The town of Saline, Michigan, didn’t want a $16 billion data center in its backyard. Residents voted against it. Weeks later, as Fortune‘s Sharon Goldman reported, construction began anyway.
That dynamic — community opposition steamrolled by corporate momentum — is playing out across America at accelerating speed. At least 48 data center projects representing $156 billion in investment were blocked or stalled by local opposition in 2025 alone, according to Miquel Vila, a supply chain and political risk analyst at 10a Labs who maintains the Data Center Watch initiative.
Project cancellations jumped from six in 2024 to 25 in 2025, and in the first quarter of 2026, more than 20 additional projects were killed — a record quarterly pace. There are now 188 local opposition groups operating across 40 states.
And yet Big Tech isn’t slowing down. It’s accelerating.
On May 11, Moody’s Ratings raised its capital spending projections for the top six U.S. hyperscalers — Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Meta, Alphabet, Oracle, and CoreWeave — to $785 billion for 2026 and nearly $1 trillion for 2027. The revision came after a blowout first quarter in which Google Cloud revenue grew 63%, AWS posted its fastest growth in 15 quarters, and Microsoft’s AI revenue surpassed $37 billion at a 123% year-over-year clip.
