The summer America started saying no to data centers

Between April and June, Spark AI recorded 476 suspensions and moratoriums on US data center projects. Over the same three months, we recorded 470 approvals.

For the first time since we started tracking, the brakes outnumbered the green lights. Two years ago, approvals led by roughly fourteen to one.

It wasn't a blip. Through June and July, suspensions kept outpacing approvals.

The moratorium is replacing the denial

When a county wants to stop a data center, it increasingly doesn't say no. It says not yet.

Twelve-month moratorium. Hundred-and-twenty-day pause pending a zoning study. In one week this July, we logged four: Turtle, WI; Hillsboro, OR; Nodaway County, MO; and several East Tennessee cities acting in near-unison.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. A denial is a decision you can appeal. A moratorium is the absence of one — nothing to take to court, no clock to run out. For a developer holding land and a signed power agreement, it's often the more expensive outcome.

Of the 809 counties where we tracked data center activity this summer, 233 issued a pause or a denial. Nearly one in three.

Where the fight actually is

Ask where American data centers happen, and you'll hear Loudoun County, VA. Data Center Alley. The densest concentration of internet infrastructure on earth.

Virginia now ranks second in the country for data center pauses and denials, across nine separate counties. Only New York logged more.

That's what a mature market looks like: the buildings are already there, and so are the rules. The contested growth has moved somewhere less obvious.

Take Laramie County, WY — active projects from Meta, Microsoft, Google, Crusoe, Vantage and Prometheus, roughly twenty distinct campuses, plus the power infrastructure being built to feed them. Cheap land, spare power, and county commissions that have never seen a two-gigawatt site plan before.

Cheap land, spare power, and county commissions that have never seen a two-gigawatt site plan before. That's the pattern, and it's repeating in places like Richland Parish, LA and Doña Ana County, NM.

A sneak peek into the sites we track, nationwide. Preview the map →

Why we see it early

A map of where data centers are is a map of the past. Most datasets start at operation or announcement. Ours starts at rezoning or permitting.

Every week we parse proceedings from tens of thousands of planning boards and county commissions across the US — meeting minutes, scanned PDFs, clerk uploads nobody expected anyone to read. We've resolved around 5 million decisions so far into thousands of tracked US data center projects.

By the time there's a press release, we've usually been watching for months. It's how we flagged a 2.45 GW New Mexico campus as power-exposed ten months before regulators rejected the pipeline meant to supply it.