AI DATA CENTER OPPOSITION
Is This Nimbyism?
Data Center Opposition is Rapidly Expanding
As fast as the AI boom grows, dependent on the rapid expansion of Data Center development, local opposition to these plans has grown almost as quickly. This opposition is as ubiquitous as the plans themselves to build Data Centers wherever and as quickly as possible.
Data Centers, including the massive hyperscale Centers, are being proposed to be built in red states, blue states, rural communities, suburban communities, low-income communities of color, at the urban edge, and even, at a more minute scale in dense urban areas. They are most heavily located in places like Virginia and Texas and California, but they are also emerging in Germany, Canada, and England, as well as African, Latin American, and Asian countries. The U.S, proposed developments are far outpacing any other country. And, if some tech bros like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg follow through on their most elaborate and hubristic plans, they could be built in space. Perhaps this would serve as a prelude to Musk’s long-standing dream to relocate the select few to live extraterrestrially. And this is all happening at warp speed.
The local opposition to Data Center development entered the scene far more quickly than anticipated. Almost all opposition has been local. Most state and federal policymakers have been major supporters of the Data Center/AI boom. Regulatory efforts are minimal; tax incentives are ample, both short and long term. The job and economic benefits are touted, even though most of them are speculative or transient, as is much of the AI boom. Even community efforts to have transparency and to make public the information about AI and Data Center impacts, such as water and energy use, have been vigorously opposed by the AI companies with the support of the Trump Administration as well as Democratic Governors like Gavin Newsom or Josh Shapiro at the state level.
How to make AI marketable and then profitable has been the guiding principle of the developers. There is not much that’s open right now. Well-funded PR initiatives by the tech companies and their investment and developer allies seek to smooth the way to minimize any local concerns and to assert that such information is proprietary. Trust us, they say, as has been said many times before.
The Charge of Nimbyism
At the heart of the PR campaign to overcome such local opposition is the well-worn charge of nimbyism, conflating other local opposition around such issues as low-income housing as equivalent Nimby-like efforts to stop AI’s proclaimed socially and economically necessary development. But is the local opposition to AI Data Centers in fact a form of Nimbyism?
The actual term “nimbyism” was first widely used around the conflicts over environmental and community impacts of waste disposal in the 1970s in places like Love Canal in New York or the Stringfellow Acid Pits in Riverside County in California. Local opposition to major development projects like highway construction date back even further to the 1950s and 1960s when the Interstate Highway system was being built, including in urban centers that led to neighborhood displacements. Robert Caro’s best-selling 1974 book, The Power Broker, about Robert Moses’s grand plan to reconfigure the New York metropolitan region through highway construction was the most prominent account of these locally grounded struggles.
As the term nimbyism evolved, it came to be used as a pejorative description about local opposition to development. Such opposition was characterized as a type of local parochial response to the general good that major development projects were assumed to represent. Some of the more successful local opposition in the highway battles of the 1960s and 1970s, for example, fought the location of the highway routes (thus, the claim of nimbyism), even though much of that opposition also focused critically on how the highway system and auto-centered transportation undermined transit systems and walkable neighborhoods.
However, it was the struggles around waste and hazard issues during the 1970s and 1980s that became the centerpiece of the corporate and developer arguments that nimbyism was anti-social and anti-progress. Groups that fought landfills, waste incinerators, toxic emissions from chemical plants and other facilities challenged the charge of parochialism. As opposed to the accusation of parochial nimbyism, they coined terms like “Not in Anybody’s Yard,” or “Plug up the Toilet.” Moreover, these local struggles, given the predominance of the location of the waste and hazardous facilities in low-income communities of color, helped develop the notions of environmental racism and environmental justice as another way to challenge the charge of “nimbyism.”
Locating hazardous and toxic facilities in low-income communities of color had become in fact the preferred strategy of the developers, made explicit when faced with the potential for community opposition. Among environmental justice advocates, a 1984 report by the consulting firm of Cerell and Associates, which explicitly identified a location strategy for waste facilities to build their facilities in vulnerable low-income communities, made explicit the environmental racism charge that the waste and toxics companies were looking to find locations where opposition could be limited due to the lack of resources to fight back.
The Nimbyism charge found stronger footing when it came to opposition to affordable housing projects and homeless support services, sometimes led by wealthier residents who wanted to keep low-income people and the houseless out of their communities. It was also used as a proxy for a charge of anti-modernism and anti-technology, an approach that has become foundational to the AI companies approach to weaken or minimize opposition to Data Center development. These are just a bunch of Luddites, nimby proponents who are against progress and technology, argue the AI proponents and their enablers.
Yet the opposition to the AI Data Centers, like the highway location critics and anti-toxics and environmental racism opposition before them, while criticizing the location of such facilities, also have core arguments about the local and national as well as the global impacts of AI and Data Center developments. Those criticisms are about process issues –AI companies hiding the information about impacts, back door deals to enable such developments, seeking to locate in vulnerable areas where opposition is assumed to be weakest, etc. They are about energy and water use impacts – enormous energy use that impacts utility pricing, the need to build new energy facilities that could be both polluting and contributing to climate impacts, reviving problematic technologies such as shuttered nuclear power plants, and water use that negatively affects water quality and community water availability. And they are about, especially with the hyperscalers, about enormous land use impacts that reconfigure vast areas into new versions of sacrifice zones on behalf of profit-seeking trillionaires and their mega-corporations.
Yet, interestingly, the limited resources available to local opposition forces have nevertheless stopped or postponed multiple projects. It has led to the frantic search for new sites and new deals by the AI companies. And it has contributed to the speculation that the Data Center battles might be the warning that we are in the midst of a bubble that will pop sooner rather than later. Perhaps that’s why the Musks and the Zuckerbergs have been outfitting their space suits.
LINKS
Data Center Watch, “$64 billion of data center projects have been blocked or delayed amid local opposition” and “Q-2 2025 Update: 125% Surge in Data Center Opposition,” https://www.datacenterwatch.org/q22025
Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974
Louis Blumberg and Robert Gottlieb, War on Waste: Can America Win its Battle with Garbage? Washington DC: Island Press, 1989
Adam Mahoney, “After a White Town Rejected a Data Center, Developers Targeted a Black Area,” Capital B, January 6, 2026, https://capitalbnews.org/data-center-south-carolina-black-community/
Ryan Kmetz, “Environmental Justice and Data Center Location Patterns in the United States” June 25, 2025. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/environmental-justice-data-center-location-patterns-united-ryan-kmetz-aukue/
And thanks to my friend Andrea Hricko for sharing some of her research on data centers.