Opposition to data centers in the United States has surged in recent months, evolving from neighborhood resistance to a policy fight over land use, electricity costs and water access.
The backlash is spreading from city halls to state legislatures as communities confront the physical footprint of the AI boom across the country. Data centers, which house the computing systems needed to train and run AI models, are essential to expanding the technology.
They also require enormous amounts of resources, like electricity, land and water. The surging demands are increasingly colliding with local concerns about utility bills, the environment, farmland, quality of life and community control.
The latest example is Monterey Park, California, where residents overwhelmingly voted earlier this month to permanently prohibit large-scale data centers citywide. It became the first US city to enact such a ban.
Also this month, New York state legislators passed a one-year moratorium on new hyperscale data centers, giving the state time to study how such facilities can affect infrastructure, the environment and the economy.
