Data centers in communities

🔍The Reality

The concern is grounded when the build is poorly executed. Open-loop evaporative cooling in water-stressed regions remains a genuine issue when operators choose the cheaper design over recycled-water systems. Without negotiated rate caps and self-supply agreements, residential electricity bills can rise in markets where transmission costs are passed through to consumers. A May 2026 Gallup poll found 70 percent of Americans oppose construction of an AI data center in their local community, with 48 percent strongly opposed — the public sentiment is real, even where the engineering and financial details would address most legitimate worries. Sustained local opposition in Tremonton (Utah), Monterey Park (California), and Pennsylvania's Chester County reflects communities where transparent negotiation has not yet happened or has broken down. Senator Bernie Sanders has introduced moratorium legislation, Maine's legislature passed a construction ban that the governor vetoed, and state public utility commissions are increasingly scrutinizing rate-impact disclosures. That state-level pressure stopped being rhetorical over the summer of 2026. On September 8, 2026 Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey signed an executive order barring state agencies from permitting any data center above 25 megawatts of peak demand unless the developer has already secured a community benefits agreement; developers are expected to bring their own clean generation, and those who cannot must pay into a newly created Ratepayer Protection Fund, with the state environmental agency directed to set that compliance payment by the end of the year. The order also blocks non-disclosure agreements between state agencies and developers, which is aimed squarely at how these deals have typically been negotiated. TechCrunch counted it the third state in three months to constrain build-out, after Texas ordered audits and New York halted projects above 50 megawatts. Read that as the mechanism this page has been recommending — negotiate early, tie commitments to contracts, refuse secrecy — being converted from local best practice into a permitting precondition. Virginia followed on September 18, 2026, and it matters most because it hosts the largest concentration of data centers in the world: Governor Abigail Spanberger's Executive Order 22 barred state officials from signing non-disclosure agreements on data-center projects, ordered faster noise rules and a cumulative review of backup generators, and came with a framework that would replace automatic "by-right" approval with public hearings for projects above 25 megawatts. That cuts against the Loudoun County example this page cites as a success, because much of Loudoun's build-out ran on exactly that by-right approval, and Virginia's governor now says the industry expanded "without a coordinated or clear plan." Both can be true: a county can win real revenue and still leave residents without a say in where the buildings go. California went a different way on September 21, 2026, when Governor Gavin Newsom signed seven laws aimed at cost rather than siting: data centers must pay for the grid and water upgrades they need, state regulators must create a separate electricity rate class so those costs do not shift to households, proposed sites must disclose their water use and drought planning to local governments, and projects lose access to blanket environmental exemptions unless they meet state energy, water and fuel standards. That is a binding version of the protection the federal ratepayer pledge only promises. The new federal ratepayer pledge is voluntary, and its enforceability is already contested — North Carolina officials have pressed Duke Energy to make its commitment legally binding, and Duke's own spokesperson clarified the goal is to keep bills lower than they would otherwise be, not to lower them outright. Grid reliability is a separate and genuine strain: when a single power line failed near Washington in July 2026, roughly 3.1 gigawatts of data-center load disconnected almost simultaneously, swinging grid voltage from Northern Virginia to Chicago and taking more than ten minutes to stabilize. Two further gaps are worth naming plainly, because both cut against claims made above. The first is that permanent-jobs figures are promises, not outcomes: at the Lake Mariner campus in Somerset, New York, a 2019 pledge of 165 permanent jobs made in exchange for a discounted power rate had become a projection of 35 to 40 by a 2024 planning-board presentation, and New York Governor Kathy Hochul said in July 2026 that data centers "do not deliver significant, long-term jobs." Ask what a commitment is contractually tied to, not what it was announced as. The second is that ownership of a single campus can be split so many ways that no party is clearly answerable for it. Ars Technica reported in September 2026 that Lake Mariner is owned and operated by TeraWulf on land leased from its own chief executive, is to be run by Fluidstack, carries Google warrants for a future 14 percent stake plus a lease backstop, and serves Anthropic as a tenant. A June fire there met firefighters with no working alarm, no suppression system and three dead hydrants. Anthropic ratepayer commitments cover electricity costs at the site but not its noise or clean-energy claims, and no party involved appeared able to verify how much of the power is actually low-carbon. And the federal government is now moving in the opposite direction from the states. In September 2026 the Environmental Protection Agency proposed letting state and local agencies decide for themselves whether to hold public comment on air permits for large data centers, having separately proposed allowing developers to begin construction before their permits are approved; the agency says this gives the officials "most familiar with local issues the discretion to determine whether, when, and for how long to provide opportunities for public participation." Capital B reported that the rural South, where much of this construction is concentrated, has a disproportionately Black population and residents who already learn of projects late because local governments sign non-disclosure agreements with developers — one South Carolina campus under debate spans the area of about 1,200 football fields in a county that is 40 percent Black, and was proposed there only after developers failed to site a similar project in a predominantly white Georgia county. Read the two trends together rather than separately: everything this page recommends depends on a community knowing a project exists early enough to negotiate, so removing the public-comment step does not merely reduce transparency, it removes the precondition for the remedy. September 2026 polling put a number on how wide the sentiment has become, and on what people actually want done about it. A New York Times and Siena University survey of 1,503 likely voters, fielded in early September, found 61 percent opposed to the construction of data centers to power AI, with only 14 percent strongly supportive. Read that alongside the Gallup figure above rather than as movement from it: Gallup asked about a data center in the respondent's own community and this asked about construction in general, so they are different questions and the distance between 70 and 61 percent is not a trend. Two findings underneath the headline matter more than it does. Opposition does not sort into the usual coalitions — 2024 Trump voters split roughly evenly at 49 percent support to 45 percent opposed, while Harris voters and non-voters opposed at 74 and 67 percent. And among those opposed, 56 percent wanted limits on data centers while 38 percent wanted an outright ban, which is a majority for negotiated constraint rather than prohibition and the clearest evidence yet that what this page recommends is also what most opponents are asking for. Water and the environment led the stated reasons at 32 percent, ahead of impact on local communities at 21 percent. The honest answer is that data center quality varies, that a commitment which is covered is not the same as one that is verified, and that not every operator negotiates in good faith.