Communities across America push back on AI data centers

The AI ​​boom has led to a rapid expansion of data centers, currently supporting the United States economy. These features are essential for processing AI calculations, especially for cloud services, but they also have their downsides. Data centers, especially those built for AI, abound. Large data centers can take up millions of square feet with racks of interconnected supercomputers. This means they draw more power and create more noise. As it turns out, a large and growing number of people do not prefer to live with huge buildings blowing smoke into the sky, driving away wildlife with constant noise, and increasing their power bills in the process. Now, communities across the country are pushing back.

The response is not only comprehensive, it is both bipartisan and effective. In communities from Arizona to Virginia, residents have banded together to slow or completely halt the construction of new AI data centers, stemming expansion plans from hyperscalers. Efforts to put the kibosh on new server farm construction have only recently begun to receive journalistic scrutiny, but they are well under way. People across the country seem to be taking notice after waves of press highlighting the negative externalities of data centers for nearby residents, including an xAI data center in Memphis, Tennessee, powered by 33 methane gas turbines. Nicknamed “Colossus” by owner Elon Musk, the server farm has increased smog in the city by 60%, according to Tennessee Lookout. The city’s ethnically diverse and economically disadvantaged residents had little say and little recourse.

Here’s how concerned citizens across America are pushing back against AI data centers, eager to prevent a similar outcome in their own locations.

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Residents support AI hyperscaling projects in communities nationwide

Despite unprecedented levels of investment toward AI hyperscaling — in other words, building more and bigger data centers than ever before — communities across America are pushing back. In some cases, they have managed to halt entire construction projects.

In Chandler, Arizona, a proposed data center project was shut down in a mid-December city council vote after strong opposition from locals, Fox Business reported. Former senator Kirsten Sinema, now president and CEO of the Arizona Business Roundtable lobbying organization, has been supporting the proposal. When the project was put forward for council approval in October, the vote was almost completely flipped, passing by a margin of 5-1.

Bipartisan opposition from residents of Franklin Township, Indiana led Google to pull a proposed data center project in the same county, WFYI reported, and opposition is strong across the state. And in Lansing, Michigan, Planet Detroit reported on organized efforts to put a statewide moratorium on new AI data centers. According to CPR, resistance has also emerged in the western hilly areas. In all, The Verge found that Americans have managed to prevent or block “potential investments of tens of billions of dollars” in AI infrastructure. Data Center Watch, a research firm, found that opposition increased 125% in the second quarter of 2025 alone, with 66% of tracked data center projects stalled or halted.

These local pockets of pushback closely mirror similar organized efforts to reject the new AI surveillance cameras. Americans seem to be increasingly turning against the big tech craze after years of negative sentiment. People may love their iPhones, but are addicted to social media and have never been sweet on AI. The question, now, is, ‘What have you done for me lately?’

Americans don’t want to foot the bill for AI computing, so who will?

The pace and scale of localized opposition to AI hyperscaling has worried some in the AI ​​industry, as the creation of these sites has been central to the supercharged growth of AI companies in recent years. But word of their downsides has fueled rebellion faster than the projects have been approved. If the major players’ responses make anything clear, it’s that they, like others, seem to identify rising electricity costs as a primary driver of anti-data center sentiment. Microsoft, Amazon, and the industry consortium Data Center Alliance all highlighted their commitments to pay for their own energy in response to Investor’s Business Daily piece. Meanwhile, recent reporting has shown the opposite: Even as some data centers sit empty, the data center boom is driving up power bills for people living near large computer farms. The threat of a thin wallet is a powerful alliance builder.

However, local resistance has a global cost. If hyperscalers can’t build in rich areas, they’re likely to target poor ones, as in the case of xAI’s Memphis site. Likewise, if they cannot build in the imperial core nations, they are likely to build in the peripheral nations, where opposition can be easily pushed back by the firehose of capital investment. The costs that Americans do not want to bear—rising energy costs, pollution, and so on—will be borne by the periphery instead, echoing a long-standing historical pattern of exploitation. Powerful governments in core nations will need to prevent the global hot potato game from dumping data centers on the most vulnerable communities in the U.S. and abroad to determine the scope and sustainability of AI development globally.

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Read the original article on SlashGear.