People kept telling local resident Amanda Pollard that a developer would get its data center near her home in Barrington Hills, Ill., no matter what, and that politicians wouldn't listen. They were wrong. Residents of three towns turned out against Karis Critical's plan to rezone Plum Farms, rural land just over the line in Hoffman Estates, where Pollard drove daily, and in late June the developer dropped it. Pollard told Capitol News Illinois that "this shows that we can make a difference, and we do have a say in our community."
Developers have called off at least $260 billion in planned U.S. data center projects this year, according to Heatmap Pro, the research service of the climate news site Heatmap. The cancellations are coming faster, too. In dollars, the projects called off from July through September were bigger than every data center project canceled in all of 2025 put together. National environmental groups have joined the fight against data centers, but most of the projects in Heatmap's count died at the local level, when a developer couldn't get a local permit or a town or county government acted against it.
Heatmap didn't name the projects or the people who stopped them. In many cases, residents who had rarely been to a council meeting before had begun showing up, and they kept coming back until the developer skipped town. They didn't want a data center on the farmland or golf course beside their homes, and they worried about higher water and power bills. In most of these fights, though, residents won only because the developer chose to leave. The developer can still come back.
The packed public meetings that drove developers away
Some developers don't even wait for a vote. Eight Form wanted to put a five-story data center where a Hyatt Place hotel stands in El Segundo, Calif., and gave up before the city's Planning Commission could decide, according to the Mercury News. Residents used the July 9 hearing to list what the building would bring to a site near schools and youth sports fields, including 16 diesel generators on standby. The city's only environmental study of the site dated to 2002 and never weighed what a data center's generators would mean for the schools nearby. Before the last speakers reached the microphone, the company's founder, Arjun Shokeen, rose from the audience and dropped the plan. "I've heard the community loud and clear. They've made their voice very present," he said. "We're going to be withdrawing the application. We're not going to be moving forward with the data center."
Neighbors can win these fights by knowing more about a project than the official record does. In Monterey Park, Calif., the groundwork started with the only two people at an early hearing on the project. Before Monterey Park's City Council voted for a moratorium on data centers in January — in front of more than a hundred residents, according to nonprofit Waging Nonviolence — married couple Hrag Balian and Emily Chu went through more than 1,000 pages of the developer's paperwork and found that the data center would use about as much electricity as a city three times the size of Monterey Park. "We needed to raise the alarm because nobody in this community seemed to know anything about this," Balian said. The developer, StratCap, withdrew that spring.
Balian said developers came to Monterey Park and the cities around it because they took the area for a "sleepy town or predominantly immigrant community where people just won't fight." That was a mistake. Balian, Chu, and a group of activists knocked on doors there in Spanish and Chinese and got thousands of people to sign a petition. Council meetings ran until 1 a.m., and by March, the council had put a permanent ban on the city's ballot.
What neighbors say a data center would do to their street
Many of the people at those meetings come because of what a data center would do to their own street. In Joppa, Md., the owner of a golf course floated a plan to replace the 275-acre course behind Bryan Cornell's property with seven data center buildings, according to The Banner, a Baltimore news site. Cornell, a construction superintendent who keeps horses and goats on land his grandfather bought, had paid little attention to local politics. He and a neighbor, Krissy Flatau, went on to lead the campaign that got Harford County to ban data centers in June. "I'm not being forced off my land," Cornell said. "We're going to fight back."
For other residents, the objection is the bill. Hugo Izaguirre, whose family has lived in Brownsville, Texas, for generations, opposed a plan to turn the old Southwest Key facility near the city's port into a data center, according to KRGV, a local TV station. He said the pollution and the higher costs for water and electricity would land on people like him. "All of those things are things that will be pushed back up to us," he said. The company, which KRGV didn't name, withdrew its request in late July before the planning commission took it up. Anyone in the city who pays a water or power bill can share that fear, wherever they live.
Across the country, Americans have turned against a data center in their own area much faster than they've turned against AI. In an Annenberg Public Policy Center survey taken from mid-June to mid-July, 61% of U.S. adults said they oppose building new data centers in their area, up from 49% in the spring. Over the same stretch, Americans' views of what AI will do to the country, and of how much the government should regulate it, didn't budge.
The opposition crosses party lines, and in Harford County, a Republican stronghold northeast of Baltimore, the toughest response came from the Republican in charge. County Executive Bob Cassilly thought the County Council's call for a 180-day pause on data centers was too weak and proposed banning them outright. The council agreed without a vote against it. Cassilly won his Republican primary two weeks after signing the ban. Taking on a data center cost him nothing with his own party's voters.
The local wins a developer or statehouse can still undo
Harford is the only Maryland county with a permanent ban on data centers, and the state's legislature could still override it when lawmakers return in January. In most other places, the only thing keeping a data center out is the developer's decision to stay away, and Karis Critical, the developer that dropped its plan for Plum Farms, has said it may return. The company promised that any new proposal would give residents the details they need to judge it.
Residents' biggest complaint was that Karis asked to rezone the land without showing what it wanted to build there. If the company comes back with a full plan, the complaints would lose strength. So would the edge residents had in El Segundo and Monterey Park, where they knew more about the projects than the official record did.
State capitals could settle many of these fights for good. Illinois lawmakers failed to pass any rules for data centers this spring, leaving each town to negotiate with developers on its own. Maryland's lawmakers could do the opposite and write rules that override a county's ban, throwing out the work local residents have done to keep data centers out.
Until those rules are written, residents will have to continue to advocate for themselves. They've already started to fill council chambers. Many of them will have to make the same case next year to lawmakers in their state capitals, far from the farmland and golf courses they set out to defend.