Data Center Backlash: State of the Nation

Since the start of 2026, data-center build-out and public resistance to it have both reached historic highs.

In June, Energy Secretary Chris Wright urged data-center developers to push back against public criticism of AI infrastructure, comparing it to the early opposition he faced over hydraulic fracturing.

Blackstone-owned QTS abandoned one of the world's largest planned data-center campuses after years of litigation and sustained community opposition.

More cities and counties are saying the same thing: “Pause everything until we figure out the rules.”

Spark researches the data-center permitting posture of every county in the United States: moratoriums (county and town level), zoning authority and rules, community sentiment grounded in local reporting, and utility interconnection posture. With this information, we’re able to derive scores and tiers around sentiment and feasibility.

A note before the numbers: local government moves fast and publishes slowly. Every figure below is built from cited sources and independently verified where the stakes are high, but with 3,122 counties, no dataset is 100% precise. Treat these numbers as directional and verify any specific county before making decisions.

1. The moratorium wave is more like a step function.

Twelve months ago, a county pausing data-center development was news. Today it's Tuesday. Counting county-body actions by the month they were adopted:

As of this writing, about 5% of US counties have an active moratorium or outright ban on data-center development. Another ~7% have one formally proposed or under discussion — roughly 12% combined.

Georgia leads with 20 active counties, followed by Iowa (16), North Carolina (15), Kansas (11), Indiana, and Tennessee (10 each). This is not a coastal-NIMBY phenomenon. The wave is strongest in the exact rural and exurban markets the industry moved to for cheap land and power.

And the county layer undercounts it. In home-rule states like Wisconsin, New England, New York, and the township belt across Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota, land-use power sits with towns, not counties. Another ~200 individual local actions are invisible in county records.

The pattern behind most of these is pause-and-regulate, not permanent prohibition: a 90-to-180-day (sometimes 12–18 month) freeze adopted explicitly to write data-center rules the code never contemplated. That means the map a year from now will look different. Some of today's red counties may emerge with the clearest permitting paths in the country.

2. Why communities are saying no

We captured the reasoning in each county where communities have engaged, grounded in local reporting, board minutes, and civic activity. Among the 1,220 counties with predominantly negative sentiment, here's what they're actually objecting to:

Two things in that table deserve more attention than they get.

Water is the sleeper veto, and it's becoming the headline constraint. A Wall Street Journal investigation found that AI data centers consume substantially more water than most public reporting suggests, and that direct cooling is only part of the story: the power generation behind these facilities has a large water footprint.

Counties have also noticed that water gives them leverage, zoning doesn't. In Texas — where counties have no zoning power at all — Hays County paused data-center approvals anyway, via a high-water-use review resolution.

Secrecy is a top-five grievance. More than a third of opposed communities cite NDAs, code-named LLCs, and closed-door negotiations. Projects that showed up with names, numbers, and public meetings appear repeatedly in our data on the approved side of the ledger.

For contrast: among all rated counties, only 101 are predominantly positive, a 12-to-1 negative-to-positive ratio where communities have spoken. Roughly 4 in 10 counties have no local signal at all yet: no coverage, no meetings, no debate.

3. Almost nobody has actually written the rules

Here's the structural fact that explains the moratorium wave: only about 7% of counties have any data-center-specific provision in their code. Of all counties:

• About 1% allow data centers by-right somewhere

• About 4% define a conditional-use / special-permit path

• About 2% are explicitly restrictive

• Roughly 56% have zoning codes that never mention data centers. Every application is an improvisation

And in roughly 37% of the country, there is no county zoning gate at all. Either the county lacks zoning authority entirely (all Texas counties, most of Alabama, much of the rural Plains) or towns hold the power instead. In those places, the permitting conversation isn't happening at the county courthouse. It's happening at the town board, the water district, or nowhere.

If you're a developer, the single highest-value screening question is not "Is this county friendly?" It's "who is the AHJ here, and does their code have a page for me?" A county with a defined conditional-use path (even a demanding one) makes the process knowable.

4. Utility attitudes: the co-op difference

We mapped the primary electric utility for every county (verified against EIA Form 861 federal data) and assessed interconnection posture for large loads. The ownership structure of your utility turns out to matter as much as the zoning code:

• In IOU-served counties, 45% show a restrictive large-load posture (congested queues, mandatory multi-year studies, and emerging large-load tariffs).

• In cooperative-served counties, that drops to 26%, and co-ops account for nearly all of the counties we scored as genuinely open.

5. Approvals still outnumber denials, for now

Our dataset tracks community and regulatory posture, not a permit-by-permit registry. But the local record still lets us count outcomes mentioned in county-level reporting: about 10% of counties recorded project approvals, roughly 2% recorded denials or rejections, and under 1% recorded developers withdrawing projects under community pressure.

What we'd tell a developer screening sites today

1. Screen for the AHJ (Authority Having Jurisdiction), not the county name. In 37% of the country, the county isn't the gate. A town, a water authority, or nobody is.

2. Treat code silence as risk, not opportunity. Silent-code counties are where moratoriums are born.

3. Watch the water question everywhere, especially in no-zoning states. It's the lever counties reach for when they can't zone.

4. Prefer defined paths over friendly vibes. A CUP process you can read beats a handshake you can't.

5. Look hard at co-op territory. Twice as likely to be open at the interconnection level, with the trade-off that community rate concerns need answering on day one.

On Spark AI, this data stays up to date and is delivered as reports, proactive alerts, or data exports. If you’re a data-center developer navigating the prospecting or permitting process, reach out — we’d love to talk!