On September 1, 2026, voters in Independence, Missouri threw out a city councilman named John Perkins. Not over a scandal and not over a budget. He had voted for tax breaks on a data center. Sixty-eight percent of his district voted to recall him, and he was gone.
That one race tells you where the AI boom has landed politically. The warehouse-sized buildings that hold the chips have become the most visible thing about AI in ordinary people’s lives. And a lot of people do not want it next door. The opposition now runs across the political spectrum, from rural Kansas to the Texas statehouse, and it is costing the industry real money.
Here is the honest version: the backlash is large, it is bipartisan, and it is reshaping where data centers get built. It is not stopping the buildout. Both things are true at once, and the gap between them is the whole story.
How Big the Backlash Actually Is
Start with the numbers, because they are ugly for developers.
- 75 projects worth $130 billion were blocked or delayed by local opposition in the first quarter of 2026 alone, according to the tracker Data Center Watch, roughly matching the entire 2025 total.
- More than 500 jurisdictions had enacted severe restrictions or outright bans on data center construction by late July 2026, the vast majority of them since January, according to Heatmap’s tracker.
- The cancellation rate for contested projects rose from about 20 percent in late 2024 to roughly 50 percent in the first half of 2026.
- 142 protests across 42 states were logged in July 2026 alone.
Public opinion moved just as fast. A Gallup poll in March 2026 found 70 percent of Americans opposed a new AI data center in their neighborhood. By August 2026, a Heatmap Pro and Embold Research survey of 2,045 registered voters found 75 percent opposed and only 15 percent in favor. A year earlier, that same survey had 43 percent in favor and 42 percent against. That is not a shift. That is a collapse.
The Recall Wave Is the New Front
What changed in 2026 is that opposition moved from planning meetings to the ballot.
Ballotpedia tracked 329 officials targeted in recall efforts in the first six months of 2026, the highest midyear figure since it began counting recalls in 2014. A visible share of those were data center fights.
The Independence recall is the clearest case. Perkins had voted for an incentive package that included a 90 percent property tax abatement for a planned 2.1-million-square-foot Nebius campus. Organizers collected the 1,000 signatures needed to force a vote, then won 68 to 32. A local Facebook group opposed to the project had more than 115,000 members. Two other Independence council members who voted for the deal, Bridget McCandless and Jared Fears, had already lost their April election bids.
It is not just Missouri. In Yukon, Oklahoma, Mayor Brian Pillmore faces a recall vote on November 3, 2026 over a land sale tied to a data center. Another recall, against an official in Mason, is set for that same date. In Festus, Missouri, four incumbents lost their seats in April after backing a $6 billion project, though a follow-up recall there collapsed on a technicality: the petitions did not allege unlawful conduct, which Missouri law requires. In many states, you cannot recall someone just for disagreeing with you.
Why the Fight Cuts Across Both Parties
This is the part that surprises people. Data center opposition is one of the rare issues in 2026 that does not split neatly into left and right.
A review of public statements by elected officials in districts with large data center projects found that 55 percent of those who came out against the projects were Republicans and 45 percent were Democrats, according to Data Center Watch. The reasons differ by party. Republicans tend to lead with tax incentives and grid strain. Democrats tend to lead with water and the environment. But they end up in the same room, saying no.
You can see it in the last few months:
- Texas, a famously pro-business state, announced a temporary moratorium on new data center approvals in August 2026, according to Politico.
- Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who had championed such investment, signed an executive order with new restrictions and barred the use of NDAs on data center deals.
- Wisconsin gubernatorial candidates spent the summer arguing over who dislikes data centers more.
- President Trump went the other way, writing on Truth Social that communities that block data centers want to end up “backwards and poor,” as NBC News reported.
That last line is the tell. When a president has to weigh in on local zoning, the fight is no longer local.
The Two Real Drivers: Money and Water
Strip away the politics and two material complaints do most of the work.
Money. Utilities requested more than $29 billion in rate increases in the first half of 2025, double the same period in 2024, and those increases were expected to reach 40 million customers, according to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. People feel that on their bill, and they connect it to the buildings going up nearby.
The honest caveat: the link is real but often overstated. PolitiFact rated Senator Elizabeth Warren’s June 2026 claim that nearby residents’ bills rose “as much as 267 percent” as Mostly False, because that figure was wholesale power prices, not the residential bill you pay. A July 2026 Rutgers State Policy Lab analysis found data centers had not yet produced large, detectable increases in local residential bills, while warning that “not yet” is not “nothing to worry about.” Both things are true: the costs are coming, and the scorekeeping is messy.
Water. This one lands harder because it is visible. A medium data center can consume up to roughly 110 million gallons of water a year for cooling, about what 1,000 households use, according to EESI. Larger ones can draw up to 5 million gallons a day, which Consumer Reports compared to the daily use of more than 16,000 homes. Google’s own 2026 environmental report disclosed 10.9 billion gallons consumed in 2025, up 34 percent in a year. In a drought, that is not a rounding error.
Noise and property values show up in almost every fight too, but power and water fill the meetings.
The Secrecy Is Making It Worse
Here is the accelerant. In many places, residents found out about a project only after the deal was already done, because their own officials had signed nondisclosure agreements.
It is now routine for developers to require local governments to sign NDAs before negotiations. Public records requests by Spotlight PA found at least eight NDAs signed by township, county, and state officials for data center projects. Wisconsin Watch found at least four Wisconsin communities with secrecy deals. In Pine Island, Minnesota, officials knew about a project for two years before residents did. In Rapides Parish, Louisiana, negotiations with developer Applied Digital were shielded, and a local beekeeper told NPR that the secrecy was part of what pushed him to object.
This is why the transparency angle now has teeth. Bills to ban the practice have been introduced in Michigan, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Ohio. Shapiro’s order in Pennsylvania banned NDAs outright. The problem is simple: nobody can argue about what a project will consume if nobody is allowed to say it is coming.
What the Backlash Can and Cannot Do
Now the correction to the hype on both sides.
Opponents have not killed the AI buildout, and they probably will not. As Vox put it in August 2026, the boom can be slowed and geographically shifted, but it cannot be killed without either a collapse in demand for computing power or a much bigger political shift. The economics pushing the buildout are stronger than the politics pushing back, at least for now.
That means the practical effect is displacement, not defeat. A project blocked in one county gets shopped to the next one that wants the tax revenue. The fights are real and they cost money, but they mostly move the buildings around.
The one thing that could change that is Congress. If federal lawmakers ever passed a national moratorium, local opposition would stop mattering. Bills like the AI Data Center Moratorium Act, introduced in March 2026, propose exactly that, but they are nowhere near law. Until then, this stays a city-by-city fight, which is exactly why it keeps showing up in recalls.
What to Watch Next
- November 3, 2026. Recalls in Yukon, Oklahoma and Mason go to voters on the same day as the midterms, so data center anger gets measured alongside everything else.
- The midterm map. Data center fights have already surfaced in races in Michigan, Wisconsin, Texas, and Ohio. Candidates are being asked to pick a side, and in a lot of districts there is only one popular answer.
- State laws, not federal ones. Watch the NDA bans and the local moratoria. That is where the rules are actually being written.
- Your own utility bill. If the rate cases keep landing, the political pressure gets worse, not better. This is a money story before it is a technology story.
The AI Boom Has a Second Cost
Data centers are the physical layer of AI. The same buildout also decides who gets hired and who gets watched at work. If the backlash is about what AI costs a community, this is what it costs a person.
FAQ
Is the AI data center backlash bipartisan?
Yes, unusually so. Data Center Watch found that of elected officials who publicly opposed large projects, 55 percent were Republicans and 45 percent were Democrats. The two sides emphasize different concerns, but they often vote the same way.
Are data centers actually raising my electricity bill?
It depends where you live, and the evidence is contested. Utilities are requesting large rate increases that get spread across tens of millions of customers, but a July 2026 Rutgers analysis found data centers had not yet produced large, detectable increases in local residential bills. Treat any dramatic percentage with suspicion until you know whether it is retail or wholesale.
Do these fights actually stop data centers from being built?
They delay and relocate more than they stop. The cancellation rate for contested projects roughly doubled between late 2024 and mid-2026, but the national buildout is still growing, because a blocked project usually moves to a friendlier jurisdiction rather than disappearing.
Why are nondisclosure agreements such a big deal?
Because they let officials negotiate in secret about land, power, and water that will affect their neighbors, then present the result as a done deal. The secrecy is often what turns mild concern into an organized campaign. Bills to ban NDAs on data center deals are now moving in several states.
The Short Version
- Local opposition blocked or delayed 75 data center projects worth $130 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone, and more than 500 jurisdictions have passed restrictions or bans.
- The backlash is bipartisan: Republicans lead on taxes and grid strain, Democrats on water and the environment, and they end up on the same side.
- Recalls are the new front. Independence, Missouri removed a councilman in September 2026 over a data center vote, and more recalls are set for November 3.
- Money and water drive it. Utilities are asking for tens of billions in rate increases, and a single large facility can use millions of gallons of water a day.
- The secrecy of NDAs is the accelerant, and states are starting to ban them.
- The honest read: the backlash is reshaping where AI gets built, not whether it gets built.
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