It’s clear that communities now have an effective playbook to block data center construction. This week, researchers flagged the first quarter of 2026 as producing the “most blocked and delayed data center projects on record,” NBC News reported. Data Center Watch, a project from AI intelligence firm 10a Labs that tracks data center fights around the US, reported that protestors ‘blocked or delayed at least 75 projects nationwide worth about $130 billion from January through March,’ NBC News reported.
That’s ‘the most in a three-month period since the group began tracking in 2023,’ and it shouldn’t be parsed as ‘a cyclical spike,’ the researchers said. Instead, there’s been a ‘structural shift,’ as ‘communities have internalized an opposition playbook, legislative sessions introduced formal regulatory uncertainty, and the number of active opposition groups more than doubled to 833 across 49 states,’ researchers said.
The political momentum behind data center protests is expected to influence the upcoming midterm elections, with both parties increasingly sympathizing with resistance as opposition intensifies. Sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom has been spending time with organizers in North Carolina to better understand the playbook that’s fueling this momentum. In an op-ed for the New York Times encouraging Democrats to make data centers a key campaign issue, she noted that she ‘wasn’t sold on data center resistance as a political possibility,’ but ‘time on the ground changed my mind.’
Not only are people crossing political divides to oppose local construction projects, but also people ‘are passionate enough to attend political education sessions about water rights, land use, and thermodynamics,’ McMillan Cottom wrote. As she explained, people aren’t just educating themselves to keep noisy factories from driving up utility costs, threatening public health, or wasting local resources; some people are, for the first time, experiencing what it’s like to work with their neighbors to overcome adversity through political will.
