Ohio has roughly 200 operational data centers, about 100 more planned or under construction, and at least 18 Northeast Ohio municipalities that are considering or have already enacted temporary moratoriums on new development. The state has provided $550 million in tax incentives to data center builders since 2024. The politics are pulling in both directions at once.
The Greater Cleveland Partnership, the region's largest chamber of commerce with 12,000 members including Cleveland Clinic, Sherwin-Williams, and Park Place Technologies, has released what it calls a "smart growth approach" framework opposing data center bans. CEO Baiju Shah described moratoriums as sending "a big not open for business signal." KeyCorp CEO Christopher Gorman, incoming GCP vice board chair, called AI "the biggest game changer of our collective lifetimes."
The GCP's eight-point framework asks operators to bear the cost of the infrastructure they stress, design for grid reliability and redundancy, achieve measurable energy efficiency, and commit to water and thermal stewardship. Those are reasonable asks. The framework also asks for strategic siting and community benefit commitments. The industry's record on those two points is what generated the moratoriums in the first place.
Will Hollingsworth, a Ravenna resident, gave a speech opposing a proposed data center in his community that went viral. Ravenna subsequently approved a moratorium. Cleveland rejected a permit for a $1.6 billion, 35-acre facility in the Slavic Village neighborhood. A statewide ballot initiative called Ohio Residents for Responsible Development is seeking to cap new data center capacity at 25 megawatts per facility.
The 25-megawatt cap proposal is a meaningful constraint on AI infrastructure. Current hyperscale AI training facilities routinely exceed 500 megawatts. A 25-megawatt cap does not preclude data centers; it precludes the scale at which AI hyperscalers operate. Whether that proposal reaches a ballot and whether it passes are different questions, but the underlying sentiment is clear: seven in ten Americans oppose data center construction near their homes, and 48 percent are strongly opposed. Those numbers are not a niche activist position.
Ohio's concentration of opposition matters for a specific reason. More than half of Ohio's data centers are in the Greater Columbus area. About 24 are in Cuyahoga County. The moratorium pressure is spreading from individual municipalities to a coordinated regional stance, and the GCP's pushback signals that the business community recognizes it has a legitimacy problem that tax incentives alone cannot solve.
The GCP framework explicitly includes "water and thermal stewardship" as a principle. That language did not appear in data center industry talking points three years ago. The ASU study on Phoenix data center heat pollution published this week, which found cooling exhaust raising downwind temperatures up to 4°F, is exactly the kind of documented community impact that turns local opposition into regulatory mandates. Operators who treat thermal stewardship as a checkbox will find that communities have started measuring.