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It is clear that communities now have a handbook to stop the construction of data centers. This week, analysts characterized the first quarter of 2026 as producing “the most closed and slowest projects,” NBC News. report.
Data Center Watch, a project from the AI intelligence firm 10a Labs that monitors US civil war, reported that the protesters “blocked or delayed at least 75 projects worth about $130 billion from January to March,” NBC News reported.
This is “the most in the three months since the group began tracking in 2023,” and should not be interpreted as a “circular trend,” the researchers said. Instead, there has been a “systemic shift,” as “localities put up a book of opposition, legislative divisions created systemic uncertainty, and the number of opposition groups more than doubled to 833 in 49 states,” the researchers said.
The politicized nature of the data center protests is expected to affect the midterm elections in the coming years, with the two parties increasingly aligned in opposition as the opposition grows.
A sociologist takes a critique of the data
Sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom has been talking to North Carolina planners to better understand the playbook that’s growing this trend. In a op-ed to the New York Times urging Democrats to make data centers a key campaign issue, he said he was “not sold on the data center issue as a political opportunity,” but “the sit-down changed my mind.”
Not only people across the political divide opposition to construction in the community, and people “are interested enough to engage in political education about water rights, land use, and thermodynamics,” McMillan Cottom wrote. As he explained, people are not only educating themselves to stop noisy factories from increasing the cost of labor, threatening public health, or destroying the local economy; some people, for the first time, are experiencing what it’s like to work with their neighbors to solve problems through political agendas:
