The legacy media has woken up to the backlash against data centers. Unfortunately, much of the analysis misses the mark. Last month, a conservative writer published a piece in the New York Post in which he claimed that “The effective voices against data centers, after all, are the same Luddites who’ve spread environmental apocalypticism to stop modernization projects such as pipelines and power plants and fracking.”
While pundits would like to dismiss the opposition, the numbers don’t lie. A poll published last week by Fox News found that “by a 40-point margin, voters opposed data centers in their area to support artificial intelligence.”
… As I explained in May, in “Top 10 Reasons Why Communities Are Fighting Data Centers,” the simple truth is that people “all across the US and around the world are fighting data centers because these projects are not providing sufficient value to their communities.”
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Since January 1, 2026, we have documented 275 bans, rejections, restrictions, or moratoriums on data centers in the US. For comparison, there were 49 rejections in all of 2025.
