Communities are rising up against data centers — and winning

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.

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.

Other data center projects that are moving forward or already operating still face resistance. Elon Musk’s xAI, for example, faces a potential lawsuit from the NAACP and Southern Environmental Law Center over pollution from its data center in Memphis. Peak nitrogen dioxide concentration levels have jumped by 79 percent in the area surrounding the data center since it started operating in 2024, according to research from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville requested by Time magazine.

xAI, which is building a second, larger data center in Memphis, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from The Verge, but says “We’re moving toward a future where we will harness our cluster’s full power to solve intractable problems,” on its website.

“No community should be forced to sacrifice clean air, clean water, or safe homes so that corporations and billionaires can build energy-hungry facilities,” the NAACP said in guiding principles that it shared with The Verge in September for other grassroots groups working to hold data center developers accountable for their impact on nearby neighborhoods.

Meta is facing a backlash against its largest data center yet planned for Richland Parish, Louisiana. Local utility Entergy broke ground this month on two of three gas plants it’s building to meet that facility’s electricity demands, expected to reach triple the amount of power New Orleans uses in a year. “Entergy LA customers are now set to subsidize Meta’s data center costs,” the Union of Concerned Scientists says in a November blog post, including an estimated $3.2 billion for the three gas-fired plants and a new $550 million transmission line. Entergy, on the other hand, contends that “Meta’s electric payments to Entergy will lower what customers pay for resilience upgrades by approximately 10%,” according to communications manager Brandon Scardigli.

“Our agreement with Entergy was structured to ensure that other customers are not paying for our data center energy use,” Meta spokesperson Ashley Settle says in an email to The Verge. Settle adds that Meta is contributing $15 million to Entergy’s ratepayer support program and more than $200 million for local infrastructure improvements.

“Now, we have a bogey man — data centers who are these large energy users who are coming in, and in many states, getting sweetheart deals on wholesale electricity prices, when regular consumers don’t have that type of sway,” Tony Reames, a professor of environmental justice at the University of Michigan and former Department of Energy official under President Biden, said to The Verge after the election.

States, both red and blue, are starting to set some limits on those sweetheart deals. After South Dakota lawmakers rejected a bill that would have offered developers sales tax refunds, Applied Digital paused plans for a $16 billion AI campus in the state. Virginia, Maryland, and Minnesota, meanwhile, have introduced legislation attempting to rein in tax incentives for data centers or energy costs for other consumers, the Data Center Watch report says.

Nationally, more than 230 health and environmental groups have called for a moratorium on data center construction. The organizations, led by the nonprofit Food & Water Watch, sent a letter to Congress with their demands in December. They argue that there aren’t enough policies in place to prevent data centers from burdening nearby communities with higher bills and more pollution. President Donald Trump released an “AI Action Plan” in July that aims to speed data center development in part by rolling back environmental regulations.

With midterm elections next year, we’re likely to see more data center fights playing into local politics, Vila expects. “It’s going to be very interesting to track how this opposition impacts the regulatory framework,” he says.