A pattern is unfolding across the United States. Proposals for hyperscale data centers paid for by massive technology companies to support artificial intelligence (AI) are coming across the desks of local governments. These proposals are usually shrouded in secrecy, with local officials often sign nondisclosure agreements to keep the exact plans under wraps and obscured from residents. By the time the full details of the plans are made public, it’s sometimes too late for the people impacted by the data centers to weigh in.
But residents are organizing in growing numbers to oppose the construction of these centers in their communities—and some of them are winning.
There are more than 4,000 data centers currently operating in the United States as of December 2025, with nearly 3,000 more in progress. An advertisement by the company Meta, owner of Instagram and Facebook, appearing on television and social media, features wholesome images of the small town of Altoona, Iowa, with a background of feel-good guitar music before a man’s voice says the community has “welcomed Meta, which opened a data center in our town. Now, we’re bringing jobs here—for us, and for our next generation.” But many residents of the places where these centers have already been built or proposed are saying this is too good to be true.
The risks that come with data center construction and operation are numerous. From massive water, land, and energy usage, to noise and light pollution, to lost tax revenue and a lack of permanent jobs, people across the political spectrum and geographic regions have concerns about how data centers could negatively impact their communities.
In 2014, long before the term “data center” entered the mainstream lexicon, Elena Schlossberg was rallying her neighbors in Prince William County, Virginia, against a proposed high-voltage transmission line that would be funded by the power company’s customers and run through their residential neighborhood to power an Amazon Web Services data center. She got some neighbors together to discuss the issue, and from there, the Coalition to Protect Prince William County was born. After four years of community meetings, town halls, petitions, rallies, T-shirts, posters, yard signs, letters to the editor, and more, the coalition successfully forced the power company to bury the transmission line along Interstate Highway 66.
The coalition’s focus has now turned to data centers. Northern Virginia has been a hub for data centers since the late 1990s, and the number of them in the state has grown exponentially in the past several years, making Virginia the state with the largest number of data centers by far. Prince William County is home to forty-four active data centers, with another fifteen under construction as of August 2025.
In the beginning, the coalition’s concerns regarding water and energy consumption held little sway with public officials and residents when tech companies told them that the data centers would bring jobs and tax revenue. “The advantage that everybody has now—that we did not have—are all the facts,” Schlossberg, executive director of the Coalition to Protect Prince William County, says.
The coalition’s fight against the proliferation of data centers took years to gain national attention, but the group’s diligent research and organizing tactics laid the groundwork for data center resistance groups around the country. “There are so many grassroots fights happening all over the place and benefiting from our lessons learned and getting into the fight that much quicker, that much more effectively,” says Karen Sheehan, director of the Coalition to Protect Prince William County.
The first step in building a strong coalition, according to Sheehan and Schlossberg, is to get educated. “When you’re dealing with somebody who wants to hear that it’s going to make money for the community, you point them to information about water usage, about noise impacts. If you can get them to [visit] a data center, they’ll feel and hear the hum. They’ll see the diesel generators; they’ll see the coolers on the top,” Sheehan says. The challenge is that even well-intentioned elected officials and government employees fall for the tech companies’ promises, and there are few, if any, legislative guardrails in place to protect residents. “Everything that you ever thought would control appropriate planning, that’s all gone out the window,” Schlossberg says.
The Prince William Coalition’s ability to cultivate a large and diverse base of supporters has come from its single-issue, nonpartisan focus on data centers, Schlossberg explains. “The alignment for this kitchen table issue is irrelevant of political ideology. Everybody has made an investment where they live, in their present and in their future. Everybody cares about clean air and clean water . . . . When the diesel generators kick on, everybody’s going to be breathing that same air.”
As for practical advice, Sheehan emphasizes the need for a multipronged outreach approach. “Some of it’s personal, some of it’s in writing with emails, some of it’s visibility with signs, some of it’s showing up for rallies or farmers markets, community events—just letting people see that you’re not just going to be hitting them with emails or you’re not just going to be putting something on Facebook,” she says. “It makes it more real if they understand that we’re just normal people fighting for our homes and our quality of life.”
Schlossberg and Sheehan have seen their work pay off locally—most recently, a Virginia Circuit Court judge revoked the zoning permit for the Digital Gateway, a proposed data center campus that would have been the largest in the world. But their biggest win has been in the information war against the tech companies. “The success has been that the toothpaste is out of the tube,” Schlossberg says. Data centers and their accompanying hardware and infrastructure are paid for in no small part by residents’ taxes and utility rates. “They have socialized their infrastructure and privatized their profits on our backs, and that pisses everybody off,” Schlossberg says. “They cannot hide from that reality.”
In May 2025, residents of Hermantown, Minnesota, a suburban community located just west of Duluth, started to raise questions about a mysterious development project slated for more than 200 acres of wooded and residential land. Homeowners started receiving letters asking if they would sell their properties. In September, a public records request placed by The Minnesota Star Tribune revealed that the city of Hermantown’s construction project was a hyperscale data center. By the time residents became aware of the proposal, city officials had already been working with the data center company for more than a year and had signed nondisclosure agreements preventing them from speaking openly about the project.
After the news broke, a group of residents formed a coalition called Stop the Hermantown Data Center that quickly amassed more than 100 supporters who met in person to strategize, build a website, and reach out to environmental advocacy groups for support. “This Hermantown situation absolutely exploded,” says JT Haines, Duluth-based director of the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy (MCEA). “We’ve been a part of a lot of different efforts in the state of Minnesota on protecting our natural resources and this mobilization is unlike anything we’ve seen.”
Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy
A Microsoft data center under construction in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, on August 6, 2025. The location was previously planned to house the now-abandoned Foxconn manufacturing plant touted by President Donald Trump in 2018.
On October 20, 2025, hundreds of residents attended a Hermantown City Council meeting, lamenting the lack of transparency and expressing concerns about water and power usage. Nevertheless, the city council voted unanimously to rezone the parcel of land allocated to the data center, clearing the way for development to begin. “After having five hours of public comment, there was no real discussion from the people voting on it,” Katie Hawkins, a member of Stop the Hermantown Data Center, says. “I feel like there’s a real lack of actual discretion and scrutiny, and a real lack of listening to the citizens here and what they want.”
Aaron Klemz, chief strategy for MCEA, says this pattern of deception is playing out throughout the country as companies seek to evade public scrutiny. But the apathetic response from city councilmembers regarding residents’ concerns only fuels resistance efforts.
“When a community sees that secrecy has dominated a process and that they only have a limited opportunity to jump in, they jump in with both feet,” Klemz says. “When it feels like the game’s rigged and the decision is already made, people react angrily, appropriately.”
Stop the Hermantown Data Center partnered with MCEA to sue the city, arguing the initial environmental review was incomplete and that its mitigation plan was too generic—the review didn’t even mention the word “data center.”
As a result of the lawsuit, the data center company temporarily pulled back its permit requests that had been scheduled for consideration on November 18. Now local activists are planning another rally for February 8. “We’re just trying to keep showing up,” says Hawkins. “We have tons of different people with tons of different backgrounds that are coming together and working together however they can.”
Caledonia, Wisconsin, is a town of about 25,000 people situated on Lake Michigan between Chicago, Illinois, and Milwaukee that, as community resident Prescott Balch says, “guards its open space [and] charm fiercely, and I mean fiercely.” The “About” page on the village’s website mentions its proximity to the “planned Microsoft development” in nearby Mount Pleasant, but the web page does not mention a separate Microsoft data center plan, which residents successfully organized to strike down last fall.
In July 2025, Balch discovered a data center project was in the works just one-and-a-half miles from his home. Balch was in a unique position to respond: He had just retired from his job as a technology executive at U.S. Bank and had thirty-eight years of experience with tech, large corporations, and financial analysis under his belt. To him, this proposal was bad news.
Next came “the part where we got good,” says Balch. The group “took a real, traditional community organizing approach,” increasing attendance at every Caledonia village board meeting and using public comment time strategically. Balch says they took ten people’s two-minute allotment and turned it into a twenty-minute continuous speech.
By October, Microsoft backed out of the project, and now Balch is working with additional communities across the Upper Midwest to recreate the victory in Caledonia. He even created an extensive website titled “WI Data Center Document Repository” to compile resources for other communities facing similar proposals.
His key strategy is surprising to those who oppose data centers for their resource use or noise pollution. He advises data center resistance groups trying to sway their representatives to stay away from arguments based on water use, energy prices, pollution, and health effects. “Every single person on this board thinks they are doing the right thing primarily for the long-term well-being of the community,” he says, “which oftentimes boils down to finances.”
To convince local officials to reject a data center proposal, Balch says, a group must demonstrate that a hyperscale data center is a financial concentration risk to the community. “These data centers are so big that they become an outsized proportion of the village’s total tax collected,” he explains. If a company no longer wants to rent a building to operate a data center there—likely because the technology becomes outdated or obsolete—the tax revenue the municipality was getting will vanish.
“Think about it in a different way. If you had money invested, and somebody said, ‘You should put half of that in one risky stock,’ you’d say, ‘You’re an incompetent financial adviser.’ It’s just stupid. No bank would loan 50 percent of their money to one borrower.”
About forty-five miles north of Caledonia sits Port Washington, Wisconsin, a city of about 12,000 people and a popular summer tourist spot. There, local grassroots group Great Lakes Neighbors United is hitting a wall in getting elected officials to listen to concerns about a proposed data center.
Mike Beaster, a Port Washington resident and member of the group, shares many of the same apprehensions as Balch. Along with expected increases in taxes and utility prices, Beaster is worried the data center would contribute to the well-documented risk of using up the water in Lake Michigan, which borders Port Washington to the east. “One data center is not going to drain the whole lake, but if these things spring up all over the place, there are some legitimate concerns.”
Despite Great Lakes Neighbors United packing city council meetings to oppose the proposal, Beaster says, councilmembers have largely ignored their arguments. “The mayor puts it forward, and all seven members of the city council just unanimously push everything through,” he says. “And even when you’re up there talking to them, they’re just like zombies or looking at their laptops or barely even listening to anyone.”
In early December, three people were arrested and ticketed at a city council meeting—one member of Great Lakes Neighbors United when she spoke beyond her allotted time slot and resisted police officers escorting her out, and two more concerned residents when they moved to defend her. About two weeks later, the group announced its initiation of a recall election for Port Washington’s mayor, and on January 2, it filed a lawsuit against the city.
Balch, who has worked with Great Lakes Neighbors United, echoes the disillusionment with public officials, including those in Port Washington. “As a community, because we no longer trust our elected officials, we have to watch every single agenda that’s published to the village website . . . . But if you have to do that with every agenda, with every meeting, with every thirty-seven-page attachment, you start to wonder, who’s looking out for me if I have to do this? I thought that’s what we elected you chumps for.”
Amid a time of deep political polarization, the data center issue has galvanized small towns across the country to form grassroots, bipartisan coalitions and to stand against some of the most powerful corporations in the world. Notably, many of these groups are spearheaded by retired people and those with professional backgrounds in law, technology, or finance. Thus, communities made up of largely blue-collar workers and younger residents may be more vulnerable to tech companies’ tactics that take advantage of a lack of regulatory guardrails.
“Small-town governing units are not trained or equipped to make those kinds of decisions,” says Cathy Johnson, who’s leading the charge against a data center proposal in Farmington, Minnesota. “We need the [state] legislature to give us some parameters because the city is following the line of these predatory developers who are coming in with false promises.”
The power imbalance between billion-dollar tech companies and rural municipalities makes the fight feel “like David and Goliath,” according to Johnson. For the time being, however, as residents in Virginia, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and elsewhere have demonstrated, grassroots local resistance can work. As of March 2025, sixteen data center projects around the country have been blocked or delayed as a result of local resistance efforts.
“There’s plenty to do that doesn’t require deep financial expertise or deep energy price expertise,” Balch says. “It’s just a matter of finding that core group that’s willing to put in the time, and then doing the work. Just keep people engaged and keep people a little edgy, and it can be won.”