The New York State Assembly made history this month by passing what could become the country’s first statewide moratorium on large new data centers. To activists all over the U.S. who are fighting these facilities and their massive social and environmental impact, the development seems like a turning point. “In almost all 50 states, there’s immense grassroots pressure to institute moratoriums on data centers and halt the spread of this industry,” said Seth Gladstone of the advocacy group Food & Water Watch, which supported the New York bill. “There’s a feeling the boom in data center construction has come about so quickly, the only adequate response is to press the pause button.”
New York’s moratorium still needs a signature from Gov. Kathy Hochul to become law. However, its passage by the Legislature is one of the more visible indicators of how a nationwide grassroots movement against data centers is having real-world impacts. The movement has grown almost as fast as the AI boom itself, prompting action at the city, county and state levels in both blue and red parts of the country.
“This isn’t a partisan issue,” Gladstone said. “The concerns raised by data centers apply to everyone. No one wants to pay exponentially more for electricity, and no one wants to deal with water scarcity.” “There’s immense grassroots pressure to institute moratoriums on data centers.” Community opposition to data centers stalled or defeated over $150 billion worth of projects last year, according to research from Data Center Watch . The movement has only grown since then, at a pace that’s surprised even groups with decades of experience working on environmental and social issues.
“I think a lot of organizations have been caught kind of flat-footed, simply because of the scale of these proposals and the speed at which they’ve emerged,” said Michél Legendre, campaigns director for the Dogwood Alliance, an organization that mobilizes to protect Southern forests. “It’s forced communities to do the initial organizing work themselves.” Some wins, like the one in New York’s Legislature, have generated national headlines. Others have unfolded more quietly, especially at the local level, but are no less important.
“This is a David versus Goliath fight against Big Tech,” Gladstone said. “But we’re winning.” Local victories “People here are really activated over this issue,” said Ben Jones of the group 350 Seattle. “They want to do something.”
Seattle recently became the largest U.S. city with a data center moratorium, thanks to months of organizing by local activists. Last fall, organizations including 350 Seattle, Seattle Troublemakers and the Seattle Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA, held a series of panel discussions about data centers and the AI industry. The events were responding to a surge of community interest in the topic — even though, at the time, no large data center projects had been publicly announced in Seattle. At first, Jones and others involved in the forums envisioned finding ways to support Central Washington communities that were already facing new data center proposals. Then, in April, news broke that four Big Tech companies were seeking permits to build at least five large data centers in Seattle itself. One would require putting a new six-story building downtown to house a computing facility built by Digital Realty, a data center developer. “The energy these facilities would use is equivalent to a third of the energy footprint of Seattle,” Jones said. “As soon as we heard about the plans, we started mobilizing.” “People here are really activated over this issue.” Thanks to the groundwork they laid last fall, Seattle data center opponents were able to quickly activate an existing network, generating over 96,000 emails to the City Council. Within weeks, city officials were drafting language for a moratorium. Council members passed it unanimously on June 9. “By then, city leaders were competing with each other to be the one who made the moratorium happen,” Jones said. “They were responding to the impressive amount of public pressure they received.” Seattle’s moratorium will last for a year, during which city leaders and community groups have a chance to work on permanent guardrails for any new data centers. “We’re slowing down development of the industry in order to do this work,” said Raj Mirpuri, a machine learning researcher and Seattle DSA organizer. “We need to ensure rules for data centers include transparency, energy and water protections, and community benefits.”
Similar processes are unfolding in other municipalities around the country. A short list of prominent towns and cities with data center moratoriums includes Monterey Park , California; Scarborough, Maine; Canton, North Carolina; and New Orleans. The movement hasn’t been without setbacks. Earlier this year, Maine’s Legislature passed what would have been the country’s first statewide data center moratorium, only to have it vetoed by Gov. Janet Mills. However, similar efforts are already underway in other states, with New York closest to the finish line. States where lawmakers are considering data center moratoriums include Pennsylvania, Michigan, South Carolina and Vermont. The movement against data centers has grown so quickly that it has catapulted the issue into a top-tier concern for voters. Now, politicians from both parties are under pressure to assuage public discontent.
Unconventional alliances One Saturday morning in late April, Deeda Seed awoke to news that Kevin O’Leary, “Shark Tank” star and celebrity investor, was attempting to build a huge data center in one of the Southwest’s unique, most imperiled ecosystems: the Great Salt Lake Basin. Commissioners for Box Elder County would vote on the project that Monday.
“I was like, you must be kidding,” said Seed, a Salt Lake City-based campaigner for the Center for Biological Diversity.
With little time to mobilize, Seed and other local activists reached out to their community contacts. As a result, some 180 people showed up to protest on the morning of the vote. Seemingly in response to this public pressure, the county postponed the vote for a week.
Activists opposed to the new data center, known as the Stratos Project, took advantage of the extra time to organize, tapping into concerns simmering in the community. Utah is processing a slew of data center proposals, including several near the Great Salt Lake. Among these, the Stratos Project stands out for its backing by O’Leary, and its potential to damage wildlife habitat in the sensitive Locomotive Springs Waterfowl Management Area.
“The data center issue was already close to boiling over here,” Seed said. “Stratos was what blew the lid off.”
Anticipating a crowd, Box Elder County commissioners held their rescheduled vote at the local fairgrounds, where approximately 1,100 members of the public showed up to pack the space. Commissioners ultimately voted to approve the Stratos permit, with some claiming their hands were tied by legal requirements. Still, public opposition seems to have made a lasting impact. Politicians from both parties are under pressure as they try to assuage public discontent. In an apparent bid to appease constituents, Box Elder County passed a six-month data center moratorium on June 10. While it comes too late to affect Stratos, it could prevent additional data centers from moving forward. It’s also a sign of how government officials are buckling under pressure from a public fed up with the outsize energy and water demand from data centers, even in places where policymakers have long histories of siding with industry. “In the U.S. South, many of our elected officials have advanced and fought for data centers in their communities, while at the same time there’s pushback from within their own party constituencies,” said Legendre of the Dogwood Alliance.
Just as in Utah — where opposition to data centers has united environmentalists with more conservative groups like Mormon Women for Ethical Government — the anti-data center movement in the South has given rise to unconventional alliances. Environmental groups worry that data centers’ demand for energy will become a lifeline for polluters like natural gas companies and a forest biomass industry that is denuding Southern ecosystems.
“We’ve seen many proposals for biomass being reoriented around filling the energy gap on data centers which would further incorporate forest biomass into industrial operations,” Legendre said.
Data centers’ demand for resources, and the impact this has on utility bills and energy and water scarcity, have brought other communities into the fight. “In the Southeast, we’re talking about a region that already has a lot of issues when it comes to access to resources,” Legendre said. “And now you’re telling people if there’s a winter storm or another hurricane, we’re going to have to choose between powering a data center, or whether 20,000 homes get electricity.”
These kinds of concerns have led to people packing hearing rooms and local government board meetings from coast to coast. Seemingly overnight, data centers have become a top-tier voting issue .
“I’m confident every candidate for elected office in Utah will be getting asked about data centers this year,” Seed said. “People want to know what they’re going to do about this.”
A national movement For some activists engaged on energy issues, the rapid proliferation of data centers is reminiscent of another time when new technology sparked an unprecedented development boom. In the 2010s, the emergence of “fracking” as a technique for extracting hard-to-reach oil and gas reserves spurred a frenzy of industry activity with far-reaching consequences. Affected communities mobilized, eventually winning a patchwork of state and local fracking bans. “Seeing these data centers pop up feels eerily similar to watching the fracking boom,” said Jones of 350 Seattle, referring to the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing used to extract oil and gas. “One day it’s not a thing, the next it’s all over the country.”
Fracking is confined to states with large oil or gas reserves, but data centers can be built almost anywhere. And while fracking produces energy widely seen as a necessary resource, how the AI boom benefits ordinary people is far less clear. When this is taken into account, the flood of data center proposals has potential to provoke an even bigger backlash.
“It’s been truly amazing, as a longtime organizer, seeing this movement build momentum,” said Emily Wurth of Food & Water Watch, on a June 11 mass call that launched a nationwide coalition against data centers. Hundreds of activists from all over the U.S. joined in. “One day it’s not a thing, the next it’s all over the country.” According to Wurth, over 500 organizations from 47 states have already joined the new Stop Data Centers Coalition . Notable names on the list include Food & Water Watch, Our Revolution, GreenLatinos, Third Act and Physicians for Social Responsibility. While a scattering of local data center moratoriums draw national attention, numbers cited on the coalition launch call suggest progress is more widespread than many media accounts suggest. According to Ben Inskeep of the Indiana-based Citizens Action Network, 13 county governments in Indiana have already enacted data center moratoriums. Rania Masri, from the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network, said 25 local and tribal governments in her state have similar policies in place.
Efforts to coordinate at the state level are also growing more sophisticated. On the same day that Seattle passed its data center moratorium, activists in Washington announced a new statewide coalition that aims to introduce a suite of data center-related bills in the next legislative session.
The organized opposition to data centers builds on a wave of popular fury with the artificial intelligence industry and its massive footprint, unlike almost anything in recent U.S. history. “Concerns about data centers are agitating even people who have never taken a public stand on any issue before,” Seed said. “They’re willing to take a stand on this.” The post The Data Center Backlash Uniting America appeared first on Truthdig .