Can the AI data center boom be stopped? Meet some opponents with battle plans.

With the rapid advancement of AI, Big Tech has expanded data centers at a torrid pace with seemingly nothing to stop them.

But, against the odds, local opponents are starting to make some headway — either by getting concessions from companies or slowing them in their tracks — in an effort to combat the centers’ detrimental effects on their communities.

Their strategies include everything from negotiating with tech firms to filing lawsuits against their cities or starting grassroots social media movements. Some 142 activist groups in 24 states across party lines made organizing efforts that resulted in $64 billion worth of US data center projects being stalled or stopped between early 2023 and March 2025, according to a report from Data Center Watch.

Global spending to build data centers — including data center infrastructure and the chips and servers to fill them — is projected to hit $493 billion in 2025 and soar to $920 billion in 2028, according to a July report from Morgan Stanley. This rapid expansion has been promoted by President Trump, who recently signed an executive order aiming to speed up the permitting processes for projects. Already, reckons CNBC, some 16 states granted $6 billion in tax exemptions to data centers over the past five years.

The sector’s rapid growth presents massive issues, critics point out. Data centers are already pushing up Americans’ electricity bills, and their global power usage is expected to soar more than 50% in the next two years, per Goldman Sachs. A recent Bloomberg report showed that data centers’ electricity consumption also potentially distorts the flow of electricity to homes, increasing the risk of electrical fires and blackouts. On top of that, large data centers, especially those used for AI, can consume millions of gallons of water daily, sometimes leaving surrounding residences with dry taps.

In exchange, Big Tech firms are touting economic benefits to local towns: millions in property tax revenue and jobs. But these centers employ relatively few people and, because of strain on infrastructure, the tax revenue may not be a fair tradeoff. Another problem: Communities are often caught by surprise when their towns announce a data center is coming to their neighborhoods, changing local zoning laws and potentially impacting property values. That’s because developers and Big Tech firms ask municipalities to sign controversial nondisclosure agreements.

State legislators’ efforts to enact laws regulating the industry have fallen short. While states have introduced a slew of bills looking to add regulations, most aren’t passed. In Virginia, only one of over 30 bills related to the regulation of data centers made it to the governor’s desk — and it was vetoed by the governor. In Georgia, a bill that would have prohibited Georgia Power from passing the electricity costs from data centers on to other ratepayers died in committee. Environmental and advocacy groups in Minnesota have critiqued a recent state law adding regulations for data centers, saying it didn’t go far enough.

No one is under the illusion that the runaway AI train will be stopped in its tracks. But some local communities are slowing it down — taking action where they believe their state and local officials have failed them.

Here are some of their strategies and how they’ve fared.

Elena Schlossberg is a former middle school counselor living in Haymarket, Va., who started a movement to combat data centers at her kitchen table in 2014 — one that has inspired similar action across the state and even the nation.

Since its inception more than a decade ago, Schlossberg and her neighbors’ group in Virginia, the Coalition to Protect Prince William County, has helped mount two separate years-long legal battles against “hyperscale” data centers moving into the state’s rural crescent.

The first fight, which lasted from 2014 to 2018, was related to a data center project built by a subsidiary of Amazon (AMZN). While the coalition didn’t stop the data center, their case against Virginia’s dominant utility Dominion Energy — which powered the data center — resulted in a settlement that forced Dominion to bury a piece of its infrastructure (a transmission line) for the project that otherwise would have run through a century-old, working-class Black neighborhood. Schlossberg calls that outcome only a “partial win,” because the cost to cover the infrastructure was still passed on to captive Dominion Energy ratepayers.

After that battle, she and her fellow coalition members were well prepared for their second big legal fight, when Blackstone-owned QTS proposed a 22-million-square-foot data center campus, called the Digital Gateway, in Prince William County, about 35 miles southwest of D.C. Over the course of several years, they helped pay the legal fees of residents who appealed the county’s rezoning of land for the data center. A judge in early August ruled in favor of residents, voiding plans for the project.

“Our pressure is relentless,” Schlossberg said.

(A spokesperson for QTS told Yahoo Finance that it is “committed to the project and being a responsible, trusted partner to the Prince William County community” and that the Digital Gateway ruling is “putting at risk $200 billion of investment into American AI.”)

Schlossberg said the coalition has effectively created “a 12-step program in stopping data centers.” Those steps include making a Facebook page, creating neighborhood flyers and yard signs, getting data center critics elected to local commissions, and lawyering up.

Now, Schlossberg shares her knowledge with communities across the state. That includes groups in the cities of Chesapeake and Pittsylvania. Those organizations effectively squashed their towns’ data center proposals with only a few of Schlossberg’s 12 steps.

Chesapeake residents Dennis and Nancy Cashman learned about a proposed data center half a mile from their home through a post on NextDoor and promptly joined a Facebook Group of concerned citizens. They printed out 200 yard signs and joined 200 other residents at a city council meeting in June, where they convinced counselors to vote against rezoning land for the data center.

Schlossberg’s efforts go beyond Virginia. “I get emails from people in Peculiar, Mo., and Texas, and Maryland, and Georgia … Pennsylvania, Ohio,” she said.

In Georgia, more than 2,000 residents across two communities have had mixed success using the Virginia playbook to stall two massive data center developments from entering environmentally sensitive residential areas.

Residents in Palmetto — a rural town that lies across Coweta and Fulton Counties in Georgia — failed to stop 320 acres of rural land just outside their city limits from being rezoned for a 2-million-square-foot data center development called Project Peach. That site sits hundreds of feet from a working-class, rural Black neighborhood in the city, made up mostly of senior citizens.

Their efforts, like writing editorials and calling commissioners in Coweta County, didn’t work. Palmetto City Council member Jess Wilbanks told Yahoo Finance that residents’ inability to stop the data center was partly because they found out about Coweta County’s rezoning meeting just weeks before it occurred, after she and her other neighbors spotted a sign on the side of the road.

“We all showed up when it was already too late,” she said. Now, Palmetto Mayor Teresa Thomas-Smith is attempting to negotiate directly with Project Peach’s developer, Cyrus One, to “negotiate some community benefits,” according to Wilbanks. It’s unclear whether the negotiations will result in any concessions.

In a statement to Yahoo Finance, a representative for Cyrus One said, “While we cannot comment on any ongoing efforts, we look forward to establishing new economic opportunities and community benefits with the establishment of our campus in Coweta County.”

And yet, some success was had: Coweta County placed a six-month moratorium on new data center proposals in May after strong local opposition to Project Peach and another development called Project Sail — a 5-million-square-foot site that, if constructed, would be one of the largest data centers in the world and sit on more than 800 acres of rural land near a Native American heritage site. County commissioners put the moratorium in place while they add new zoning ordinances to govern data center development.

“We were vocal enough in saying that there needs to be ordinances passed specifically for data centers that the county put a moratorium on any new data centers requesting to come into the county,” said Laura Beth, the chair of Citizens for Rural Coweta, who’s leading the fight against Project Sail.

Recently, commissioners delayed a vote on those ordinances after public backlash followed a report that commissioners were caving to data center lobbyists when drafting the rules.

A spokesperson for the commission told Yahoo Finance, “In terms of the data ordinance, the Board of Commissioners and Coweta County staff have been working diligently to conduct thorough research on data centers in order to develop a draft ordinance … the Board and staff welcome all feedback from the public as updates to the ordinance are still underway.”

Whatever rules are drafted will help determine whether Project Sail prevails. That project has not gotten approval for rezoning.

Wilbanks’s own group, Stop Project Peach, is helping pay legal fees for an attorney hired to assist residents, who are preparing to fight any zoning decisions related to Project Sail once the county’s zoning ordinances are updated.

“Data centers beget data centers,” Wilbanks said. “So that’s why it’s really important to stop Project Sail because we weren’t able to stop Project Peach.”

A group of residents in Minnesota, on the other hand, have focused on the latter part of the Virginia playbook: legal action. Some 17 neighbors have forced a temporary halt in the development of a 338-acre data center campus in Farmington, just hundreds of feet from their homes, after filing a lawsuit against the city.

Cathy Johnson is a Farmington resident and retired teacher. She has owned her home since 1979 and was surprised to learn about the massive data center campus coming to her neighborhood, a middle-class farming community 35 miles outside of Minneapolis, replacing a golf course and unused school board property. The data center is set to be the largest in the state to date and would more than double the city’s water demand.

Her main concerns: that the data center, proposed by Colorado-based developer Tract, would strain Farmington’s water supply; push up utilities costs; disrupt their quiet, residential area; and send her and her neighbors’ property values down.

She and her husband, Gary, helped start their coalition with those neighbors, who reside in Farmington and the neighboring township of Castle Rock, in 2024. They asked the city council in Farmington not to rezone the golf course for industrial use. But that didn’t work, and the city approved the project. Their questions to local officials went unanswered, as city officials had signed an NDA with Tract.

“After we were just being 100% ignored by the city, we combined our pennies and we hired an attorney,” Johnson told Yahoo Finance. They sued the city, alleging that it unlawfully changed Farmington’s comprehensive plan — a blueprint cities develop for growth that guides land use — to allow for the site. They also charged that it broke an agreement with a neighboring town by failing to get consent for the site.

Tract did not respond to requests for comment, and the City of Farmington directed Yahoo Finance to its website.

In July, a judge ruled that the city of Farmington could not dismiss the lawsuit.

“We will have our day in court,” Johnson said.

Indiana stands out as a rare example of advocates successfully negotiating concessions directly from Big Tech data center builders. Microsoft (MSFT), Amazon (AMZN), and Google (GOOG) — which are each developing massive AI data centers worth a total of over $14 billion in northern Indiana — agreed to pay a cumulative $7.5 million into a fund for low-income ratepayers in the state as part of a settlement agreement with advocacy groups and Indiana’s leading utility, I&M.

The Citizens Action Coalition, a nonprofit, and the Indiana Office of Utility Consumer Counselor, the state’s ratepayer advocate, negotiated those concessions by intervening in a case filed by I&M with the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission, which oversees electric utility rates.

“We don’t always have this kind of unanimous settlement agreement where every single party in the case is able to reach a grand bargain,” said Ben Inskeep, a program director at the Citizens Action Coalition.

I&M was asking the commission for approval to increase the minimum bill data centers would have to pay each month and to make them pay a fee that could exceed $1 billion if they tried to back out of their long-term contract early.

The Citizens Action Coalition wanted more concessions from both I&M and the Big Tech companies — and they got it. In addition to each company paying $2.5 million over five years to the Indiana Community Action Association to support low-income ratepayers, the settlement includes a provision that requires I&M to file a transparency report, disclosing how much it’s spending to provide service to the data centers and revealing how much power the sites are consuming.

“It is a problem across the country, generally speaking, that data centers are very secretive,” said Inskeep. “It’s been a huge problem in Indiana … so this settlement term is unique.”

Virginia’s Elena Schlossberg said she believes data centers can be stopped or slowed down.

“Right now, the heavy lift is community by community. Grassroots organizations popping up to protect where they live, one [data center project] application at a time, until finally our state and federal government understands that the way this industry is developing in the most pure sense of the word is not sustainable,” she said.

She pointed to political pressures on local leaders that are rising in tandem with data center fights.

Schlossberg’s Coalition to Protect Prince William County, for example, has forced out two pro-data center candidates from the county board of supervisors in the last few years and replaced them with industry critics. Similar upheavals have occurred in Peculiar, Mo., and Oldham County, Ky.

And earlier this month, Laura Beth’s Citizens for Rural Coweta in Georgia launched a political action committee to raise $150,000 to help elect candidates to the Coweta County Commission who would put guardrails around data centers.

Said Schlossberg, “These small communities are the firewall.”

Laura Bratton is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Bluesky @laurabratton.bsky.social. Email her at [email protected].

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