They Built It Anyway
How And Why Data Centers Are Being Built Against Opposition and What We Can Do
I want to start with a woman in Wyoming.
She posted a picture of the prairie. The kind of landscape that makes you feel like something ancient is looking back at you. Green and blue and endless sky going all the way to the mountains. And her question was simple: a data center is coming for my backyard. Should I sell my house? Should we leave? Can anyone stop this from happening?
I grew up outside of Casper. I know that green. I know that blue. I know the feeling she is describing, that specific kind of safety that only comes from standing in wide open land and feeling small in the best possible way. The idea of a diesel generator and a cooling tower interrupting that prairie made me viscerally sick.
But as I read through the responses to her post, I noticed something. She was not alone. Not even close. This is happening in community after community across the United States, and in nearly every single case, the story ends the same way.
They built it anyway.
How Big Is This Problem
The United States already has more data centers than any other country on earth. More than 5,400 active facilities. That is almost as many as the next 19 countries combined. And we are building more, faster than at any point in human history.
Right now, data centers consume 4.4% of all US electricity. The Department of Energy projects that number hits 12% by 2028. To put that in context: the entire United States only uses about 4% of the world’s total electricity. They are building a second grid on top of the grid we already have.
Amazon, Google, Meta, Oracle, and Microsoft are projecting between $660 and $690 billion in capital expenditures in 2026. Meta alone is targeting $135 billion. Goldman Sachs projects more than $500 billion will be spent on data centers, power plants, and grid hardware just this year. Utilities received interconnection requests from data centers last year totaling 700 gigawatts. The entire United States used 477 gigawatts in all of 2023.
They are asking for more power than this country currently uses. All of it.
And here is the piece that matters for your town specifically. Pew Research found that 67% of planned data centers are being sited in rural areas, even though 87% of existing centers are in or around major cities. The industry has moved to the countryside. To smaller communities. To places with less political power, smaller planning departments, and elected officials who have been told this is the best economic opportunity their community will ever see.
This is not an accident. This is the strategy.
Community After Community, The Same Story
Let me take you through a few of these fights, because together they tell you something the industry absolutely does not want you to understand.
Maine.
This spring, the Maine legislature did something no other state was willing to do. Both chambers, controlled by Democrats, passed LD 307, which would have placed an 18 month moratorium on permits for any data center drawing more than 20 megawatts of power. Not a ban. Just a pause. Just enough time to study what they were saying yes to. It passed overwhelmingly in both chambers. Lawmakers from communities across the state had heard their constituents and they voted to protect them.
And then Governor Janet Mills vetoed it.
She said she supported a moratorium in principle, but she objected because the bill did not carve out one specific $550 million project, a development at a former paper mill that a developer claimed would create 800 construction jobs and at least 100 permanent jobs. Representative Melanie Sachs, who sponsored the bill, said she personally asked both the developer and the governor’s office to provide documentation of those job numbers.
Neither provided it.
Her words: the governor traded a bill that would protect 1.4 million residents for a project that, without proof, would create 100 jobs. The veto override failed by a handful of votes on April 29th.
And then a remarkable thing happened. Janet Mills, who had been running for United States Senate, dropped out of the race under enormous backlash from her own voters. The candidate surging against her in the Democratic primary is an oyster farmer named Graham Planner who had been loudly urging her to sign the bill.
Democracy is working in Maine. It is just working at the wrong speed.
Utah.
On April 24th, a Utah state authority called the Military Installation Development Authority, chaired by Republican Senate President Stuart Adams, approved a development grant for the Stratos Project Area in Box Elder County. This is a 40,000 acre intelligence campus backed by Kevin O’Leary. Yes. Kevin O’Leary from Shark Tank.
Phase one is three gigawatts of power generation. Full buildout is nine gigawatts. The entire state of Utah uses about four gigawatts. A University of Utah atmospheric science professor told local media this project would increase the state’s carbon dioxide emissions by 50%. Not 50% of the campus footprint. Fifty percent of the entire state.
The state cut the standard energy use tax from 6% to half of one percent and agreed to an 80% rebate of property taxes back to the developer. The Box Elder Commission held a public meeting on May 5th. The room was packed. Residents were outraged. The commission voted to approve it anyway. Then they walked out of the meeting and finished it virtually, projecting proceedings back to a half empty room they had just abandoned.
When residents protested on social media, Kevin O’Leary went on camera and claimed that over 90% of the opponents were being bused in from out of state and that the backlash was AI generated. He had no evidence of this. Local residents who showed up in person described it as a lie.
Boulder City, Nevada.
Boulder City is the town that built the Hoover Dam. It has a city charter specifically designed to prevent overdevelopment. No Data Center yard signs are going up all across town because a Houston based company is proposing an 88 acre data center just a few miles outside of the city.
The state of Nevada awarded that project more than $24 million in tax abatements before most residents even knew the project existed. The city council voted to advance it over exceptional community opposition, citing a $1.46 million annual lease payment to the city, which is more than double what a solar project on the same land would pay. A local resident told the Las Vegas Review Journal: I have never seen them move this fast on anything.
There is a November ballot measure that will give Boulder City residents a vote on whether data centers are an acceptable use of the El Dorado Valley transfer area. But that measure does not apply to this specific site. The vote is coming. But it will not undo what the city already approved.
Wyoming.
On January 5th of this year, the Laramie County Board of Commissioners unanimously approved Project Jade, a Denver company’s AI campus just south of Cheyenne, alongside a 2.7 gigawatt natural gas power plant. The campus is designed to eventually scale to 10 gigawatts. Total projected investment is $50 billion, which would make it the largest single AI campus in the country.
A resident named Thomas White begged the commissioners to address undisclosed groundwater withdrawals. The commissioners approved it unanimously. The commission chairman compared it to Wyoming’s Cold War nuclear deterrence role.
Here is what nobody mentioned at that hearing. The Wyoming Outdoor Council has documented that by siting inside county industrial parks, developers bypass the state’s siting act entirely. That act, when it applies, requires 18 months of socioeconomic and environmental review. This is not an accidental loophole. They are going inside county industrial parks specifically to avoid 18 months of scrutiny.
Virginia.
Northern Virginia hosts 35% of the world’s data centers. Loudoun County alone has 25 million square feet of active data center space. Prince William County has 10 million square feet operational and 90 million more planned. For years, a coalition led by Alaina Schlossberg fought a 2,100 acre, 37 building data center rezoning adjacent to Manassas National Battlefield Park. They won at the state appeals court level on a procedural violation: the board had not given adequate public notice of the hearing.
You do not always win the big argument. Sometimes you win on a small technical argument. But you still win.
The county dropped its defense in April. One of the developers withdrew. The other, QTS, a Blackstone portfolio company, filed a last minute appeal to the Virginia Supreme Court. A Washington Post poll from March found that Virginia voters who were comfortable with new data centers in their community had collapsed from 69% in 2023 to 35% today. In three years, half of the public withdrew its support.
Georgia.
There is a Meta data center in Mansfield, Newton County. The facility is 2.5 million square feet. It was approved quietly and has been expanding for years. Within months of construction, residents noticed their wells had gone dry. Sediment clogged pipes, dishwashers, ice makers, washing machines, and toilets. One couple has spent $5,000 trying to fix their water. Replacing the well entirely will cost $25,000.
One local resident told a reporter: I am scared to drink our own water.
Newton County’s water authority director confirmed that the Meta facility uses 10% of the county’s daily water supply. The county is on track to reach a water deficit by 2030. A water rights advocate found that a single Georgia data center applicant had requested nine million gallons of water per day. That is enough for 30,000 households.
Why Your Government Keeps Saying Yes
So why? Why are governments at every level, in states both blue and red, approving these projects over the objection of the people they represent? There are three reasons: money, lobbying, and federal pressure.
Start with the money that is not being collected. Virginia’s data center tax exemption cost the state $1.6 billion in a single year, 2025. That is 118% more than the year before. Over the past decade the exemption has totaled $2.7 billion, which is 53% of all of Virginia’s economic incentive spending, 11 times larger than the next biggest incentive in the state. And in fiscal year 2025, the data center industry reported creating 1,610 new jobs. Do the math: that is $1.2 million per new permanent job.
Texas’s data center exemption is projected to cost $3.2 billion over the next two year budget cycle. Nevada granted $239 million in tax breaks in a single year. Good Jobs First reports 37 states are currently offering data center tax incentives and 10 of them are losing more than $100 million a year to these exemptions.
A typical hyperscale data center, the kind that costs half a billion dollars to build, typically employs about 40 to 50 full time people. The Brookings Institution found that naive industry job estimates overstate the actual effect by a factor of three. The jobs argument that is being used to override your vote is simply not true.
Then there is the lobbying. The Data Center Coalition, whose members include Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Oracle, spent a million dollars lobbying the federal government in 2025. Spending jumped from $123,000 in the first quarter to $360,000 in the third. Amazon, Google, and Meta collectively report tens of millions of dollars in federal lobbying just in 2025. OpenAI disclosed more than half a million dollars in lobbying just in the fourth quarter.
At the state level it is much worse. The Data Center Coalition PAC funneled more than $50,000 to the Virginia House Speakership Leaders Fund alone, plus smaller amounts to 34 state legislators. In Wisconsin, the Badger Herald documented data center companies pouring lobbying dollars at a scale never seen before from a single industry in that state. In Texas, the Tribune reported unprecedented industry money into the 2026 Republican primaries, specifically targeting legislators who had tried to give counties regulatory authority.
And then there is the White House. On January 23rd of last year, Donald Trump signed an executive order revoking Biden’s AI safety guardrails and framing AI dominance as a national security imperative. On December 11th, he signed a second order creating an AI litigation task force with the explicit mission of challenging state laws that get in the way of AI development. That order conditions federal broadband funding on states not enacting what it calls onerous AI regulations.
Local democracy is being squeezed from both ends. Industry money is pouring into local elections. The federal government is withholding funds if states try to regulate AI. Your city council member often genuinely cannot say no because the state law will not let them, or they are being told that saying no means their community may never see that kind of opportunity again in their lifetime.
As we have learned, that opportunity is a mirage. But for those state legislators and city council members, a mirage in the desert of a poor economy looks like water.
What It Costs You
Your electricity bill. The National Resources Defense Council estimates between $100 billion and $163 billion in cumulative cost shifts to ratepayers in the PJM grid region alone, just through 2033, and that assumes no regulatory intervention. PJM serves 65 million people from Illinois to the Carolinas. Utilities requested more than $29 billion in rate increases in just the first half of 2025. Outstanding household utility debt in the United States reached $25 billion in June of 2025, up from $15 billion in 2022. Utility shutoffs hit 3.5 million households in 2024.
Your water. A single data center can use roughly 300,000 gallons of water per day for cooling. That is as much as a thousand households. Elon Musk’s xAI Colossus facility in Memphis is currently drawing 1.3 million gallons per day from the Memphis Sand Aquifer and is projected to hit five million gallons per day at full operation. In Bessemer, a proposed hyperscale facility is requesting two million gallons of water per day, which is one third of the local utility’s entire water supply. Phoenix area homebuilders have paused new construction because of water scarcity exacerbated by data centers in a drought stressed region.
Your air. Musk’s xAI Colossus facility in Memphis is running 35 natural gas turbines that were installed without proper permits. The Southern Environmental Law Center says those turbines have the potential to emit 2,000 tons of smog forming nitrogen per year. This is in a neighborhood that sits adjacent to an aquifer overlaid by coal ash ponds already containing arsenic. The people living in Boxtown and Westwood and Mallory Heights in Memphis are already carrying a disproportionate environmental burden. They did not get to vote on whether they would take on more.
Your home value. In Loudoun County, Virginia, Amazon data centers stand 50 feet from residential neighborhoods. Families describe the constant low frequency hum of cooling systems, floodlights that turn the night sky white from miles away, and backup diesel generators that kick on without warning. And of course those residents receive no compensation for their destroyed property values and no subsidy for the damage to their environment.
Who Is Actually Making Money
It is not your town. And it is definitely not you.
Blackstone, the largest private equity firm in the world, has a global data center portfolio valued at $50 billion. They own QTS, the company currently appealing the Prince William County decision at the Virginia Supreme Court. They financed Meta’s $27 billion private debt deal for a Louisiana data center. They acquired a 774 megawatt natural gas plant in Virginia specifically to power their data center investments. Blackstone has called itself the preeminent AI landlord in the world, and they mean that as a compliment.
KKR in 2025 launched a data center division, hired the former CEO of Amazon Web Services to run it, and entered a $50 billion partnership for data centers and power generation. Brookfield, the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan, the Canada Pension Plan. These are real pension funds, managing money for teachers and civil servants, and they own Compass Data Centers. Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds are here too.
The money behind these facilities is some of the largest concentration of wealth in human history. Your community absorbs all of the downside. Billionaires, hedge fund managers, sovereign wealth funds, and foreign investment firms collect all of the benefits.
What Is Actually Working
More than the industry wants you to know.
Analyst Mikkel Viejo runs a project called Data Center Watch and has documented 48 data center projects totaling more than $156 billion in value that were blocked or delayed in 2025 alone. Heatmap News found 25 projects were fully canceled last year because of community opposition. That is up from six in 2024 and two in 2023. Twenty one of those 25 cancellations happened in the second half of the year, which means organizing is accelerating.
In Monterey Park, California, the city council passed three separate ordinances banning data center construction and declaring them a public nuisance after months of organizing by a group called No Data Center Monterey Park. In San Marcos, Texas, the city council voted five to two against an AI data center after hours of public testimony. In St. Charles, Missouri, the city implemented a one year moratorium. In Arizona, two projects worth $14 billion were withdrawn after community pushback over height, noise, and resources.
Local zoning is still the choke point. Most of these decisions still have to pass through local and municipal land use authorities. That is where the industry is now spending the most money, because they know it is effective. That also means it is where your organizing is most effective.
Procedural and public notice lawsuits are winning. The Prince William case was not about whether data centers would be built. It was about whether the board followed its own notice requirements. Those wins are replicable.
Coalition building across unexpected alliances is changing politics. Environmental groups. Agricultural groups. Battlefield preservation organizations. School funding advocates. Neighborhood associations. Energy ratepayer groups. This is not a left or right issue. This is an issue about human life, your home, and whether you have a voice in your community.
Wisconsin polling found 93% of residents believe data centers should pay 100% of their own energy costs. 70% believe the costs outweigh the benefits. Virginia went from 69% to 35% support in three years. These numbers are moving in only one direction and they are moving fast.
What This Is Actually About
They want you to believe this is about technology. They want you to believe it is about jobs or national security. This is not about AI. This is not about data centers specifically.
This is a story about who gets to decide. Whether you get to have a meaningful say in what goes in your backyard. Whether the costs actually benefit you. Whether tax abatements that fund these projects take money from your schools and hand it to a sovereign wealth fund. Whether democracy actually means anything in a zip code that cannot afford its own lobbying.
In Maine, in Utah, in Boulder City, in Mansfield, Georgia, in Loudoun, in Prince William, in Memphis, in Missouri, in Wyoming. These communities are being impacted right now. And if your community is not on that list yet, I have one simple thing to tell you.
It is coming for you.
Communities are packing meetings. They are painting yard signs. They are filing lawsuits and running for office. An oyster farmer with essentially no campaign funds is the leading contender for a United States Senate seat because he told the truth. That is how fast this can move when people decide they have had enough.
I started this story because of a woman in Wyoming asking a simple question about her beautiful prairie. I will be covering this story again and again because the answer to her question is not settled yet. It will be answered one community at a time, one data center at a time, one power bill at a time.
The only question is what you are going to do about it.
Stay lit.