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, the body that regulates the state’s electric utility. It’s the first time Democrats have taken statewide seats 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.
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.