In dollars, the projects called off from July through September were bigger than every data center project canceled in all of 2025 put together. Neighbors win these fights by knowing more about a project than the official record does. In Monterey Park, Calif., a married couple went through more than 1,000 pages of the developer's paperwork and found the data center would use as much electricity as a city three times the size of theirs. "We needed to raise the alarm." Across the country, Americans have turned against a data center in their own area much faster. In a survey taken from mid-June to mid-July, 61% of U.S. adults said they oppose building new data centers in their area, up from 49% in the spring

People kept telling local resident Amanda Pollard that a developer would get its data center near her home in Barrington Hills, Ill., no matter what, and that politicians wouldn't listen. They were wrong. Residents of three towns turned out against Karis Critical's plan to rezone Plum Farms, rural land just over the line in Hoffman Estates, where Pollard drove daily, and in late June the developer dropped it. Pollard told Capitol News Illinois that "this shows that we can make a difference, and we do have a say in our community." 

Developers have called off at least $260 billion in planned U.S. data center projects this year, according to Heatmap Pro, the research service of the climate news site Heatmap. The cancellations are coming faster, too. In dollars, the projects called off from July through September were bigger than every data center project canceled in all of 2025 put together. National environmental groups have joined the fight against data centers, but most of the projects in Heatmap's count died at the local level, when a developer couldn't get a local permit or a town or county government acted against it.

Heatmap didn't name the projects or the people who stopped them. In many cases, residents who had rarely been to a council meeting before had begun showing up, and they kept coming back until the developer skipped town. They didn't want a data center on the farmland or golf course beside their homes, and they worried about higher water and power bills. In most of these fights, though, residents won only because the developer chose to leave. The developer can still come back. 

The packed public meetings that drove developers away

Some developers don't even wait for a vote. Eight Form wanted to put a five-story data center where a Hyatt Place hotel stands in El Segundo, Calif., and gave up before the city's Planning Commission could decide, according to the Mercury News. Residents used the July 9 hearing to list what the building would bring to a site near schools and youth sports fields, including 16 diesel generators on standby. The city's only environmental study of the site dated to 2002 and never weighed what a data center's generators would mean for the schools nearby. Before the last speakers reached the microphone, the company's founder, Arjun Shokeen, rose from the audience and dropped the plan. "I've heard the community loud and clear. They've made their voice very present," he said. "We're going to be withdrawing the application. We're not going to be moving forward with the data center."

Neighbors can win these fights by knowing more about a project than the official record does. In Monterey Park, Calif., the groundwork started with the only two people at an early hearing on the project. Before Monterey Park's City Council voted for a moratorium on data centers in January — in front of more than a hundred residents, according to nonprofit Waging Nonviolence — married couple Hrag Balian and Emily Chu went through more than 1,000 pages of the developer's paperwork and found that the data center would use about as much electricity as a city three times the size of Monterey Park. "We needed to raise the alarm because nobody in this community seemed to know anything about this," Balian said. The developer, StratCap, withdrew that spring.

Balian said developers came to Monterey Park and the cities around it because they took the area for a "sleepy town or predominantly immigrant community where people just won't fight." That was a mistake. Balian, Chu, and a group of activists knocked on doors there in Spanish and Chinese and got thousands of people to sign a petition. Council meetings ran until 1 a.m., and by March, the council had put a permanent ban on the city's ballot. 

What neighbors say a data center would do to their street

Many of the people at those meetings come because of what a data center would do to their own street. In Joppa, Md., the owner of a golf course floated a plan to replace the 275-acre course behind Bryan Cornell's property with seven data center buildings, according to The Banner, a Baltimore news site. Cornell, a construction superintendent who keeps horses and goats on land his grandfather bought, had paid little attention to local politics. He and a neighbor, Krissy Flatau, went on to lead the campaign that got Harford County to ban data centers in June. "I'm not being forced off my land," Cornell said. "We're going to fight back."

For other residents, the objection is the bill. Hugo Izaguirre, whose family has lived in Brownsville, Texas, for generations, opposed a plan to turn the old Southwest Key facility near the city's port into a data center, according to KRGV, a local TV station. He said the pollution and the higher costs for water and electricity would land on people like him. "All of those things are things that will be pushed back up to us," he said. The company, which KRGV didn't name, withdrew its request in late July before the planning commission took it up. Anyone in the city who pays a water or power bill can share that fear, wherever they live.

Across the country, Americans have turned against a data center in their own area much faster than they've turned against AI. In an Annenberg Public Policy Center survey taken from mid-June to mid-July, 61% of U.S. adults said they oppose building new data centers in their area, up from 49% in the spring. Over the same stretch, Americans' views of what AI will do to the country, and of how much the government should regulate it, didn't budge. 

State capitals could settle many of these fights for good. Illinois lawmakers failed to pass any rules for data centers this spring, leaving each town to negotiate with developers on its own. Maryland's lawmakers could do the opposite and write rules that override a county's ban, throwing out the work local residents have done to keep data centers out.

Until those rules are written, residents will have to continue to advocate for themselves. They've already started to fill council chambers. Many of them will have to make the same case next year to lawmakers in their state capitals, far from the farmland and golf courses they set out to defend.