Not in my backyard: Why American communities are fighting tooth and nail to stop Big Tech from building AI data centers in their neighborhoods

"It’s all pie in the sky," Newton County Commissioner LeAnne Long told Fox Business of her experience with the numerous data centers either built or proposed near her Georgia community (3).

"These big developers come in with lucrative promises like zoning, water, electricity. It is the biggest smoke-and-mirror thing you’ve ever seen."

Andrew Filler, an Indianapolis resident who helped win the fight against a near-500 acre Google facility in his city, told Barron’s he joined the cause after visiting a similar data center in a nearby community (4).

“They say it’s just a little warehouse building. No … there’s generators, there’s cooling equipment. There’s just tons of stuff outside of it,” Filler said.

And in opposing a data center in rural Pennsylvania (5), local Larry Shank simply asked, “Would you want this built in your backyard? Because that’s where it’s literally going, is in my backyard.”

Research by the organization Data Center Watch identified 188 community opposition groups nationwide (6). Between March 2025 and June 2025 it recorded a “125% surge” in opposition that prevented or delayed $98 billion in data center projects — more than the combined total from the previous two years.

“As development expands and media attention intensifies,” they note, “local groups are learning from one another. Petitions, public hearings, and grassroots organizing are reshaping approval processes.”

Why communities across the country are fighting back

According to the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (1), while data centers are not new, they were traditionally “tucked into unassuming office parks, quietly processing our web searches and storing our cellphone photos.”

But as the AI boom exploded, more, and larger, data centers with greater processing and storage capacity became necessary, covering “hundreds of acres with impermeable steel, concrete, and paved surfaces — land that will no longer be available for farmland, nature, or housing.”

The nonprofit notes that “in 2023, U.S. data centers consumed 176 terawatt-hours of electricity, roughly as much as the entire nation of Ireland … and that’s expected to double or even triple as soon as 2028.”

The boom in data centers has been further encouraged by the Trump administration, which touted them as part of their strategy to “pursue bold, large-scale industrial plans to vault the United States further into the lead on critical manufacturing processes and technologies” (6).

But that energy usage doesn’t come without a steep cost to Americans. One report from December noted that from Illinois to North Carolina, “the extra demand from new data centers is estimated to have added $9.3 billion to capacity costs for 2025 and 2026,” which adds about $16 to $18 to residential energy bills in some of those states.

Bloomberg, meanwhile, found that electricity costs “in areas located near significant data center activity” rose sharply, some up to a staggering 267% over the last five years (7).

One former New Jersey public utility board official told CNBC (8) that data centers are “an extremely large component of the affordability crisis we’re experiencing right now,” while an industry consulting firm executive told the news outlet, “It’s hard to see utility bills coming down in this decade.”

A joint study (9) by researchers at UC Riverside and Caltech suggests that air pollution from generators at data centers could cost locals and those in surrounding states a small fortune in health care costs.

They used the example of how “pollution from backup generators at data centers in Northern Virginia drifts into Maryland, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and the District of Columbia,” resulting in public health costs reaching $190 million to $260 million annually. They warned that those costs could skyrocket into the billions each year if the generators are allowed to “emit at their maximum permitted level.”

Then there’s the water used at data centers to help cool the servers. A University of Michigan study (10) showed that most data centers consume more than 10 million gallons of water from local resources annually, while highlighting a Google data center in Iowa that requires 980 million gallons, or “the annual water usage of over 4 million homes.”

The same study also noted that data centers rarely lead to much community job creation beyond the actual construction of the facilities. Since the centers “primarily house computers and servers,” they usually provide “low-wage, term-limited, non-technical positions such as security, maintenance, and janitorial work.”

Meanwhile, data centers can upset the community lifestyle locals have cultivated. Many reports of resistance include concerns over residents losing their farmland, or the impact on their livestock. Georgia resident Lisa Miller says that a blast from the construction of an Amazon data center near her home caused a neighbor’s ceiling to collapse.