Earlier this year, Natelli Investments, a large-scale development firm, withdrew its annexation and rezoning applications for a proposed data center in Wake County, NC. The campus was projected to be about 190 acres, with six buildings all about 70-feet tall. The developer cited zoning ordinance changes that pushed back the construction of the proposed 250-megawatt facility, but the scrapped plans also followed community protests, petitions, and participation in public meetings over concerns about the data center’s water use, air quality impacts, and increased costs.
“When they make infrastructure improvements, who does that cost go to? It doesn’t go to the developer,” resident Lorraine McAvoy told local media last year. “It goes to the people, the consumers of the utility.”
Stories about cancelled or postponed data center projects are only becoming more commonplace, and new research shows just how pervasive the opposite to AI infrastructure expansion has become.
A report published this month from research firm Data Center Watch found the scale of data center opposition in the first three months of 2026 matches the scale of opposition in all of 2025. At least 75 data center projects worth more than $130 billion have been delayed or cancelled in the first three months of the year. Active opposition groups ballooned from 396 by the end of last year to 833 by the end of March 2026, spanning across 49 states.
About a dozen states have introduced data center construction moratoriums, including New York, which recently passed legislation putting a one-year pause on large data center permits. Others, however, in Maine and Oklahoma, have failed.
“Opposition to data centers—it’s now part of a mainstream conversation,” Miquel Vila, lead researcher at Data Center Watch, told Fortune. “It’s not anymore only the communities, not only anymore the neighbors that are being affected by a specific project. Now, this is part of the general narrative, general discourse, of American politics.”
Plummeting popularity of data centers
Data center popularity has plunged in recent months, with seven in 10 Americans now opposing data centers built around the homes, a Heatmap Pro poll this month found. The growing dissent comes amid studies showing a 6% to 29% increase in wholesale electricity costs by the end of the decade as a result of data center expansion, as well as projections that the environmental and public health costs of AI infrastructure growth could cost the economy $25 billion annually.
What struck Vila as most surprising about the rise in data center opposition was not just its magnitude, but the ballooning sizes of advocacy groups. Data Center Watch found an increase in both grassroots organizations opposing local projects and also in state and national advocacy. Large players like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and the NAACP, for example, have backed a 500-group coalition opposing unfettered data center construction.
AI advocates such as Kevin O’Leary, who is backing a $100 billion data center project in Utah, have claimed national organizations opposing these projects are receiving funding from Chinese entities, part of a larger push to create a narrative that data centers are unpopular. Experts, however, said data center opposition is organic, and there is little evidence to support claims of China’s interference.
The rise of national opposition groups has also coincided with data center projects expanding beyond markets like Northern Virginia and Northern California to rural communities. Vila noted residents in these areas—unlike communities with heavy hyperscaler presences—have little experience with large-scale data center development, making hearings and community meetings heated and harder for local politicians and developers to manage.
“In some cases,” the report said, “opposition mobilized before any project was officially filed, the mere rumor of a data center was enough to trigger organized resistance.”
Opposition across party lines
Greater data center development in rural America has also changed the demographics opposing the projects. While Heatmap Pro found AI infrastructure growth was most unpopular among Democrats and young people, it saw a decrease in popularity among all Americans. In states like South Carolina, South Dakota, and Michigan, proposed data centers are a bipartisan or a Republican issue.
In South Carolina, for example, which has a Republican trifecta in power, has a Republican-led bill to restrict tax incentives and subsidies for data centers is currently in the Ways and Means Committee. The environmental impacts of data center buildouts attract Democratic opposition, Vila said, but Republicans have argued against their expansion over perception of lack of transparency, impact on property values and utility rates, as well as simply the changing identity of an area should a data center be erected.
“If you scale the situation to a more ideological level, you have arguments on both the right and the left against AI, against data centers,” Vila said.
There are reasons beyond public dissent that have hindered the expansion of AI infrastructure, according to the report. Data center projects must also deal with regulatory compliance, as well as the availability of utility and an aging electrical grid. JPMorgan Chase projects $5.8 trillion in global grid update investments over the next decade, with more than $1 trillion in investments in the U.S., where infrastructure has remained largely neglected since World War II.
These hindrances are not expected to halt all data center construction, but Vila suggested that as the process to pass proposals and break ground on these projects matures, so, too, will efforts to oppose it. Those efforts may look less like protests at town halls and more like hiring lawyers to go toe-to-toe with developers.
“We might see more of these fights escalate to a more legal front,” he said.
