Data centers are surging—but so are the protests against them

Across the country, data center demand and construction have been skyrocketing throughout 2025.

And so has local opposition to those projects.

From Indiana (where a developer withdrew its application to build a data center on more than 700 acres of farmland after local opposition) to Georgia (where now at least eight municipalities have passed moratoriums on data center development), residents and politicians are pushing back against the water- and energy-hungry sites.

Between late March through June of this year alone, 20 data center projects, representing about $98 billion in investments, were blocked or delayed in the United States, according to a new report from Data Center Watch, a project from the AI security and intelligence firm 10a Labs.

That number is higher than all of the d