830+ grassroots groups are now fighting the AI data center boom

Apple thought it had a sweetheart deal in 2015: a $1 billion Irish data center, 100% renewable energy, walking trails, and replanted native trees. What the company didn’t count on was Allan Daly and Brian McDonagh, two Athenry residents whose concerns about noise, flooding, and light pollution tied the project up in court until Apple finally walked away in 2018. That playbook is now going mainstream.

New numbers from Data Center Watch, a project backed by security firm 10a Labs, paint a stark picture. Active opposition groups in the US more than doubled from 396 at the end of 2025 to 833 by the close of Q1 2026. Those groups helped block or delay at least 75 projects worth a combined $130 billion in just three months. Over 235,000 petition signatures were collected in the same period. This isn’t a few scattered NIMBYs — it’s a coordinated movement spanning 49 states, and it’s starting to draw blood. QTS, owned by Blackstone, scrapped a $12 billion campus in DeForest, Wisconsin in January. Prince William County, Virginia killed another QTS project this July — a 2,000-acre “Digital Gateway” that would have added strain to a region already seeing energy costs climb.

The pressure is reshaping deals at the negotiating table, too. In Box Elder County, Utah, residents pushed Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary to downsize his wildly ambitious 40,000-acre Project Stratos proposal. Delaware City regulators determined in March that a 580-acre facility violates the state’s Coastal Zone Act, which bars heavy industry from shorelines. The wins are piling up for opponents, but the economic forces they’re fighting are staggering. The US Energy Information Administration says commercial energy demand will overtake residential demand this year for the first time, driven entirely by the data center buildout, and double by 2027.

The fight is spilling into electoral politics. President Trump has bet heavily on fast-tracked data center construction to win the AI race against China, signing an executive order to speed up approvals. With midterms approaching, some Republican candidates are reading the room differently — distancing themselves from that position to align with constituents who don’t want massive facilities next door. The Athenry playbook took years. Today’s groups are doing it in months.