In the first three months of 2026 alone, American towns stopped the construction of $130 billion of artificial intelligence infrastructure, blocking or delaying 75 data center projects, according to Data Center Watch.
Inside, the city council had just voted unanimously to kill a 27,000-square-foot data center proposal less than two weeks after the project became public, amending the redevelopment plan for 100 Jersey Avenue to strip data centers out as a permitted use and restore the public park originally slated for the site. The meeting had run over capacity before it even started, more than 300 people packed into a room built for 80.
Outside, the crowd was chanting, “The people—united—will never be defeated!”
"This is what it looks like when people stand up," Dziobek shouted to the crowd, his voice cracking. “And we say a big f--- you to Big Tech,” he added. “It’s time to build communities, not data centers!”
The proposed data center in New Brunswick was, on paper, a small project by industry standards, a fraction the size of the hyperscale data centers reshaping rural Virginia or Georgia. It fell anyway, in under two weeks, on a unanimous vote.
This pattern is now playing out nationally and at scale. In the first three months of 2026 alone, American towns stopped the construction of $130 billion of artificial intelligence infrastructure, blocking or delaying 75 data center projects, according to Data Center Watch. The group, which tracks this fight, calls it the largest concentration of blocked and delayed projects on record.
The numbers behind the numbers make this a story about more than zoning. Active opposition groups more than doubled between the end of 2025 and March 2026, from 396 to 833, spread across 49 states. More than 300 cities, towns, and counties have imposed bans or moratoriums on data center construction. In July, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed Executive Order 62, pausing state permits for any data center drawing 50 megawatts or more, the first statewide moratorium of its kind.
Energy-sector commentators have accused national environmental funders of underwriting what look like spontaneous local groups, and a developer backing a Utah data center project has publicly claimed opponents were bused in.
What makes this movement politically dangerous for the industry, is who stands on its side. The bipartisan Ratepayer Protection Act passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee 52 to 0 in July, requiring regulators to make large data center customers cover their own grid upgrades rather than spreading the cost across electric bills. Its sponsors are a Colorado Republican and a Florida Democrat. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced a federal moratorium bill the same season a Florida Republican running for governor introduced a competing ratepayer bill. According to global energy research firm BloombergNEF, data centers are projected to consume roughly 20 percent of American electricity by 2035, up from just under 6 percent today.
Before taking any of this at face value, it is worth asking the question the industry itself is now asking loudly: is this a genuine popular revolt, or old-fashioned NIMBYism wearing a new label? Energy-sector commentators have accused national environmental funders of underwriting what look like spontaneous local groups, and a developer backing a Utah data center project has publicly claimed opponents were bused in.
Data Center Watch's own methodology tracks formal organizations coordinating messaging across state lines, the kind of professionalized advocacy critics say undercuts the grassroots story. Blogger and journalist Matthew Yglesias has argued that data center opposition looks statistically identical to what solar farms and apartment buildings already get: this is simply what large construction runs into in America, AI or not.
A recent Gallup poll revealed that the dominant concern among opponents of AI data centers is the use of natural resources, meaning water and power draw, not abstract anxiety about AI. The loudest recent flashpoints were not manufactured by anyone. In Coweta County, Georgia, opposition to a Prologis data center exploded after Georgia Power moved to condemn roughly 300 properties through eminent domain for the transmission line the project required. Professionalized advocacy and authentic grassroots grievances are not mutually exclusive; national funders have organized against pipelines and coal plants for two decades without anyone concluding the underlying anger over polluted water wasn’t real.
According to Gallup, 71 percent of Americans oppose the existence of a data center in their own neighborhood, even as the country remains divided on whether AI itself is ultimately good or bad for the world. Whether every group organizing that opposition is spontaneous or seeded matters less than what the sentiment reveals: the zoning hearing has become the place where an argument about the future of artificial intelligence gets translated into a language every city council already speaks.
None of this resolves the deeper argument, however, and it was never going to. Whether a massive AI infrastructure buildout strengthens the country or hollows out its grid and its institutional trust remains open, and reasonable people who read the same reports arrive at opposite conclusions.
What has changed is where that argument now gets settled first: not in a Senate hearing room or an OpenAI blog post, but in front of a city council, by people who never thought of themselves as part of any movement, funded or otherwise. Whatever the global AI revolution turns out to be is now being fought locally, one zoning ordinance at a time, in rooms with folding chairs and fluorescent lights, by community members who demand a say in what kind of future gets built next door.