The AI Backlash Is Starting to Sting. Here's What It Actually Costs.

The Wall Street Journal ran a piece this week called "The AI Backlash Is Starting To Sting." It points to New York's new one-year ban on large data centers (which Maine’s legislature also passed, saved only by a governor veto) and a Meta workforce in open revolt over AI-driven layoffs, then frames all of it as a market risk: fewer viable sites, pricier leases, spooked investors. Fair points, and it’s worth reading. But there isn't a number in it for how often opposition actually happens, how often it works, or what separates the projects that overcome opposition from those that are killed by it.

So we pulled those numbers from our own data.

We tracked 19,234 data center projects across the US (most of them first surfacing in just the last few years). Here are the numbers:

• About 1-in-10 projects ran into real opposition (e.g., a protest, a formal objection, a lawsuit). 

• In 1-in-5 of those fights, opposition was the very first thing on the record, ahead of any permit or hearing, just a rumor and a Facebook page.

Opposition is getting more common every year. Opposition among new projects has more than doubled over the last ~decade, from under 8% in 2015 to 20% in 2025. 

It's not just us seeing it: Data Center Watch's Q1 2026 report found at least 75 US data center projects (worth roughly $130 billion) were blocked or delayed in the first three months of this year alone, matching the scale of all of 2025 in a single quarter. In Q1 2026, the number of active opposition groups more than doubled: there are now over 800 opposition groups, spanning 49 states.

Most of this opposition doesn't actually work. About two-thirds of opposed projects get built anyway (22% undecided, and ~13% ultimately blocked).

But there’s still a cost. Opposed projects stall or die roughly six times more often than unopposed projects. Opposition rarely kills a data center outright: it taxes it in time, money, and legal exposure.

So what actually gets a project through? Usually not lawyers or money. In the projects that proceeded despite opposition, the single most common thing developers did was show up: town halls, open houses, listening sessions, nearly double any other tactic, including legal wins or tax incentives.

All of this is somewhat predictable. Four times out of five, opposition follows something already public: a permit filed, a hearing scheduled, land bought. The signal was already there, somebody just wasn't watching closely enough, or soon enough. And the odds of running into this are increasing everyday.

The developers who come out ahead aren't the ones who avoid conflict. It’s the ones who see conflict building before it becomes a Facebook group with a thousand members. It’s developers who show up to the open house before someone else fills it with a story they didn't write and a narrative they can’t control.

Spark watches these signals, permitting records, hearings, sentiment shifting online, months before any of it turns into a headline. Most the projects in this data that struggled weren't unlucky. The developers just weren’t listening to the right signals.

If any of this sounds familiar for a project you're working on, get in touch.

Sources & Methodology

Dataset: Spark's tracking of 19,234 US data center projects, built from public permitting records, hearing minutes, court filings, and local news coverage, updated through July 2026.

Data Center Watch, Q1 2026 Report, at least 75 US data center projects worth roughly $130 billion blocked or delayed in Q1 2026, opposition groups more than doubling to over 800 across 49 states. Gallup, via Forbes, May 2026: 71% of Americans somewhat or strongly opposed to a data center being built in their area.

Referenced: "The AI Backlash Is Starting To Sting," Wall Street Journal AI & Business newsletter, July 21, 2026.