A new study shows local pushback against data centers surged in the second quarter of 2025, with community resistance stopping or delaying a growing number of projects around the country.
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 had long been voicing frustration over repeated rate increases from the PSC. During his campaign, Hubbard kept hearing about another issue that kept coming up with voters. “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 major hub for data center construction in recent years. Industry analysts point to favorable tax treatment in parts of the state and to growing demand for cloud and AI infrastructure as drivers of rapid growth. At the same time, neighborhood groups and local officials have organized against many of those developments, and a new report suggests opposition is rising nationwide, with states across the political map—including Georgia and Indiana—taking center stage in that push.
The analysis was released by Data Center Watch, a monitoring project run by AI security firm 10a Labs that catalogs community resistance to data center proposals. 10a Labs has been tracking the issue since 2023 and published its first public findings earlier this year. The report’s author, Miquel Vila, says the Data Center Watch effort is separate from the company’s main risk-analytics work and is not funded by outside clients.
The new report describes the second quarter of 2025 as “a sharp escalation” in local opposition to data centers, with a notable uptick in organized campaigns, legal challenges, petitions, and local government actions that have stalled projects.
Data Center Watch’s initial public report covered the period from May 2024 to March 2025 and found that community efforts had blocked or delayed about $64 billion in data center projects; six projects were halted outright and ten were postponed. The latest update covers March through June 2025 and shows a much faster pace of resistance. In that three-month span, the project says opposition blocked or delayed approximately $98 billion in planned development. Eight projects were blocked, including developments in Indiana and Kentucky, and nine more faced delays. One high-profile proposal, a $17 billion campus planned for Atlanta’s suburbs, was paused in May after county officials put a 180-day moratorium on data center construction following sustained resident pushback.
There are some “methodological caveats” to the new Data Center Watch report, Vila acknowledges. The team relies on public records: local news coverage, court filings, meeting minutes, and social posts. The timeframe the report covers overlapped with an extraordinary surge in data center building across the United States. ConstructConnect, an industry tracking site, estimated that U.S. spending on data center construction by August had already topped all of 2024. More active construction can naturally produce more disputes, and increased media attention may amplify local fights. At the same time, Data Center Watch recorded nearly 50,000 signatures on petitions aimed at opposing particular facilities between March and June, a volume of organizing that Vila says marks “a turning point” in the debate.
“Before, [resistance] was something that could happen,” he says. “Now it seems that it’s very likely that when you are developing [a data center], potentially someone is going to organize.”
The political effects of the backlash have been apparent in recent campaigns. Hubbard is not the only officeholder who saw data center opposition influence voters. In Virginia, the state with one of the largest concentrations of data centers, governor-elect Abigail Spanberger signaled a desire to make data centers “pay their own way” for electrical infrastructure. Last week, climate news outlet Heatmap ran a profile of John McAuliff, a former Biden climate adviser who won his seat in a campaign that leaned heavily on opposition to local data center proposals. Polling from Heatmap released alongside that coverage found that fewer than half of Americans across party lines would back a data center in their area.
Josh Thomas, a Virginia state delegate representing Loudoun County—an area county officials tout as having one of the highest concentrations of data centers in the world—made curbing data center growth a major piece of his agenda. He sponsored bills during the recent legislative session aimed at tightening oversight of new facilities, and those issues played a prominent role in his reelection fight. His Republican opponent accused him of not moving quickly enough to stop data center sprawl.
Thomas, who secured another term last week, pointed to the local resistance that rose up against the proposed Prince William Digital Gateway, a plan to build more than 30 data centers on the edge of a national reserve in northern Virginia. A group of homeowners sued to challenge the approvals, and in August a judge voided the project’s zoning, briefly halting construction.
“The little guy finally won, which rarely happens in any industry, let alone where the Magnificent Ten play,” he says, referring to the US’s biggest tech companies. “I think that rallied people politically in Virginia.”
Cost concerns were front and center for many voters. Thomas said his constituents worry about how large data centers will affect electricity rates. “People are just a lot more cost-conscious,” he said. Energy bills, Thomas says “are something that was kept relatively static for a number of years.” In Virginia, the added electrical load from data centers has been one factor in rising utility costs, lawmakers and regulators have said.
The opposition has cut across party lines. Although some local leaders and activists have framed the fights around environmental or land-use issues, national figures on the right have also raised alarm. Sen. Josh Hawley, Rep. Thomas Massie, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene have publicly criticized data center expansion. Greene used her X account on November 7 to urge citizens to act, writing: “People you have got to pay close attention to your local city, county, and state approvals of data centers and demand your water and energy bills be protected!!!”
Tech companies themselves have tended to be quiet in public debates over contested sites. A handful of firms, Meta among them, maintain pages with information on their campus plans and community investments. Other builders often rely on nondisclosure agreements during site development, giving neighbors little clarity about which firms will operate a facility or how it will be run.
Industry representatives pushed back on the portrayal of a uniformly hostile public. Dan Diorio, the vice president of state policy for the Data Center Coalition, said the sector continues to see “significant interest” from communities that want to host projects, and that members are focused on “continued community engagement and stakeholder education,” as well as “being responsible and responsive neighbors in the communities where they operate.”
“The US data center industry provides significant benefits to local communities—creating hundreds of thousands of high-wage jobs across the nation, providing billions of dollars in economic investment, and generating significant local, state, and federal tax revenue that helps fund schools, transportation, public safety, and other community priorities,” Diorio said. “All told, US data centers supported 4.7 million jobs and contributed $162 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2023.”
Those numbers are part of the reason the building boom has continued even as resistance grows. The latest tally of delayed and blocked developments cited in public-facing tracking amounts to roughly $93 billion, a large figure for communities that see projects halted or paused. Market observers point out that this total represents a fraction of the capital flowing into AI and cloud infrastructure. Meta, for example, announced plans last week to invest $600 billion in AI infrastructure, including data centers, over the next three years.
Local victories can prove temporary. The court ruling that voided approvals for the Prince William Digital Gateway was stayed in October, allowing construction activity to resume while litigation proceeds toward a trial next year. That kind of stop-and-start pattern is common in land-use battles, where delay can become a negotiating tool but rarely guarantees a permanent halt.
Thomas says he plans to press the issue in Richmond during the coming legislative session. He intends to reintroduce a reform bill that his allies in the state legislature passed in May, only to see it vetoed by Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
“I have Republicans and Democrats coming to me saying, ‘How can we help with this issue? My constituents are talking about it like they never have before,’” he says. “Our coalition of data center reform-minded legislators has just grown to a very large number.”