Posted on 08/14/2026 5:21:23 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
There’s an old saw in politics that says, “If you are explaining, you’re losing.” Over the past few months, Big Tech and its allies in the legacy media have been doing a lot of explaining about data centers, including why they are needed and why more communities should welcome the projects. But Big Tech’s public relations challenge got a lot harder last month, when country music legend Willie Nelson declared people need to “fight against data centers invading our land.” Nelson, who owns a house and farm in his hometown of Abbott, Texas, also said, “The last thing we need is a loud, water-thieving, light-polluting data center anywhere near our town (or any others for that matter).”
Nelson, who’s still kicking at age 93, may be the most famous man in America, and his comments reflect an unprecedented backlash against Big Tech, AI and data centers that’s happening all across the US. A recent poll by Fox News found that “by a 40-point margin, voters opposed data centers in their area to support artificial intelligence.”
I’ve been a reporter for four decades. And over the past 16 years, I have been closely tracking the global backlash against Big Solar and Big Wind. I have documented that opposition in the Renewable Rejection Database, which now includes more than 1,300 entries from around the world. But I’ve never seen anything like the raging rebellion against data centers and AI.
The numbers are gobsmacking. In the first seven months of 2026, I have documented 274 bans, rejections, restrictions or moratoriums on data centers in the US, all listed in the Data Center Rejection Database. In June alone, I documented 74 rejections. For comparison, there were 49 such rejections in all of 2025 and just nine in 2024.
Indeed, the rejections are happening so fast it’s hard to keep track of them all. Here are a few examples: in May, the tiny town of Spring Hope, North Carolina, passed a one-year ban on new data centers. In June, the San Marcos, Texas, city council voted to ban all data centers permanently. In July, commissioners in Palm Beach County, Florida, nixed a large data center proposed to be built about 20 miles west of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago swankienda.
Also in July, New York became the first state to stop all data center construction when Governor Kathy Hochul issued an executive order placing a one-year permitting moratorium on the facilities. Why is this happening? And why is it happening now?
After reviewing hundreds of rejections and numerous polls, I believe the biggest issues are voters’ concerns about water and power, distrust (or outright hatred) of Big Tech, fear of what AI might mean for jobs and rage at Silicon Valley oligarchs and their enormous fortunes. As a friend of mine put it recently, regular folks can’t fight Google, Facebook and Amazon online, but they can fight them at the local zoning board. And that’s exactly what they are doing.
The opposition reflects a cultural backlash that cuts across party lines. In June, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from the Bronx, one of the most liberal members of Congress and a possible presidential contender in 2028, introduced a bill that will prohibit construction of new data centers until “Congress passes comprehensive legislation to address the economic, environmental and safety impacts of artificial intelligence.”
On July 18, a right-wing group called Humans First – it claims that “Big AI globalists seek to hijack our government to get Washington, DC to put Big AI before American people” – coordinated 142 protests in 42 states. Humans First is chaired by Amy Kremer, a stalwart Trump supporter who identifies herself as a “founder of the modern day Tea Party.” When you have AOC and Tea Party types lining up on the same side of an issue, you aren’t looking at a normal political fight. You are seeing a populist revolt.
Opposition to data centers is surging as US residents are seeing steep increases in their power bills and, fair or not, many people are blaming data centers for the price hikes. Big Tech has commissioned several studies to try to debunk those claims, including one by the Data Center Coalition that found “no historical evidence of cost shifting from data centers to other utility customers.” But a mid-July report by PJM, the largest grid operator in the US, did blame data centers for putting new demands on the system that could cost consumers some $6.3 billion. And on July 22, Moody’s Ratings said that PJM’s system lacks “adequate mechanisms to ensure that the cost of building new supply is borne by the new entrants and instead socializes new-build costs across all customers.”
Opponents are also rightly concerned about the noise pollution generated by data centers’ HVAC systems. In March, NBC4-TV in Washington, DC, reported on a data center in Ashburn, Virginia, that, according to neighbors, “sounds like a helicopter is about to land.” A reporter from the station measured the noise from CloudHQ’s data center at 93 decibels.
To put that number in perspective, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health recommends wearing protection for any noise averaging 85 decibels or higher, regardless of exposure duration. In April, residents of Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, began lodging complaints about the noise from a Microsoft data center. One resident said, “It’s a nightmare. I’ve lived there five years. I want to leave. It’s no longer fun. I’ve got headaches. We’ve got box fans running in order to cover the sound at night.”
Water usage issues may be the most emotional concern that opponents use to fight data centers. Big Tech companies are saying their newest centers will use minimal amounts of water, but that has done little to allay concerns. Google’s water consumption jumped 34 percent last year, to 10.9 billion gallons, nearly double what it used in 2022 and roughly equal to the water used by a city of 250,000 people. And some data center developers are aggressively pushing to grab as much water as they can.
In July, a developer who wants to build a large data center in central California filed a lawsuit to get access to water from a local irrigation district. The project is expected to use about 260 million gallons of water per year.
In short, people all across the US are fighting data centers because these projects are not providing sufficient value to their communities. Add in soaring electricity bills, noise pollution, significant water usage, worries about property values and viewsheds, as well as a splash of anger at Big Tech, nascent fears about AI and a few photos of Jeff Bezos canoodling with his surgically enhanced spouse aboard his $500 million, 417ft superyacht, and you get a near-perfect cocktail of hot-button issues that’s mobilizing activists from across the political spectrum.
How bad is the problem? Even Loudoun County, Virginia, which calls itself the data center capital of the world and handles up to 70 percent of the world’s internet traffic, is now considering a moratorium on new data centers, so it can establish regulations that will “better protect our communities and natural resources.”
Big Tech has realized it can’t afford to ignore the opposition. Earlier this year, seven tech companies and hyperscalers signed on to President Trump’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge, which says that their data center projects won’t impose higher costs on other electricity consumers. The pledge now includes 281 signatories, including Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft, as well as big data center operators like QTS and Digital Realty, and dozens of electric utilities. Microsoft has also recently pledged to become “water positive” by 2030, an effort that it says will be achieved by “decoupling data center growth from water use.”
Will surging opposition stop AI in the US? That’s doubtful. According to data from the consulting firm Aterio, 789 data centers with 62 gigawatts of capacity are now under construction and new projects are being approved almost every day.
But it’s also true that the anger at Big Tech is real and growing. American voters and populist politicians are ready and willing to vilify data centers, AI and Big Tech. That means the data center issue will loom large in the November midterms and the 2028 presidential race. As one Texas lobbyist told me recently, the anger is easy to understand. The titans of Big Tech, he said, are “easy people to hate.”
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fueled by chyna propaganda ...
NIMBYs gotta NIMBY. If it isn’t this, it’s power plants or pipelines. Yet they still want to participate in modern society.
Chinese propaganda efforts are impressive.
This article alone:
1. pushes the lie that data systems are water hogs. (They aren’t; they are closed loop like the radiator in your car.)
2. Pushes the idea they suck up electricity. (They don’t; they have redundant electrical provision and generally build their own power source that makes the grid stronger with more redundancy.
Mark Twain observed it’s harder to convince someone they’ve been defrauded than to defraud in the first place. This hysteria proves Twain right yet again.
Or do what I do. If an old stupid leftist like Willie Nelson is against it; then you should probably be for it.
Local politicians are getting kickbacks for putting these in against the will of the people.
How do you explain away the constant noise?
Go see a shrink about noises.
What noise? It’s no different than any big facility. Certainly quieter than a chemical plant.
In my area it’s not the water or the NIMBY factor as must as it is electricity.
Counties, including mine have blocked them recently. The state commissars in Maryland have shut down numerous power plants and are simply buying power from other states. Costs are skyrocketing. Energy sucking data centers will necessarily utilize vast amounts of an already scarce resource.
Maryland is taking a wide swath of farmland under the guise of Eminent Domain to erect power lines to run from Pennsylvania directly to some data centers in Virginia. The farmers lose their farms and the people of the state get absolutely nothing in the process.
Hey, c’mon, SKYNET and the Total Surveillance State ain’t gonna build itself, ya know.
Huh. Around here it’s the opposite.
Leftists in NM politics don’t want people having high paying jobs and do whatever China tells them to do, so they oppose American AI centers.
I can’t see leftists doing anything that hurts China or keeps America strong.
The complaint against these data centers, is that they are very wasteful of resources, specifically in terms of land and available energy generation capacity.
The land comes into the equation, because there is some sort of notion that the energy may only be generated from “renewable” green energy means, i.e., wind and/or solar, both very inefficient and unreliable as they are now designed. Both these approaches take up land that precludes their use for any other purpose, and being unreliable, require the “back-up” power generation systems using natural gas, fuel oil, or coal essential for reliability. In retrospect, this redundancy is a little stupid, why not rely entirely on the natural gas, fuel oil, or coal alone for the necessary power demand? Much less requirement for diversion of land into solar or windmill “farms”, and much less of a blight on the landscape.
In fact, go directly to on-site power generation from nuclear reactors, the Small Modular Reactor designs now in the final stages of development, and market ready, that take up very little real estate, and can generate all the power right on the work site of these data centers, perhaps in enough quantity that some of the excess energy can be sold on the local grid, a plus for the community in which the data center is located.
An elegant win-win for all.
How closed is closed? How much water does it take to fill that radiator you mention, and how often does it need to be refilled / replaced?
Data centers are going to be built. They will be built whether they are in the US or not.
And the place where they are built will have access to every bit of data that flows through them.
That’s cool, huh?
We have 5000 data centers. China has less than 600. There is no reason to have 5000 data centers. They’re sucking up farm lands and taking people’s houses away from them.
It’s not water usage (actually water warming) or electricity usage that bothers me, it’s what all of this computing is doing to us. How much data center activity is used for poking into our lives.
How often does your radiator in your car need water?
If it’s more than every 5 years or so, you’ve got a problem.
Closed is closed.
No reason to rebel — as long as the data centers are paying their own way and observing the same land use rules as other entities.
Unfortunately, some opponents are worried about internet abuses and taking out their concerns on data centers, rather than addressing the abuses directly and individually.
So why did they raise my electricity rates and say it’s because of data centers? After a while, they flushed that water out into the lakes, which raised the temperature of that lake.
I understand that. I hate Flock cameras for the same reason. Aside from the massive privacy risk, they’re a massive sexy risk, as the Chinese have undoubted hacked them.
That said, big data is here. I’d rather have it where we can control it physically than in China where we have no hope.
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