Data Center Watch counted 396 active opposition groups fighting AI data center projects at the end of 2025. By the end of Q1 2026 that number hit 833, according to The Verge's column on the fight against AI data centers. In three months, local opposition blocked or delayed 75 projects worth $130 billion across 49 states. Residents filed more than 235,000 petition signatures along the way.
Miquel Vila, the researcher who built the Data Center Watch tally, says opposition to data centers has moved into the mainstream. Read the underlying case files and a pattern holds. Residents rarely organize around AI as a concept. They organize around a water withdrawal permit for an evaporative cooling tower, or a noise variance for a chiller plant running next to a subdivision. Both are cooling decisions. Both now show up on planning agendas as standalone line items. The Cooling Report has tracked the same mechanic in air-cooled plants hitting 80 decibels and drawing organized pushback and in North Carolina's push to ban evaporative cooling outright at hyperscale sites.
The projects piling up in that ledger are not fringe proposals. Meta's $27 billion Hyperion campus in Richland Parish, Louisiana; Google's $10 billion Project Mica in Kansas City, Missouri; xAI's $20 billion campus in Southaven, Mississippi; and QTS's $12 billion DeForest, Wisconsin site (dropped in January) all drew organized resident opposition before a single rack shipped. The Cooling Report already flagged an earlier tally, when the number sat at $64 billion in blocked or delayed projects. That figure doubled. It took one quarter.
Closed-loop and dry cooling systems cost more upfront than evaporative towers. But they draw no water withdrawal permit and run at a lower decibel count. Fewer permit line items means fewer openings for an opposition group to organize a hearing around. Sites specifying closed-loop or dry systems are starting to clear planning boards faster than the evaporative-tower projects stacking up in Data Center Watch's backlog, even though nobody has published that comparison as a formal metric yet. The spec sheet is turning into the permitting strategy.
The $130 billion tally will keep growing as long as evaporative towers and unshielded chiller plants stay the default spec for hyperscale sites. Operators who spec closed-loop or dry cooling are the ones still breaking ground next quarter. The rest turn into next quarter's case file.