The rebellion against data centers is growing

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.”

Here’s my personal ( albeit imperfect) take on your questions.

The massive new data centers are being built because AI workloads, cloud computing, and hyperscale storage require orders of magnitude more compute than the older internet ever did.

Yes, they use very large amounts of electricity, and many (not all) use significant water for cooling—those concerns are real, but vary by design and region.

And yes, they create very few permanent jobs relative to their size and cost—this is also true.

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Please answer these questions for me as objectively as you can.

The internet and cell phones as we know them have been around for decades, and have functioned without all these massive data centers that are apparently being built. So why is there such a need for the data centers?

And what are the actual facts? Opponents say they use up too much electricity, and too much water. Is that true or not? We hear conflicting things about that.

What about jobs? Some people say these data centers create jobs. Other people say these data centers create virtually no jobs in a community.

What is the reality?
Here’s the clear, objective reality, broken into the three issues you asked about: why the new data centers exist, electricity and water use, and jobs. I’ll give you the concise answer first, then the deeper breakdown.
Concise Takeaway
The massive new data centers are being built because AI workloads, cloud computing, and hyperscale storage require orders of magnitude more compute than the older internet ever did.
Yes, they use very large amounts of electricity, and many (not all) use significant water for cooling—those concerns are real, but vary by design and region.
And yes, they create very few permanent jobs relative to their size and cost—this is also true.

1. Why do we suddenly “need” huge data centers?

Because the internet of the 2000s and smartphones of the 2010s did not require the computational intensity that AI, cloud computing, video streaming, and global-scale storage require today.

What changed?

Here are the major drivers:

AI model training and inference. There has been a HUGE DEMAND for the productive capabilities of AI

Training frontier models requires thousands of GPUs ( microprocessors ) running for weeks.

Serving AI queries (inference) at global scale requires enormous ongoing compute.

Then there’s Cloud migration

Corporations moved their entire IT infrastructure into the cloud. Instead of thousands of small server rooms, workloads consolidated into hyperscale centers.

Then there’s Video streaming…

Netflix, YouTube, TikTok, Twitch—video is the dominant internet traffic category.

Because of these, we now have Data storage explosion. Every company stores logs, analytics, backups, and customer data in the cloud. Global data volume doubles roughly every 2–3 years.

Bottom line:

The old internet didn’t need hyperscale compute.
AI and cloud computing do.

2. As a result of these demands, the need for MORE ELECTRICITY has accelerated!

A single hyperscale data center can consume 50–100 megawatts.
Some reach 300–500 MW (equivalent to a small city).

AI-focused centers can exceed 1 gigawatt of planned capacity.

Why so much?

GPUs and CPUs generate heat; cooling them requires massive power. AI workloads are especially energy-intensive. These then require another thing — COOLING!

Many data centers use evaporative cooling, which consumes millions of gallons of water per day in hot climates.

In places like Arizona, Oregon, and parts of Europe, water use has become a political issue.

3. Jobs: do data centers help local employment?

Here’s how I see it AS IT APPLIES TO DATA CENTERS ONLY. The flow on products and other demand as a result of what they provide is an entirely different matter. But just to focus on these data center build outs alone…

Data centers create many construction jobs, but very few permanent jobs.

During Construction phase, about 1,000–3,000 temporary jobs over 1–3 years are created to build the data centers. Local contractors benefit. This is the main economic boost.

After construction, comes the Permanent operations.

Here, a hyperscale data center typically employs about 50-100 full-time workers, Mostly technicians, security, and facilities engineers, I’ve even heard of some centers operating with fewer than 30.

Why so few? Because:

Servers are automated

Cooling systems are automated

Monitoring is centralized

Maintenance is periodic, not continuous

So, Opponents are correct that data centers do not create large numbers of long-term jobs. Supporters are correct in a sense that they create high-paying technical jobs, but the number is small.

But that’s not the entire story, we have to look at the BIG PICTURE — Here’s the objective reality: data centers create very few direct jobs during their build out and operations, but they do create broader economic effects — just not in the way politicians often claim. The key is understanding where the job creation actually happens, and where it does not.

The key to understanding the “bigger picture” is this: data centers don’t produce physical goods — they produce CAPABILITY and PRODUCTIVITY. And that capability is what drives job creation outside the data center itself and the economy at large— manufacturing, finance, entertainment, education, information technology, etc.

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