Expect the Data Center Backlash To Get Worse

In a recent meeting of the Box Elder County Commission in Tremonton, Utah, a man yelled at the cloud. 

“It’s false. This is not real information,” shouted an attendee at the assembled commissioners, who were considering a massive new data center project backed by celebrity billionaire Kevin O’Leary, in a video posted to X by progressive group More Perfect Union. 

Kevin O’Leary’s massive data center was approved by a county commission in Utah last night.

At 40,000 acres, it would be 2.5x the size of Manhattan.

The commission approved the proposal despite opposition from hundreds of locals. pic.twitter.com/1pF9JZD30w

— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) May 5, 2026

Members of the crowd can be heard chanting “shame, shame, shame” at the commissioners in the video. 

Ultimately, the three members of the Box Elder County Commission chose to live with the shame and sign off on the O’Leary-backed Project Stratos, which will provide data services to the military. 

“We need to realize and remember that everybody has property rights,” Commissioner Tyler Vincent said at the meeting per The Salt Lake Tribune, “and that they can do what they would like to do with their property.”

Elsewhere in the country, a growing number of local officials are abandoning property rights to side with the fist shakers. 

A new analysis by Heatmap News found that 20 proposed data center projects were canceled in response to opposition from local officials in the first three months of 2026. That doubles the previous quarterly record of data center cancellations, which was set in the last quarter of 2025. 

The silver lining to the data center backlash is that it’s only possible because of a massive data center boom. 

A new analysis by tech advocacy group the American Edge Project found that there are 2,788 data centers somewhere in the development pipeline. That would represent a 67 percent increase in data centers in the country. 

More data center projects getting canceled is a byproduct of more data center projects being proposed and built. 

Even so, the data center backlash is deeply concerning given that it draws on the powerful forces of garden-variety “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) sentiment, and generalized techphobia. Neither is going to be particularly persuadable by reasonable arguments about the relative innocuousness of data centers. 

As I detailed in a recent cover story, data centers are about as low-impact land use as one could hope for. They don’t produce much in the way of emissions or noise. Their small staffs means they have a minimal impact on traffic and public services. Their water use is comparable to that of an office building. 

And while their electricity usage is gargantuan, there’s little evidence that this additional demand is increasing consumers’ electricity costs. 

As a recent Congressional Research Services (CRS) report notes, data centers have the potential to both increase energy prices (by requiring spending on additional power infrastructure) and decrease energy prices (by increasing a utilities’ profitability, with some of that money passed as lower rates to ratepayers).

The CRS report found evidence that data centers were partially responsible for increasing electricity prices in the mid-Atlantic and were responsible for decreasing electricity costs in North Dakota. 

“As of the end of 2024 (the most recent year for which full-year data are available), little evidence existed that data center demand was affecting electricity rates nationwide,” the report summarized. 

Similarly, an analysis performed by The Economist for a recent article found “no association between the increase in bills from 2019 to 2024 and data-centre additions. The state with the most new data centers, Virginia, saw bills rise by less than the model projected.” 

Data centers don’t look pretty. Neither do big box stores, hog farms, and other economic uses that are not at the subject of a nationwide revolt. 

Despite its size, the Stratos development in Utah is a case in point for just how few neighborhood effects data centers can have.

As Shawn Regan explains at City Journal, the project sponsors plan on building a natural gas plant on-site to satisfy their own power needs. To service the data center’s water demand, they are purchasing existing water rights from private owners. Stratos is thus not increasing overall water consumption. 

Despite all this, the Box Elder County Commission had to move its meeting to the local fairgrounds to accommodate all the people who wanted to show up to yell at members about the data center and then flee to a virtual meeting when assembled opponents wouldn’t stop shouting. 

Even though the commission ultimately gave its approval to the Stratos project, the anger it has kicked up suggests the data center backlash is only going to get worse. 

All types of development produce some NIMBYism. When it comes to new housing or new businesses, people generally accept that these things need to go somewhere, even if they have reasons to say it’s not in their backyard. 

People have a harder time appreciating the necessity of data centers going anywhere, despite the role they play powering the entirety of our digital economy. 

If anything, their importance to the tech industry has only made them more enemies. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) wants a data center moratorium because new centers are useful for developing new technologies, which the senator worries will automate jobs (improve productivity) and increase inequality (produce wealth). 

A federal moratorium seems unlikely to go anywhere. Increasingly, at the state and local levels, however, politics and policy are trending toward more restrictions on new data centers. 

As the data center boom continues, we can only expect the backlash to get worse as well.