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The threats presented by hyperscale data centers are galvanizing resistance in hundreds of communities around the country. How are those movements developing? What is their significance? And how might they help shape a “Greentech New Deal” to address our climate, affordability, and democracy crises? 

 

 

Artificial Intelligence (AI), and data centers in particular, are generating an unprecedented resistance – in Texas they call it the Texas Data Center Rebellion. Robinson Meyer of the climate news website Heatmap recently told the New York Times,

“Every quarter, we poll about 4,000 Americans and we ask: Would you support or oppose a data center being built near where you live? We asked that question in August of last year, and Americans were very split. They were about 43 percent in support and 42 percent against. We asked again in the spring, and this time, 21 percent of Americans said they would support a data center being built near where they live, and 71 percent said they would oppose it. So it is a staggering shift, basically, in how Americans feel about this industry and about this form of land use in their communities.”

In the latest poll from Heatmap three-quarters of Americans now say that they would oppose a new data center being built near where they live. Just 4% say they would “strongly support” a data center proposed in their area.

A June poll from Data for Progress finds that a majority of voters (63%), including 67% of Democrats, 66% of Independents, and 58% of Republicans, support pausing the construction of all US AI data centers nationwide for at least one year. Most voters think AI will increase unemployment in the U.S. and support regulations to give workers decision-making authority over how AI is used in the workplace.

Data centers are meeting unprecedented local resistance. According to a recent report, data center opponents blocked or delayed at least 75 projects around the country worth about $130 billion just from January through March 2026. Active opposition groups have grown from 396 at the end of 2025 to 833 by the end of March 2026.

According to Brad Johnson of Hill Heat, “a strong pattern has emerged of hyperscale data centers causing popular revolt at the ballot box.

“After the city council of Festus, Mo. voted in favor of a $6 billion hyperscale proposal, voters promptly kicked out all four incumbents on the ballot in an April election. On the same day in April, voters in the Milwaukee suburb of Port Washington WI. showed their irritation with a massive $15 billion hyperscale facility by overwhelmingly approving a ballot measure to restrict future hyperscale projects from receiving tax-increment financing.

“In May, supervisors in Meridian, Mich. voted to put a six-month pause on data center proposals. Meanwhile, in the Grand Rapids suburb of Lowell Township, township board members refused to adopt a data center moratorium, with the majority of the council opting to court a $1 billion proposal from Microsoft instead. Now, recall petitions are circulating against the board members who voted against a moratorium, with the chair of the effort accusing Lowell board members of ‘representing Microsoft more than the people who elected them.’”

Some, even on the left, have portrayed the Data Center Resistance as affluent NIMBY-ism. Data scientist Geoff Holtzman analyzed a dataset of current and proposed data center projects alongside US census data and came to these startling conclusions:

1. The poorest neighborhoods resisted data centers at nearly five times the rate of the wealthiest (19.0% vs. 3.8%).

“The highest rate of resistance comes from neighborhoods with a median income of between $8 thousand and $72 thousand. The lowest rate of resistance is in neighborhoods where the average household makes between $133 thousand and $250 thousand per year.”

2. Recently proposed data centers that faced pushback were canceled or suspended at more than five times the rate of data centers that didn’t (28.2% vs. 5.2%).
3. Cancellation rates are highest in lower-income areas, a fact fully explained by their higher rates of pushback.

“The odds of cancellation are six times higher in neighborhoods that fight than in neighborhoods that don’t. Increased cancellation in low-income areas is fully explained by high rates of pushback in these neighborhoods, so continued proposals in these areas may stoke outrage, drive resistance, and increase cancellation rates.”

The Moratorium Cometh

According to a new review of public records conducted by Heatmap Pro, more than 500 counties or municipalities now actively restrict or block new data centers. These constraints, such as steep setback requirements, impossible noise limits, or outright bans on permit approvals, all but forbid the construction of data centers. The overwhelming majority of these restrictions have been enacted since the beginning of 2026. Nearly 190 have been passed since June 1.

Earlier this year the New York state legislature passed a one-year moratorium on new data centers. The law would block data center permits for “hyperscale” facilities, which it defines as those with a peak load of more than 20 megawatts. Soon thereafter, New York governor Kathy Hochul imposed the nation’s first-ever statewide freeze on new “hyperscale” data centers that can use 50 megawatts or more of power. A recent report found that bipartisan proposals for moratoriums on constructing data centers were introduced in 14 states from January through March.

Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have proposed a national data center moratorium that would temporarily ban the construction of data centers in the U.S. to “buy time to create strong, federal guardrails for AI.” Sen. Ed Markey and others have made other proposals for reigning in data centers. More surprisingly, Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, recently called for a nationwide halt to data center construction.

Efforts to constrain data center impacts have taken a variety of forms besides moratoriums. Michigan, Oregon, and Minnesota passed laws in the last 18 months designed to protect their pre-existing requirements that electric utilities use only emissions-free energy sources by 2040. Minnesota and Oregon ordered regulators to ensure that the energy that supplies data centers is in line with their emissions-reduction goals, while Michigan required hyperscale data centers to use 90% clean energy within six years to receive its lucrative sales tax exemption. Ohio, Illinois, and Arizona paused subsidies and tax incentives for data center developers.

The Data Center Rebellion and the Greentech New Deal

 

 

However ludicrous the more extreme claims made for AI’s impact, that impact is too great to ignore. The continued growth of AI and data centers at current rates threatens to derail the Greentech revolution. Unrestrained they will lead to aggravated climate change, local ecological devastation, unaffordable electricity, and a substantial growth and centralization of oligarchical power. It’s hard to see who they will benefit except a handful of the world’s richest men.

Just as there is little precedent for the explosive proliferation of hyperscale data centers, so there is little precedent for the data center rebellion. David Wallace-Wells and Robinson Meyer discussed in the New York Times whether the gathering coalition of Americans against data centers “could be the next Occupy Wall Street movement or Tea Party.” Perhaps the closest we have to a historical precedent is the anti-toxics movement that followed the exposure of toxic chemical dumps under low-income neighborhoods at Love Canal and the nationwide explosion of protest that followed as hundreds of communities around the country discovered that they too were exposed to toxic dumps. They created a nationwide movement against toxic dumps and won the landmark Superfund law which established unprecedented accountability for corporate polluters.

The local anti-data center movements are about as close as you can come to true grassroots rebellion. While many organizations are providing support, they are not the result of an organizing campaign or national call. Close examination shows that they are being created by people talking with their neighbors, banding together in their neighborhoods, packing meetings, confronting politicians, and throwing out officials who don’t take a stand against local data centers. Red and blue communities are joining together across party and ideological lines. Participants are overwhelmingly non-affluent – working class if you will. While there is little common ideology, there is certainly a widespread ethos based on the idea that wealthy, powerful elite forces are threatening the livelihoods and wellbeing of ordinary people and that people must force government to put a halt to such threats.

The outcome of any such movement is unpredictable. It could, like the Tea Party, be captured by rightwing populist elites. It could, like Occupy Wall Street, dissipate in the face of repression and lack of clear direction while leaving a transformed political landscape behind. It could, like the post-Love Canal anti-toxics movement, impose significant limits on corporate depredations through local campaigns and federal legislation. Or it could become part of a far deeper transformation of the political, economic, and social landscape.

One constructive outcome might be for the Data Center Rebellion to converge with an emerging Greentech New Deal. For the past eight years, the Green New Deal has provided a highly popular vision and program that would protect the climate in ways that would create good jobs for working people, end poverty, and alleviate injustice.

The original Green New Deal called for “a new national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II and the New Deal.” The Green New Deal aimed to save the climate by meeting scientific targets for the reduction of greenhouse gases. It would seek to end the epidemic of poverty by mitigating deeply entrenched racial, regional, and gender-based inequalities in income and wealth and distributing federal aid and other investment equitably to historically impoverished and marginalized communities. And it would provide good jobs constructing a just and climate-safe economy. A poll soon after it was initially proposed in 2018 found that 40% of registered voters “strongly support” and 41% “somewhat support” the concepts behind the Green New Deal. Another poll five years later in 2024 found that “the Green New Deal is still incredibly popular.”

Since the original proposal for a Green New Deal, the “Greentech revolution” has transformed the cost and viability of fossil free energy. Today a “Greentech New Deal” can be driven forward by an entirely different economic environment – one in which the transition to fossil free energy is not a costly and painful duty, but rather a “free lunch” that the American people can use to make a happier, healthier, and more just society and world. Indeed as I have shown elsewhere, that Greentech revolution is driving forward at local and state levels despite opposition from Trump, MAGA, and the fossil fuel industry.

While a convergence of the Data Center Rebellion and the Greentech New Deal is far from inevitable, we can envision some steps that might help lead in that direction:

• Continue and expand the local struggles against data centers. Those struggles have put the issue squarely in the public eye, shown that communities are not powerless, and already blocked a remarkable number of data center proposals. They can take heart from the local struggles to shut down coal-fired power plants which have led to retirement commitments for over 70% of coal plants since 2010.
• Continue and expand the burgeoning coalitions promoting data center bans and moratoriums at city, state, and national levels. Force politicians and elected officials to impose such policies with no ifs, and, or buts.
• Encourage the broad array of forces that backed the Green New Deal, and continue to implement it at local and state levels, to use their considerable power and resources to champion the struggle against data centers.
• Steadily broaden the Data Center Rebellion’s implicit– and often articulated – goal of replacing oligarchic with democratic control of the economy.
• Demand that the “precautionary principle” – that new innovations not be permitted until they are proven harmless — be applied both to data centers and to fossil fuel infrastructure.
• Prioritize the blocking of fossil fuels for data centers.
• Present the Greentech New Deal as an alternative to the billionaire plan to dominate our communities, our economy, and our lives.
• Promote the Greentech New Deal as at once the solution to the climate, the jobs, and the affordability crises.

A handful of hyperscalers are trying to shape the future through AI and the data centers on which they depend. But the future may also be shaped in part by the unprecedented popular mobilization against data centers.