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DEMANDS FOR DATA CENTER MORATORIUMS SURGE  
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Gabrielle Gurley
December 22, 2025
The American Prospect
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_ Americans are getting wise to the threats posed by the lightly
regulated facilities competing with humans for resources. _

Loudoun County, Virginia, is a data center hub, with sprawling
facilities such as this Ashburn, Virginia, location, seen in July
2023. , Credit: Ted Shaffrey/AP Photo

 

The major artificial intelligence companies’ prime directive to
literally bulldoze AI infrastructure into states with minimal
regulation has produced citizen-led, bipartisan demands for local and
national moratoriums on data center siting. While the Trump
administration is doing everything it can to facilitate the only
capital spending with a pulse in the economy, these calls for
moratoriums are growing, and connecting with local successes in
blocking data center construction.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) recently
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moratorium on the construction of data centers that are “powering
this unregulated sprint to develop and deploy AI.” Sanders did
credit “the transformative power of AI and robotics” before
calling out Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and Bill Gates
with a simple question: “Are these multibillionaires staying up
nights worrying about what AI and robotics will do to the working
families of our country and the world?” The answer would be mostly
no.

Over 230 organizations across the 50 states signed on to a letter to
members of Congress organized by Food & Water Watch, a national
advocacy group, also calling
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for a national moratorium on data center siting and construction. The
letter characterized generative AI and crypto as generational threats.

But it’s the local rejections of data centers—in places as varied
as Chandler, Arizona
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and Leesburg, Indiana
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should have the tech oligarchs worried. These results demonstrate that
Americans are beginning to grasp the downsides of inserting AI into
every facet of daily life. This mushrooming grassroots backlash
promises to dominate American politics in 2026.

The fallout from siting these gargantuan facilities near human
habitats continues to convulse communities. Residential ratepayers are
already grappling with electricity price spikes and see data centers
as a major driver of the pain. Power demand from data centers will hit
106 gigawatts by 2035
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according to an analysis from BloombergNEF. A Yale Clean Energy Forum
report
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estimates that data centers could take up as much as 12 percent of
_total_ U.S. power consumption by 2028, a higher demand than all
manufacturing of steel, aluminum, and other high-intensity
manufactured goods combined. “Electricity is the new price of
eggs,” one industry analyst told _The New York Times_
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and if you’re concerned about electricity, you have to be concerned
about data centers.

Data centers are also guzzling city-sized amounts of water. By 2028,
they’ll require
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up to 720 billion gallons of water every year to keep servers
cool—usage would fill one million Olympic-size swimming pools or
furnish water for the interior-home uses of 18.5 million American
households.

In Loudoun County, Virginia, which has the largest concentration of
data centers in the region that represents the world’s largest data
hub, data center expansions have collided with the climate crisis,
leading to scrambles from local government to address the “negative
impacts on neighborhoods
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While the county wants to find environmental solutions
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that would reduce the burden on residents while still building the
data centers, local elections in Loudoun County
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and throughout Virginia
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in November saw candidates who rejected data centers emerging
victorious.

Even residents in the fresh water–rich Great Lakes states have
raised questions about increased data center usage. Illinois also has
one of the highest concentrations of data centers in the country, and
local officials and environmentalists have raised alarms that siting
decisions don’t always take into consideration how local drinking
water needs can clash
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with data center cooling demands.

Georgia, Alabama, and Florida have actually had “water wars
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In April, a federal judge ruled against Alabama in a dispute with
Georgia over Army Corps of Engineers water allocations to metro
Atlanta from Lake Allatoona, a northwest Georgia reservoir. Data
center projects could complicate those interstate dynamics. NPR
affiliate WABE reported
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that Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, which monitors the river running from
North Georgia through Atlanta to Florida, tracks water usage plans for
new data centers in the region. One facility_, _Coweta County’s
Project Sail, would use nearly ten million gallons daily, which adds
up to one-third of the county’s daily usage from the river.

DATA CENTER DEVELOPERS have been exceptionally skilled at persuading
local leaders of their value to communities by touting gains like
temporary construction jobs. (There are few on-site permanent jobs.)
Unlike what’s transpired in Northern Virginia, where county
officials hand out tax credits but still haul in millions in tax
revenues, some recent data center projects are steering away from
generous agreements with local communities. Instead, project officials
focus on tax credits, obscure the details, force officials to sign
nondisclosure agreements (NDAs), and never divulge their supernova
clients to the public.

Most residents are hard-pressed to fight corporate secrecy. _The New
York Times_ recently spotlighted
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Doña Ana County, New Mexico, a predominantly Latino community of
15,000. The data center developer for Project Jupiter, a
multibillion-dollar component of the $500 billion SoftBank- and
OpenAI-led Stargate Project, got to know the locals, but the
underlying clients remained unknown because county officials had
signed NDAs. Residents only found out after the project moved forward
that the heavy hitters included OpenAI and Oracle.

Instead of property tax revenues, the county will see a payment in
lieu of taxes (PILOT) program, which essentially allow companies to
decide how much—or how little—money they’re willing to offer a
community. But this trick isn’t having much staying power. Data
Center Watch, coordinated by 10a Labs, an applied research and
technology company specializing in AI security, reports
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2025, data center opponents slowed the roll or thwarted projects
totaling about $100 billion—more than the total of every quarter
since 2023. In one three-month period, 20 projects fell through.

That includes a project in Chandler, a Phoenix suburb, where
Arizona’s former Sen. Kyrsten Sinema personally lobbied at local
meetings
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for a 422,000-square-foot data center plan operated by Active
Infrastructure, a hyperscale data center developer. In the end, the
Chandler City Council voted against the data center unanimously
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In rural Leesburg, Indiana, the town council refused
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to rezone land for industrial use to build a data center on 554 acres.
“I’m really just trying to speak out for the future of
agriculture, and passing a data center is not the future of
agriculture,” said one local resident.

The possibility that a facility might be rejected has affected data
center financing. In Michigan, Blue Owl Capital, a private credit
firm, pulled out of a $10 billion data center deal
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Oracle amid “shifting market sentiment around enormous AI
spending” and concerns that “the Saline Township site … might
face delays.”

Elsewhere in Michigan, data center opponents rallied in Lansing last
week and called for “no secret deals
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between local governments, utilities, and data center developers. At
the gathering, Attorney General Dana Nessel demanded
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that the state’s public utility commission step back from
fast-tracking a major utility project to power the Saline Township
project. Anthony Hudson, a Republican gubernatorial candidate who
attended the protest, mostly agreed with Nessel. A pair of state
lawmakers, one a Democrat and the other a Republican, have teamed up
to propose reversing tax breaks for large data center facilities. But
residents want a statewide moratorium.

SINCE 2019, AT LEAST 40 STATES
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Republican and Democratic—have passed nearly 150 laws aiming to
regulate AI and address known harms.

Unfortunately, federal regulation has lagged miles behind the internet
revolution. The Senate did manage to stave off
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by a vote of 99-to-1, a White House–endorsed attempt to prohibit
states from passing AI regulations for ten years. The prohibition on
state AI regulation came up again in the annual defense policy bill
and was again beaten back. But even though that proposal generated
outrage, the major overstep into state regulatory authority hasn’t
motivated Republicans to fill in the blanks.

President Trump has seized on that inertia to issue more than half a
dozen AI executive orders this year, the latest
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coming in mid-December complete with plans for a litigation task force
and an annual evaluation of state laws determined to obliterate any
opposition to AI usage or data center expansion.

The Brennan Center has labeled
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that move “little more than political theater.” Executive orders
do not invest the federal government with the powers to file lawsuits.
So federal officials cannot “directly enforce” the order through
court action. “To challenge a state AI regulation in court,”
writes Gowri Ramachandran, the director of elections and security in
the center’s elections and government program, “the department
would need to base the lawsuit on a federal statute or constitutional
provision—not simply on the executive order itself.”

Combine data center moratorium drama with the gutting of the
Affordable Care Act, the nothing-to-see-here response to the
affordability crisis, and extortionate trade tactics, and the White
House and congressional Republicans have set themselves and everyone
else up for a very dismal New Year. But despite their best efforts,
local initiatives to stop the plowing over of homes and farms and
businesses with giant warehouses of servers and chips will
continue—and they’re starting to have an impact on the AI
transition.

_Gabrielle Gurley is a senior editor at The American Prospect. She
covers states and cities, focusing on economic development and
infrastructure, elections, and climate._

* AI Data Centers
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* Resistence
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* Environmental Protests
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* community resources
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