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If there’s one thing Republicans and Democrats came together on in 2025 — at least at the local level — it was to stop big, energy-hungry data center projects.
For communities sick of rising electricity bills and pollution from power plants, data centers have become an obvious target. Fights against new data centers surged this year as grassroots groups, voters, and local lawmakers demanded more accountability from developers. Already, they’ve managed to block or stall tens of billions of dollars’ worth of potential investment in proposed data centers. And they’re not letting up.
“We expect that opposition is going to keep growing,” says Miquel Vila, an analyst at the research firm Data Center Watch who’s been tracking campaigns against data centers across the US since 2023.
“We expect that opposition is going to keep growing.”
The group’s latest report found that developers either canceled or delayed 20 projects after facing pushback from locals, representing $98 billion in proposed investments in the second quarter of this year. In fact, from late March through June, $24.2 billion in projects were blocked and $73.7 billion delayed. That’s an increase compared to 16 blocked or postponed projects from 2023 through the first quarter of this year, the group notes.
The number of proposed data center projects has grown, which is a big reason why opposition is also picking up steam. Inventory in the four biggest data center markets in North America — Northern Virginia, Chicago, Atlanta, and Phoenix — grew by 43 percent year-over-year in the first quarter of this year, according to commercial real estate company CBRE. But plans for massive new facilities have also sparked battles across the nation.
Data centers eat up a lot of electricity, particularly for more powerful chips used for new AI models. Power demand for data centers is expected to grow by 22 percent by the end of the year compared to last year. A high-density rack of servers in an AI data center might use as much as 80 to 100 homes’ worth of power, or upward of 100 kilowatts, according to Dan Thompson, a principal research analyst at S&P Global. AI also requires a lot of water to keep servers cool and generate electricity and could use as much annually as the indoor needs of 18.5 million US households by 2028 by one estimate.
Google dropped its plans for a new data center in Franklin Township, Indiana, in September after residents raised concerns about how much water and electricity the new data center would use. The Indianapolis City-County Council was reportedly expected to deny the project’s rezoning application. That victory for residents in Indiana isn’t captured in the Data Center Watch report, which is only updated with information through June.
Demonstrators gather in opposition to a plan by Elon Musk’s xAI to use gas turbines for a new data center.
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