Data centers surge, communities push back with bans

communities fight – From rural New Jersey to Box Elder County, Utah, local organizers and residents are challenging hyperscale data centers—arguing they bring explosive energy demand, higher costs, pollution, land-use changes, and limited public input. In New Jersey, activists he

For years, the pitch has been the same: build the data centers, power the future, move on.

But in Monroe Township, New Jersey, and in communities scattered across the country, neighbors are showing up at council meetings and zoning boards with a different message—stop it, at least until the public consequences catch up with the tech promises.

Hyperscale data centers fueling artificial intelligence require far more power and space than traditional facilities. and that has meant a bigger footprint in both land and carbon. A typical hyperscale center needs 10 acres, or 435,000 square feet of land. Yet many proposed sites plan to use over 1 million square feet—an amount that could hold only a handful of major landmarks. but is expected to arrive with a much heavier toll on local infrastructure.

The concerns raised by residents include pressure on energy grids that can drive up utility bills and stress power generation from gas and coal. with ripple effects for toxic air pollution. Cooling systems also come under scrutiny for water usage. draining local aquifers and water tables. even if more efficient systems still require significant water. And then there’s the everyday disruption: the constant humming of servers. which residents say can reshape the feel of a community.

Jeremiah Johnson, an environmental researcher at North Carolina State University, describes the grid strain in practical terms. “When we bring this massive amount of electricity demand to the grid. and there’s a couple ways the grid can respond. ” Johnson said. “One is we have existing power plants that aren’t used at their full capacity, and we increase their output. Another way it can respond is neighboring regions can increase their output and ship electricity by transmission to where the data centers are. and a third option would be to build new power plants.”.

Johnson’s research. published recently. found that new data centers could bring extreme effects on energy costs and carbon emissions over the next four years. By 2030, national energy prices may rise by an average of up to 29%. In places with dense clusters—like northern Virginia—costs could increase by almost 60%.

The need for more electricity also means the emissions problem doesn’t stay theoretical. Johnson said that under a base case run. there would be “a 28% increase in CO2 emissions across the power sector as a whole. ” compared with a scenario without additional data centers. “Lots of additional coal and natural gas generation is attributable to that additional electricity demand,” he said.

Across the country, those projections are colliding with local politics in a familiar way: proposed projects moving fast, communities feeling shut out, and neighbors deciding they can’t rely on the process to protect them.

Local coalitions have formed in rural towns and counties where quiet land is replaced by large, energy-intensive centers. Often, these fights are happening in town council meetings and local government sessions where the projects are approved.

In New Jersey, Kayleigh Henry—an ecology director at the nonprofit Climate Revolution Action Network—has become one of the organizers drawn into the front lines of that pushback. The fight, Henry said, did not turn on a single speech. It turned on persistence.

“After about three to four council meetings. they finally understood the importance of actually banning these centers because the people cared so much. ” Henry told Salon. Organizing against a proposed 1 million square foot data center in Monroe Township. Henry protested with more than 100 community members at multiple city council meetings where the project was discussed.

“Without a doubt, every single meeting I went to, over 100 people went and tried to speak and tell the council how much it meant to them that their community stays safe and is not affected by these data centers,” Henry said.

With guidance from Henry’s organization, Monroe, Millville and Andover townships passed AI data centers bans or restrictions—showing how local rules can still move even when the scale of the proposals is enormous.

But victory, organizers say, isn’t inevitable. Too many projects, they argue, get approved with little to no input from community members—either because they flew under the radar or because developers moved in with momentum that left residents struggling to be heard.

In Michigan, a small farm town voted against a proposed data center. The developers sued, and the municipality was forced to settle. The legal pressure is part of what makes the new wave of resistance so urgent: it’s not just about stopping one project. but about fighting the ground rules that shape how the next one arrives.

Some of the newest fights also involve projects with scale that’s difficult for ordinary planning to absorb. In one case, a $16 billion, 250 acre OpenAI and Oracle campus has been proposed.

That campus is expected to draw 1.4 gigawatts of energy—enough, proponents say, to power the entire city of San Diego, California. For reference, the Delorean time machine in Back to the Future needed 1.21 gigawatts.

Utah’s controversy has raised the stakes even further. A data center underway in Utah was originally proposed at an estimated nine gigawatts. with the energy need described as more than the entire state twice over. After protests and local disapproval, the authority overseeing the project demanded it be scaled back.

As of June 4, the project site is planned to be cut in half from 40,000 acres to 20,000 acres, and the actual center itself is likely to take up about 10,000 acres.

The plan also includes an onsite natural gas plant. Developers have argued that the onsite generation is beneficial to remain independent from Utah’s power grid, but the project’s environmental implications remain central to the objections.

Johnson said onsite generators are often pursued for reliability. “Some data centers really want to make sure that they have reliable. uninterruptible power. and so they’re putting generators on site. ” he explained. “But those generators onsite also carry with them local pollutants that are kind of borne by the community right by the data center as well.”.

In Utah, scrutiny has also landed on the Military Installation Development Authority (MIDA), a quasi-governmental agency meant to “to support Utah’s economic growth and defense-related infrastructure.”

The project—called Stratos—is located in Box Elder County, Utah, where local officials have no jurisdiction over it. In a press release, the county said, “MIDA projects do not go through the standard local land use approval processes.”

MIDA also described who it aims to serve. In a May 4 press release on the project area plans, the authority wrote that the type of data center being contemplated would specifically cater to hyperscale providers that include the federal government and related defense industry users as clients.

Caroline Gleich, an environmentalist and professional skier who was also Utah’s democratic nominee for Senate in 2024, has turned her attention to the drought and land-use angle—arguing that the scale of the energy demand collides with conditions Utah is already facing.

“ Why do we need a nine gigawatts data center in one of the driest states in the nation that’s in a severe drought,” Gleich asked. She said her online platform of nearly 400,000 combined followers has helped bring the controversy to a wider audience.

“It’s really brought a lot of Utahns together,” she told Salon. “People across the state are really concerned about the environmental impact, the land use, and really about the process through which this whole thing came to be.”

For Gleich, the process is part of what has fueled anger. She said many Utahns were vexed that they didn’t get a say in the construction of a monumental energy-use project.

The fight has also stretched into culture and celebrity politics, including who is positioned as the face of Stratos. Gleich takes issue with the project’s messaging. She pointed to Shark Tank personality Kevin O’Leary as part of the public-facing presence of the project.

“Why isn’t a foreigner, an Emirati, Canadian and Irish citizen, the face of this project if it’s for national security?” Gleich said.

O’Leary, for his part, accused Gleich of being funded by foreign interests in an NBC interview. Gleich responded that she has never been paid for her activism by foreign operated organizations.

“ As a Utahn and as someone who spent a lot of my precious free time that I would rather be spending doing other things. trying to advocate for this. they keep calling us paid protesters and out of state and all these things. defaming Utahns that are trying to protect our state. ” Gliech said. “Instead of actually listening to us and providing evidence of studies or environmental impact statements. we just get called names and bullied and defamed on national television.”.

Even with that pressure, Gleich said she remains persistent in her advocacy, calling for protection of Utah’s environmental health.

She also offered a blunt prescription for others who want to slow projects driven by national tech and energy demand. Her advice: show up where power can still be shifted.

“It’s gonna take a massive amount of turnout at the polls this November in order to hold them accountable, and that’s really the lever of change,” Gleich said. “ Vote out every single one of them that have been complicit or supportive of these projects — vote them all out.”

Henry in New Jersey echoed that strategy, emphasizing local engagement beyond elections. “ One of the main things is actually just being involved in your community or even different communities,” she said. “Just going to these council meetings. even if you may not be from that town. just going to learn about how things work.”.

The organizers’ shared view is that the decisions often land in jargon-rich meetings that don’t feel designed for public attention—so the people who want to stop data centers have had to learn the process from the inside. Henry said her familiarity with local zoning and planning helped her propose actionable changes, including data center bans.

Making noise online and in local government meetings, Henry said, is helping some communities achieve real results.

Even so, major projects are still underway across the country, and the costs of the expansion will still show up in communities that feel the effects.

Gleich put the timeline in personal terms. “Once our water is gone and our air is polluted, our cities and our homes are gonna be unlivable,” she said. “So we need to make sure that we’re holding these people accountable and stay eternally vigilant with everything that’s happening.”

data centers hyperscale AI OpenAI Oracle energy grid CO2 emissions water use local bans Monroe Township Box Elder County Stratos Military Installation Development Authority MIDA Kevin O'Leary Caroline Gleich Kayleigh Henry