Top 10 Reasons Why Communities Are Fighting Data Centers
To document the backlash, we’ve updated and improved the Data Center Rejection Database. And yes, it's searchable and it's free.
Commencement speeches are forgettable. Speakers routinely resort to the same pantry of platitudes — dream big, embrace failure, work hard, study hard, pray hard, etc. — and audiences forget all of them before the salt kisses the rim of the first margarita glass.
Not this year.
On May 8, Gloria Caulfield, a commencement speaker at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, was booed after she declared the rise of AI is “the next Industrial Revolution.” A week later, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was repeatedly booed during his 13-minute commencement speech at the University of Arizona, particularly when he talked about AI.
The boo-fest in Tucson was a perfect example of the growing hostility in America to Big Tech and the Silicon Valley oligarchs. It also shows how clueless the Big Tech elites are about how the public perceives them and why the data center backlash across the US has been so fierce.
Indeed, the look on Eric Schmidt’s face when he got booed on Friday by students at the University of Arizona during his speech, when he talked about AI, was worth 1,000 words. Schmidt (net worth: $42 billion) was flustered and appeared genuinely bewildered that he — one of the titans of Silicon Valley — would get booed over anything. Further, he seemed hurt that the students who were there to hear his wisdom (“build a team”) were not down with his vision of AI as their virtual companion. At one point, he even pleaded with the boo-birds, “If you’d let me make this point, please...” (The full video of his speech is available here.)
Schmidt’s disastrous speech shows that young Americans, in particular, are pissed off. It also shows how Big Tech, including Google, which withdrew its plans for a big data center project in Indianapolis last year before Indy’s city council could reject it, is drawing more and more public anger.
That anger can be seen in the new and improved — and free — Data Center Rejection Database. It tracks data center rejections here in the US and around the world. A simple search of the database shows that 89 data centers have already been rejected or restricted in the US this year. For comparison, there were 49 rejections in the US in 2025, and just 9 rejections in 2024.
Jacob, Michael, and I have put a lot of work into the Data Center Rejection Database. It is the only free, online, searchable database of its kind. Please take a look and share it.
One of the latest rejections occurred in Pocatello, Idaho, where a hearing examiner denied a permit for a proposed AI data center. Last week, according to an article by Logan Ramsey of the East Idaho News, “hundreds of people” attended a hearing on the project at Pocatello’s City Hall. Ramsey reports that “Over 60 people spoke in opposition to the application, while only three spoke in favor.” That’s not a hearing. That’s a rout.
Another vivid example of the backlash occurred on May 4, when 900 people showed up at a county commission meeting in Box Elder County, Utah, to determine the fate of a 40,000-acre data center project called Stratos, being pushed by Kevin O’Leary, the mega-rich asshat from “Shark Tank.” As I wrote on May 6 in “Rage Against The Data Center,” the overwhelming majority of the audience was opposed to the project.
Since then, some 6,000 Utahns have signed a letter encouraging Gov. Spencer Cox to veto the project.
Last week, I talked to a friend of mine about the opposition to AI, Big Tech, and data centers. My pal is politically savvy and has watched many political fights during his career. But he was stumped by why so many people oppose data centers and what might be done to persuade opponents to understand that the US must continue its leadership in digital infrastructure and AI. I told him what I’ve said many times: The hostility to data centers and Big Tech is a cultural phenomenon, and it’s unlike anything I’ve seen during my four decades of covering energy, politics, and land-use fights.
My friend expressed concern that the US cannot lose the AI race to China. That’s a common concern and a valid one. “What we are seeing is a real danger to America’s leadership,” he said. I reminded my pal that, despite the backlash, according to the latest data from Aterio, there are now 769 data centers under construction in the US with a combined power capacity of 58 gigawatts. Thus, while there have been 89 rejections this year, nearly 800 projects are being built. But — and this is key — as the number of projects grows, so does the opposition.
In fact, the rejections are piling up so quickly that we are struggling to keep up.
Before going further, let me be clear: I am not anti-AI. I use AI tools every day, and I’m amazed by how quickly they are improving. That said, I’ve seen the downside. Last year, my daughter lost an online writing job due to AI because the tools are getting so good. Further, it’s clear that technological progress is always fraught and often engenders deep-seated fears in the public.
Some of those fears are justified, and some are not. What can’t be argued is this: We are seeing an unprecedented backlash against Big Tech/AI/Silicon Valley and data centers.
That conversation I had with my friend spurred me to take a deep dive into the reasons communities are fighting data centers. Here are the top 10.
1. It’s a cultural revolt against the “lanyard class.”
The class divide, like the urban-rural divide, is real, and it is growing. Last year, The Spectator ran an article headlined, “Are the ‘lanyard class’ the new enemy?” That term was coined by Maurice Glasman, a member of the House of Lords, to describe the “modern professional-managerial elite.” Glasman told The Spectator that the public’s anger at the managerial class is part of a broad disaffection with the bureaucracy and experts. Last May, a writer in The Times of London picked up on the lanyard class concept and said that Britain’s Reform party is “surging because working-class people resent the professional cadre who dismiss them as stupid and racist.”
The result of that resentment was clear earlier this month when Nigel Farage’s Reform UK picked up more than 1,450 council seats across Britain. As the BBC reported on May 9, Reform made “big gains at the expense of Labour and the Conservatives in English council elections.”
The same disaffection with the elites in Britain is happening here in the US. People, particularly rural Americans, are tired of elites like O’Leary who are pushing projects that provide little benefit to local communities. In short, people are tired of being told what is good for them.
2. People can’t fight Big Tech online, so they are fighting it at the zoning board.
Privacy is dead. Amazon is killing the retail sector. Google has a near-monopoly on online searching and advertising. Facebook’s algorithms are designed to keep you glued to your devices. Microsoft’s software is ubiquitous and essential, but the company doesn’t provide customer support to home users. There is no 800 number to call; only chatbots to answer questions or explain in robot-speak, some version of “it sucks to be you.”
Although people can’t fight Big Tech online or take over the C-suites in Redmond, Seattle, or Mountain View, they can prevent the tech giants from putting their data centers in Coweta, Monroe, and Millville.
3. Data centers don’t produce many jobs.
Last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that while about 1,500 workers are building the first data center at OpenAI’s Stargate project in Abilene, once the building is finished, it will have only about 100 full-time employees. The paper explained that “That total is a fraction of the number of people who might work on the same one million square feet if it were an office park, factory, or warehouse. A 286,500-square-foot cheese-packaging plant that broke ground in Abilene in 2021 was projected to employ 500 people.” It went on to quote an industry official who admitted that data center projects have “rightly earned a dismal reputation of creating the lowest number of jobs per square foot in their facilities.”
Or consider the recent investigation by Colin Kinniburgh of New York Focus, who reported last month on a JPMorgan Chase data center in Orangeburg that received nearly $77 million in tax breaks to create “exactly one permanent job.” He noted that another data center in Genesee County, where the per-job subsidy was going to be “more than $11 million.”
4. People are concerned about AI destroying their jobs, and rightly so.
In January, Dario Amodei, the CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, said that due to AI, the US could see GDP growth of 5% to 10%, while unemployment could surge to 10%. Last week, Ken Griffin, the founder and CEO of Citadel, a hedge fund with $67 billion in assets under management, said “There has been a step-change function in the productivity of the AI toolkit,” and that “work that we would usually do with people with master’s and PhDs in finance over the course of weeks or months [is] being done by AI agents over the course of hours or days.” Those results, he said, left him “depressed.”
If Amodei and Griffin are expressing concern about future jobs, it should be no surprise that ordinary Americans are worried as well. Meanwhile, Facebook/Meta is laying off 8,000 employees — roughly 10% of its workforce — and replacing them with AI. As the New York Post explained yesterday, tech industry workers are concerned that “AI is steadily hollowing out white-collar jobs across Silicon Valley.”
5. People are concerned about water.
Of all the issues that opponents use to fight data centers, the water issue is the most sensitive and perhaps the most successful. Everyone, everywhere, cares about their water.
Last week, the city of Tucson, Arizona, revoked a construction water meter for a controversial data center called “Project Blue,” after discovering that its contractor had used 2 acre-feet of city water without authorization.
To be clear, data center operators are recognizing the water issue and are working to slash their consumption. Last month, Microsoft announced that it would expand its data center operations near Cheyenne, Wyoming. In the announcement, the company said it will “minimize its water use and replenish more water than what is used.” The company also said the new data center designs will, “in some cases,” eliminate the need for “ongoing access to water for cooling after an initial fill.”
I am still getting up to speed on the water-use issue at data centers. The consumption issue may be (or may not be) exaggerated. But in politics, perception is reality.
6. The public doesn’t trust Big Tech.
A Gallup poll from mid-2025 found that 30% of respondents had “very little” confidence in big technology companies and only 15% had “quite a lot” of confidence in Big Tech. In fact, of the 18 institutions included in the poll, which included small business, the military, police, higher education, banks, and other entities, only five institutions — newspapers, the criminal justice system, Big Business, TV news, and Congress — ranked below Big Tech when it came to public confidence. As Gallup noted, “Americans’ confidence in major US institutions remains near a record low.”
If the public doesn’t trust you, it’s hard to get your message across and get your data centers built.
7. The noise pollution problem is real.
In Texas, residents in Hood County have been fighting a data center used for cryptocurrency mining due to the noise pollution from the facility’s cooling system. Last year, one news outlet reported residents “compare it to a plane that never lands, or a lawnmower that never turns off. A county commissioner said it’s like ‘sleeping with a leaf blower under your pillow.’ No matter the comparison, there’s one common thread — it’s relentless.”
In March, NBC4 TV in Washington, DC, reported on a data center in Ashburn, Virginia, that, according to neighbors, “sounds like a helicopter is about to land.” A reporter from the station measured the noise from the data center, owned by CloudHQ, at 93 decibels. The station also said that neighbors from as far as five miles away had complained about the noise. To put that 93 decibels in perspective, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health recommends wearing protection for any noise averaging 85 dB or higher, regardless of exposure duration.
Last month, residents of Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, began lodging complaints about the noise from a Microsoft data center. One resident said, “It’s a nightmare. I’ve lived there five years. I want to leave. It’s no longer fun,” she said. “I’ve got headaches. We’ve got box fans running in order to cover the sound at night.”
This isn’t a new problem. In 2014, residents of Chandler, Arizona, began complaining about noise pollution from a data center, which, as one news report said, was “constant humming noise coming from the facility that never stopped, even at night.” Last December, the Chandler City Council rejected a permit for a proposed AI data center. According to Fox Business, “Cheers and applause erupted after the unanimous vote outcome was announced.”
I have a personal history with the noise pollution caused by large HVAC systems. And I can tell you that the sleeplessness and health problems caused by noise pollution are real. Big Tech better pay attention to this issue.
8. Fair or not, people believe data centers are raising their power bills.
Over the past few months, numerous reports and news articles have been published about electricity prices and data centers. In March, The Economist published an article titled, “Americans’ electricity bills are up. Don’t blame AI.” A recent report from the Institute for Energy Research reached the same conclusion, saying that although data centers are increasing electricity demand, this does “not explain why electricity prices have risen significantly in some parts of the country.” And a study released this week by E3, commissioned by the Data Center Coalition, found “no historical evidence of cost shifting from data centers to other utility customers.”
Those studies may be accurate. And they may not matter. Yes, that sounds crass. But, as with the water-use issue, many opponents of data centers are convinced that these mega projects will cost them money. And right or wrong, the perception that data centers are driving electricity rates higher will persist.
Big Tech can produce piles of studies showing that data centers don’t result in higher rates, but one of the oldest axioms in politics is: If you are explaining, you’re losing. Right now, Big Tech is doing a lot of explaining.
9. People don’t like big, and they don’t like successful.
A few months ago, I heard the CEO of a large energy company talk about public perceptions. “People don’t like big, and they don’t like successful,” he said. No other industry in today’s world can touch the size and success of the Giant Five tech companies: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. How big are they? As seen above, those five tech companies have a combined market cap of $16.5 trillion. The numbers are so big that they are hard to grasp. The tech industry now accounts for about a third of the entire value of the S&P 500. Or, put another way, at $16.5 trillion, the market cap of the Giant Five tech companies is three times Germany’s GDP ($5.5 trillion). For reference, the US GDP is $32 trillion.
AI will likely make Big Tech even bigger and more dominant. OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX (which owns xAI) are all planning IPOs that could give each a market cap of $1 trillion or more. Thus, it’s a very real possibility that a handful of super-giant companies will dominate AI, and in doing so, they will further concentrate staggering amounts of wealth in fewer and fewer hands. The SpaceX IPO could make Elon Musk a trillionaire. Not even John D. Rockefeller had that kind of wealth.
10. Don’t call them NIMBYs.
I loathe the term NIMBY. It’s a slur. Everyone, everywhere, cares about their neighborhoods and communities. I’ve been reporting on land-use conflicts for 16 years. Over that time, I’ve interviewed hundreds of people who are fighting solar projects and wind projects. The land-use conflicts and community opposition to data centers are very similar to what I’ve documented in the Renewable Rejection Database, which now has 1,202 rejections. What I’ve seen over and over again is that people will band together when they perceive a threat to their way of life, their neighborhoods, their property values, and their viewsheds. They will put aside political differences and class differences to fight what they see as a common threat. In that regard, the opposition that I’ve seen to Big Wind and Big Solar is exactly like the surging opposition to Big Tech and data centers.
In short, people all across the US and around the world are fighting data centers because these projects are not providing sufficient value to their communities. The challenge facing Big Tech is to show people why these projects are good for them and their communities.
Given the reasons I’ve listed here, that won’t be easy.
Note: I could list several more reasons for the data center backlash. But for now, 10 is enough. If you have others, please put them in the comments. If you know of a rejection that isn’t in the Data Center Rejection Database, please email me with the particulars. Or, if you have reasons why communities should embrace data centers, please put them in the comments as well. Thanks.
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One of the biggest problems in the public discussion around AI data centers is that most people have no meaningful frame of reference for computing efficiency or electricity metrics. The debate is being driven largely by emotion instead of systems-level analysis.
The common argument is that data centers consume large amounts of electricity and resources while creating relatively few permanent jobs. That sounds compelling until you compare centralized computing efficiency against the highly inefficient distributed computing model society already accepts without question.
Consider this: if only 50% of Americans own notebook computers and use them about 6 hours per day, the aggregate electrical demand from those notebooks alone is enormous. Assuming an average 50-watt load, that equates to roughly 8.5 GW of active power demand and over 18 TWh annually. (about 0.4% of the US Grid - a conservative value.) That is before including desktops, gaming systems, home networking equipment, televisions, streaming infrastructure, smartphones, and enterprise IT systems.
Yet nobody protests the use of residential laptops because people can directly perceive the productivity benefit.
Modern hyperscale data centers deliver vastly more computation per kilowatt-hour than individual consumer devices. They optimize cooling, processor utilization, power distribution, and workload balancing at scales that are impossible in distributed personal computing. In many cases, centralized AI computing is actually the more energy-efficient model.
The other misunderstanding is measuring value strictly by the number of employees physically working inside the facility. Data centers are infrastructure, not labor warehouses. Railroads, ports, electric grids, pipelines, and telecommunications networks also employ relatively few people directly compared to the economic activity they enable.
AI infrastructure enables: engineering simulation, medical research, logistics optimization, industrial process control, reservoir modeling, software development, advanced manufacturing, predictive maintenance, and more.
The proper metric is not “jobs inside the market.” The real metric is economic productivity generated per unit of energy consumed.
There is also a major distinction being ignored between grid-dependent facilities and new-generation campuses deploying their own power generation systems, including gas turbines, cogeneration, SMRs in the future, and behind-the-meter power production. These facilities increasingly resemble privately financed industrial energy systems coupled with computation.
The irony is that many critics opposing AI data centers are simultaneously using energy-intensive personal devices connected to cloud infrastructure every hour of every day. Society already depends completely on large-scale computation. The real question is whether the infrastructure is efficient, domestic, productive, and technologically competitive.
I feel a lot of the public opposition is being driven by incomplete understanding of energy use, computing efficiency, and how modern infrastructure actually creates economic value. When the discussion is based on isolated headlines instead of system-level metrics, the result is fear of the technology rather than informed analysis of its real costs, benefits, and long-term productivity gains. Need to sign them up for some Robert Bryce training.
Driving around southern Spain this week, the wind farms are a visual blight everywhere, solar not much better