The U.S. House of Representatives just passed a bill that creates a federal standard requiring data centers to pay for grid upgrades made in their favor. H.R. 9340, also known as the Ratepayer Protection Act, amends the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978, which would require each State regulatory authority and each non-regulated electric utility to consider the adoption of the bill within two years of its passing, if it is signed into law.

This bill would ensure that data centers with a capacity of 100 megawatts or more would have to pay “the full, incremental cost of any generation, transmission, or distribution upgrade necessary to serve the load of such large-load customer, including in the event of such large-load customer terminating a contract or other agreement with the electric utility pertaining to the sale of electric energy, or otherwise ceasing the purchase of electric energy from the electric utility.” This bill closely follows President Donald Trump’s “Ratepayer Protection Pledge,” where he made AI hyperscalers, utility providers, and state governors promise that they will pay their own way when it comes to their electricity demands. All this stemmed from the surprise price hikes that many residential users and small businesses suffered from because of the massive demand by AI data centers and has become one of the primary reasons why the majority of Americans now oppose data center developments in their communities.

Oregon is actually one of the first states to have taken concrete steps in controlling the utility price increases when it passed the POWER Act in 2025. This law is even more stringent, with any development using more than 20 megawatts required to pay its fair share, and has already resulted in a 30% hike for data center electricity bills and a 1.3% reduction for residential power costs. Virginia has also followed suit soon after its governor signed the Ratepayer Protection Pledge in July 2026, with Virginia’s State Corporation Commission requiring data centers to pay for all required transmission infrastructure.

Even though the House of Representatives has already passed H.R. 9340, it still needs to go through the Senate before finally heading towards the White House for signing by the President. But even if it passes through the remaining hurdles, and the U.S. adopts a federal standard where large data centers pay for grid upgrades done in their name, it’s still up to each state regulator if they will adopt the standard. Furthermore, states have up to two years to make a final decision, meaning there’s a chance that the various temporary data center bans and moratoriums would have expired even before state regulators would have enacted this bill.

New York State Governor Kathy Hochul has just announced the Community Investment Framework (CIF), which serves as a negotiation guide for towns and municipalities in the state when they’re dealing with data center developers, recommending that communities demand $1 million per megawatt for the privilege of housing data centers. According to Empire State Development [PDF], the state’s economic development agency, the CIF offers “a structured approach to identifying, negotiating, and documenting investments from data center developers/operators/owners that address local priorities and create lasting community benefits.”

The document recommends six principles during data center negotiations: an investment benchmark of $1 million per megawatt of utility demand; long-term planning, including plans for when the data center leaves the facility; a roadmap to manage ongoing costs for projects funded through the CIF; a list of local priority investment areas to address the needs of the community; local ownership confirmation of projects receiving funding from data centers; and clear timelines for any program, especially those that require phased, multi-year investments. Aside from these, it also gave several recommendations, such as focusing on community engagement, engaging decision-makers and counsel, incentivizing good faith and timely negotiations, and maintaining flexibility, among others.

While data centers have been around for decades now, AI data centers are relatively new and are putting more pressure on electricity and water supplies. They also offer limited job creation and community value compared to other industries, which is why Loudoun County, Virginia, which hosts 250 data centers, has started reining in these facilities as well. More than 500 states, counties, and localities across the nation have already passed a moratorium or temporary ban against data centers, including states like New York and Texas. However, these have an expiration date, meaning government units only have a limited time before they would have to start processing data center applications once more.

This framework is a useful guide for when municipalities have to start negotiating with data center developers again, helping ensure that these projects would bring more benefit to the community while limiting their negative effects. One Pennsylvania town actually created a similar comprehensive document, outlining 43 specific demands before approving a proposed data center in Plymouth Township. Unfortunately, the said developer decided to cancel the application and file a new one instead, with the town accusing it of demanding approval “by tantrum.”

Reports suggest that various data center developers have requested up to 9,000 MW from the state grid. However, this does not include operators that are opting to bring their own power sources or build their own power plants on site. So, if New York towns and municipalities adopt the CIF in their negotiations with data center developers, this could potentially add $9 billion or more towards their coffers. This may seem like a lot of money, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the expected $32 trillion that some experts suggest will be invested in data centers by 2050.

More than six months after Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers in Abu Dhabi and Bahrain were attacked by drones, the company has now had to tell customers to move their data to facilities in other regions. The Wall Street Journal reports that AWS has admitted that it's time for customers to jump ship to data centers located elsewhere in the world. In its AWS dashboard update, AWS confirmed "most customers have been able to re-establish their operations in other Regions by restoring backups or copying data that remained accessible. AWS Support remains available to help customers who need assistance moving their applications to alternate Regions."

The move comes as AWS continues repairs on the damaged data centers, but it stopped short of offering a timeline as to when customers can expect either location to be back online. AWS says that it remains committed to supporting its customers in Bahrain, but only said it would provide a further update early next year. It did not offer any specific recovery time frame for the restoration of services. Regarding the UAE, AWS says that it is working to replace affected infrastructure, but again only said it would provide an update on the restoration of services in the coming months.

Both affected data centers became targets for the Islamic Republic of Iran after the United States and Israel launched strikes on that country in February of this year. Months later, the Bahraini data center was struck by cruise missiles, and Iranian state media claimed it had been "destroyed."

The move is bad news for the United Arab Emirates. The U.A.E. has spent years trying to become a world leader in data processing, a pitch that led it to lobby U.S. officials to allow it to buy AI chips for its data centers.

Having made plenty of noise about OpenAI's decision to take a spot in a 5-gigawatt data center complex in May 2025, U.A.E. officials have since seen those plans stall. The WSJ points out that no lease has been signed well over a year later. OpenAI was expected to take 20% of the data center's total capacity, the kind of loss that is sure to sting officials if plans don't get back on track.

For its part, the U.A.E. is clearly well aware of the threat that the ongoing regional instability poses to its ambitions, and it's looking for ways to address the fears of potential partners. Officials have already hinted at the potential for underground data centers. While the move would make an already costly endeavor even more expensive, it could help defend new data centers from drone attacks. Building drone defense systems near data centers is another option.

Drone attacks can be catastrophic for any building, and data centers are no different. The data centers operated by AWS suffered fires and damaged infrastructure as a result of the strikes. In their efforts to fight the fires caused by drone strikes, emergency workers used water, causing further damage.

The Abu Dhabi and Bahrain data centers are relied upon by a variety of businesses in the banking and financial sectors. Those businesses cannot tolerate downtime, especially of the protracted variety. There's little sign of data centers slipping from the crosshairs of drone operators any time soon, either, and AWS is far from unique in finding its data centers under attack.

Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) claimed in April that it had hit a data center linked to Oracle in Dubai. That unit further threatened American tech companies, including Microsoft, Oracle, Alphabet, and Nvidia, this spring. It accused the companies of contributing to attacks on Iran. With that in mind, and with tensions in the Middle East looking unlikely to ease any time soon, it's perhaps unsurprising that AWS has asked customers to move data to safer data centers around the world.

The estimated natural gas consumption of data centers in the U.S. is expected to massively increase as these facilities increasingly rely on gas turbine generators for their power. According to Bloomberg, data centers are projected to use up to 15 billion cubic feet per day by 2035, a 117% increase from the previous forecast of 6.9 billion cubic feet. This number tracks with other data center forecasts, which suggest that data centers will use 20% of U.S. power by 2035, amounting to about 194 gigawatts.

Many data center projects have already been delayed by the lack of available power infrastructure, with power plants expected to take so much longer before they come online. It’s for this reason that many developments have turned towards onsite generators, so much so that AI demand is now compounding the jet engine shortage already plaguing the aviation industry.

Elon Musk was among the first to use gas turbines to power a data center when he deployed them at the Memphis Supercluster in 2024, even though he didn’t have permits for some of them. Now, it seems that the world’s richest man has seen this trend and has invested a billion dollars to buy a portable gas and diesel turbine leasing company. He even announced that SpaceX will start in-house turbine blade manufacturing to help cut down on the manufacturing bottleneck plaguing the jet engine industry.

New technologies like small modular reactors are currently being developed as an answer to AI data centers’ insatiable demand for power, like Ampera’s 3D-printed modular thorium nuclear reactor or Valar Atomics’ Ward 250 nuclear microreactor. Many AI hyperscalers, including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Oracle, have even invested in projects like these in a bid to generate massive amounts of clean energy for AI. However, they’re expected to take a few more years before they could become commercially viable — time that tech giants do not have. Because of this, Musk said that “natural gas will still be needed to supplement and bootstrap solar for several years.”

The deployment of natural gas turbines in data centers isn’t good news for the communities living around them, though. The NAACP said in its lawsuit against SpaceXAI that the use of these turbines at Colossus 2 increased nitrogen oxide exhaust by 111%, PM2.5 particles by 83%, and formaldehyde emissions by 88%. While the company has already pledged to remove all its unpermitted generators, the process will take at least a year as the portable turbines are slowly being replaced by a 1.2-gigawatt on-site power plant.

Aside from this, the massive demand for natural gas could potentially put a strain on the supply, causing prices to rise and hit the average consumer. Domestic natural gas producers are projected to raise their output by 35 billion cubic feet per day in the next decade, but this still falls short of the forecasted demand by around 11 billion cubic feet per day. So, unless output manages to catch up with the demand, prices are expected to shoot up and cause a scramble for available supply. Still, some experts suggest that there are still more than enough undeveloped gas fields within the U.S. to allow the industry to increase natural gas supplies and reduce costs.

Residents of Frederick County, Maryland, could be the beneficiaries of what is purported to be the biggest residential benefits package yet to be offered by data center developers, in a move a new report claims is a sign of a growing trend that Big Tech is trying to get ahead of fears and community pushback surrounding AI infrastructure. The $110 million deal includes new schools, water reclamation, and more, The Information reports.

According to the report, the Frederick Digital Campus offering could be a sign that data center developers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle are wising up to growing residential pushback and concerns around the building of large AI data centers in their communities, with developers "sweetening financial offers to municipalities and regulators to gain approval for new facilities" while "getting smarter" about ensuring they shoulder the cost of utilities like electricity. The report says AI builders are turning towards tangible benefits, rather than rhetoric, to get their projects approved.

The Maryland site, if approved, would see residents of Frederick County benefit from a $110 million investment in total, including a $30 million elementary school, $40 million of recreational facilities, a $14.5 million workforce training center, and a further $10.5 million for "agricultural preservation." That comes on top of a purported $215 million in annual property taxes the campus would pay upon completion, a 40% uptick in tax revenue.

It appears the developers have also offered concessions regarding construction, reducing the square footage by almost 20%, and reducing potable water (water safe for human consumption and use) usage by 80%, with up to $100 million also proposed for a water reclamation system.

The proposal is yet to be approved, but if passed, the campus would boast Amazon and Aligned Data centers amongst its tenants. The report reiterates the deal "reflects a rapidly emerging consensus by both tech companies and host governments to eliminate giveaways to developers and to accelerate benefits to towns in the vicinity of the facilities."

A further cited example from Pennsylvania claims AWS announced it would not seek any economic incentives to reduce the tax burden on its 4.5GW, 36-building data center campus in Homer City.

The report further cites occasions where big tech companies are taking the side of consumers and residents over power rate debates, with Microsoft recently said to have challenged an American Transmission Co. and We Energies’ proposal for its Wisconsin data center, claiming the plan wasn't robust enough to protect retail customers from footing the bill if demand was lower than expected. In another case, Google and Amazon are said to have lobbied Virginia regulators to ensure they would fund transmission upgrades required for their infrastructure, rather than let an energy company cover the cost by marking up customer bills.

With concerns around data center buildouts impacting local water supplies, energy rates, and even contributing to noise pollution, it's clear that Big Tech companies appear to be trying to grease the wheels on a local level by investing more directly in some local communities. Big Tech has reportedly now spent more than $1 trillion on AI infrastructure, so even local investments to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars are a drop in the ocean for companies.

Regulators are trying to pump the brakes on data center buildouts, with some 500 data centers on hold in the US because of various moratoriums and legal pauses.

Patagonia, a region of Argentina with 17,300 glaciers, has the potential to turn into a data center hotspot. The cool climate and abundant energy resources there are drawing interest from the likes of Amazon, Google, and OpenAI, according to Reuters. However, there needs to be more work on tapping into the resources and equipping high-speed networking, like fiber, to make the place irresistible. There’s also the question of political stability with a presidential election next year.

Argentina, and Patagonia in particular, has some juicy lures for potential hyperscale data center operators, and the cold climate is a bonus. That environment helps keep data centers cool and use less power while maintaining agreeable thermals. Patagonia has tens of thousands of glaciers across the Northern Patagonian Ice Field and the Southern Patagonian Ice Field combined.

Another bonus to would-be Patagonian data center operators are the range of energy sources there. Reuters mentions hydroelectric power, wind, and shale gas, but some operators who are already established are also adding solar.

Then, the social and political climate looks good for data centers in Argentina. According to the source, the populace doesn't hate data centers yet. At least there seems to be no campaign groups or public backlash. It is also reported that President Javier Milei has been making changes to court Big Tech. That’s a positive, and may be a negative. Positive in that the Argentines are now being accommodating to the needs of huge AI data centers. Negative, as there’s a presidential election next year, where things could take a dramatic turn, or not. There are also some regions in Patagonia where data center expansions may be complicated by the wishes and needs of indigenous communities. Businesses offering sizable, long-term investments aren’t keen on uncertainty.

With the pretty good environment for hyperscale buildouts established, it isn’t that surprising to see Reuters say OpenAI has confirmed a $25B and 500MW clean energy data center in the country. Lesser-known (to us) companies like Poland's Green Capital also plan a $3B and 300MW data center in Patagonia. It is also reported that FlexDomes, a U.S.-based green data center company, is planning the first stage of a 120MW facility.

Meanwhile, in neighboring South American countries, there are large developments from the likes of Amazon, Google, and others. Argentina must have these data center whales in its sights, as they are known to be scouting for expansion into new locations.

As well as political / business risk, Argentina has some structural weaknesses that need to be addressed by those developing in the country. It is said to have connectivity and power grid infrastructure deficiencies, for example. In other locations, we have seen these addressed on almost a per-project basis, with some state intervention, but it adds some high costs to setting up.

Data center builds are one of the hotly contested items worldwide. Many states and cities have upheld moratoriums on new buildouts due to power usage, water consumption, and noise concerns. Thailand is the latest nation to pump the proverbial brakes, with the government requesting that existing buildouts hit the pause button while coming up with a more precise regulatory framework.

Government heads requested that agencies compile information about current and future data centers during this week, in a bid to create unified legislation. The country currently has few laws specific to data centers, leading to legal voids like zoning a data center as a "warehouse" right next to a hospital. Much like everywhere else, the country has seen growing complaints about data centers' water and power usage.

After the week is out on September 11, the government expects to take about a month to come up with a regulatory draft, making the pause technically an indeterminate timeframe — though further delays wouldn't benefit either party, as Thailand considers the industry critical to the country’s competitiveness. The catch is that pausing construction isn't enforceable, so companies can elect to plow ahead regardless while the legislation is discussed.

NESDC (National Economic and Social Development Council) secretary-general Danucha Pichayanan is very specific: "we don't have the power to suspend the construction of the 49 data centers" currently under construction. However, when the legislation arrives, it will apply retroactively to ongoing projects, though with an adjustment period for in-progress builds. New builds will naturally need to comply with the legislation from the get-go.

Some companies may elect to soldier on with the belief their buildouts will be in compliance with the reasonably predictable content of the new laws, or betting that they could win future legal challenges — a dynamic that's already in play elsewhere with Project Jupiter. The incoming legislation is expected to cover power consumption (and possibly generation), closed-loop cooling, and water-surplus guarantees, meaning builders already have a fairly good idea of what they'll need to do.

Not complying with the request for a pause might be a game of political chicken, though, as the government may retaliate with regulatory delays and additional costs to power connections. Just last Thursday, Thailand's energy ministry raised concerns over a Bangkok data center that may be planning to hold diesel stockpiles far in excess of the 200,000 liters it has permission to.

On that topic, Thailand revised laws on industrial power delivery last July, and among other requirements, demands a bank guarantee of ฿4.5 million ($134,000) per megawatt. Half the money will be refunded when the actual usage reaches 50% of proposed utilization, and the rest when usage hits 70%. This mechanism is meant to stop preemptive allocation of power delivery capacity that might remain unused for months, years, or not at all — once again, mirroring datacenter playbooks elsewhere around the world.

At face value, the amount of $134k per megawatt sounds like a small price to pay for a builder to get ahead of the pack, but its per-megawatt nature means that a hyperscale facility pulling 200 MW or more needs to place around $27 million in escrow.

With the power laws recently revised, water consumption is seemingly the largest concern, as the current legal framework allows companies to make deals directly with utilities without additional safeguards. For example, in Chonburi, an operator signed a decade-long deal with Eastwater Stecon Utilities for 3.3 million cubic meters annually, or about 36,900 residents. It's expected that the new laws will add much stricter requirements to avoid localized deserts.

A Bitcoin mining data center in El Reno, Oklahoma, has been condemned after it leaked 3 million gallons of water, reports Koco TV News. Schools, businesses, and city and county offices were all closed last week due to the leak.

According to the source report, the Athlon Blockchain LLC-owned data center shouldn’t even have been operating, as the city issued it a Stop Work Order in 2023 due to “multiple fire and life safety code violations as well as the expiration of the building and electrical permits that had previously been issued.” The city asserts that none of the costs related to the water leak at the property will be passed on to citizens, according to the source.

We don’t know whether the Bitcoin mining data center development went ahead despite the Stop Work Order in 2023 due to ignorance or a devil-may-care attitude toward regulation. Koco reports that the owner of the property was given until the end of 2023 to comply with safety codes and obtain new permits, while construction should have been put on hold. Now it is believed that the firm building the facility set up the data center and began operations without any further consultation with the city. Perhaps the owners thought they could sidestep the Stop Work Order by housing the data center in an array of shipping containers.

Clearly, regulators should check that codes, directives, and ordinances are obeyed. This incident shows a disastrous leak from an insufficiently policed operator with serious repercussions for local citizens. Thus, the city has now committed to routinely reviewing compliance. As for the waste and costs involved in this case, a statement on behalf of the city says it is “preparing to take the necessary legal actions to recoup all costs and expenses related to the water leak from the property owner, including city resources expended in locating and addressing the leak.”

There has been a lot of controversy recently regarding data center usage of water. Concerns have been heightened due to widespread drought conditions in the Northern Hemisphere this summer.

Denver Water, which supplies the city and its surrounding areas, has imposed Stage 1 drought restrictions in its service area starting August 2026 as water supplies continue to drop. According to Gadget Review, commercial properties like data centers can only water grass twice a week — on Tuesdays and Fridays — until September 30. Starting October 1, lawn sprinklers will be banned for use until the Board of Water Commissioners declares otherwise. However, one resident who was out walking their dog saw that the new AI data center built close to their home was watering its lawn and using so much water that some areas have started to puddle.

“We can’t water our lawns until next summer, at the earliest, but you better believe that they are watering their entire green with so many sprinklers that it’s already making a giant pond, but I can’t water my f****ng tomatoes. I hate it here,” one resident claimed in the video.

This has understandably raised a lot of outrage, especially with all the widespread, bipartisan resistance that these data centers have been facing. However, there are still a lot of unknowns when it comes to the video. Firstly, we do not know when the video was shot; there’s a possibility that it was recorded on either a Tuesday or a Friday, meaning the site was well within its rights to water its lawns, at least until September 30.

The publication also noted several other possibilities: it could be using recycled, non-potable water, which Denver Water explicitly states, “are approved to irrigate any day of the week”; it could hold a variance from the utility provider, granting them permission to water their grass under “special circumstances,” or it was just plainly violating the law. Without further information, there’s just no way we can determine what is going on based on a single video. Nevertheless, this compounds the negative perception that data centers are already facing. Although closed-loop cooling technologies like those from Microsoft and Nvidia have essentially cut data center water consumption for cooling to zero, we still cannot get around the fact that several sites have already caused water issues for their neighbors.

Many people are raising issues about data centers’ massive resource consumption and the other negative effects like noise and air pollution that they could potentially bring to their surroundings. It’s for these reasons that Denver, and hundreds of other jurisdictions, have passed temporary bans and moratoriums on data center development.

Independence City Council member John Perkins lost his position after 68.05% of voters opted to oust him in a special election because he supported data centers. According to NBC News, Perkins was one of the five councilors who said yes to the tax breaks amounting to more than $6 billion for the Nebius data center being built in the area.

Many members of the community have been campaigning against this development ahead of the March City Council meeting when these tax breaks were approved, but the council ended up voting 5-2 anyway in favor of the data center. Perkins is the third to have lost their seat after this vote, with Jared Fears, who was running for re-election in the city council, and Bridget McCandless, who was running for mayor, losing their respective bids.

“Politicians aren’t entitled to elected positions. They’re elected by the people to serve those people. When they stop serving the people they were elected to represent, they’re voted out of office,” a member of the Stop the AI Data Center in Independence Facebook group said. “This is democracy in action.” While Perkins hasn’t released a statement yet after the release of the unofficial results of the Special Recall Election, he previously said in an Op-Ed on The Kansas City Star that he stands by his decision to support the Nebius tax breaks and that recalling him would be a setback for the city.

“You can disagree with that call, and I respect that. However, disagreement isn’t a crime, and I don’t believe it is grounds to attempt to overturn an election that happened two years ago,” Perkins wrote. “One vote is not a reason to erase the previous hard work I’ve done for my district.”

Despite the massive support for ousting Perkins, we should also note that the voter turnout for this issue has been abysmally small. Out of the 14,250 registered voters in Jackson County, only 1,643, or 11.5%, went to the polls to vote for or against the councilor.

Another Missouri town has voted out half of its city council, which approved a data center project within its jurisdiction. The people of Festus, Missouri, ousted four of the eight members of its council in a regular election in April 2026 after they approved a 360-acre data center project in the area. Another petition was raised to have the remaining four members recalled, but the measure was shot down by the council.

The popularity of data centers has fallen across the country, with the number of bans and moratoriums over these developments exceeding 500, spread across towns, cities, counties, and even states. Interestingly, the pushback against these developments straddles beliefs and political affiliation, making it harder for hyperscalers to get new projects off the ground.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has downplayed the water consumption issue that AI data centers are facing, saying that it has been blown out of proportion over time and does not keep up with the latest developments in data center cooling technology. Altman said this in an episode of the Sources Podcast with Alex Heath, where the two talk about the backlash against AI development. He claimed that producing a single almond in California is equivalent to 38,000 ChatGPT queries.

“You know, I saw this thing going around about the water usage of ChatGPT. And it was like every time you run a single ChatGPT query, it’s like, you know, you run your shower for like six hours. And the water never comes back, and it’s just done. I don’t have the exact calculation in front of me, but I think the real number is something like — doing this from memory, it might be wrong, but it’s close — for every 38,000 ChatGPT queries, that is the same amount of water that is used in the production of a single almond in California… This is like the full-on, you know, total true water accounting, not just what’s running in one data center,” Altman told the host.

“There’s a question of like where this came from because the people that are scarfing down 12 almonds at a time don’t feel like they’re doing something horrible from a water perspective, for the most part. It is true that data centers at one point used evaporative cooling, but they have not done that in a long time. Like if you look at a modern very large data center, it uses the equivalent amount of water as an office building in terms of, you know, people like running the sinks and the toilets and whatever. So, that has been a robust meme and difficult to disprove, but I don’t think it holds up to any scrutiny.”

It’s true that almonds are some of the most water-intensive crops being grown in the U.S. Researchers say that it takes about 1.1 gallons of water to grow a single almond. By comparison, Altman's own statements in the past indicate that one ChatGPT response uses somewhere between 1 to 50mL of water, ostensibly using older evaporative cooling techniques, or about 0.0002 to 0.013 gallons per query. While this is nowhere near Altman’s 38,000 estimate, it’s still about 85 to 5,500 ChatGPT queries per almond using an unspecified cooling method. Nevertheless, training AI models in older facilities can use far more water, with estimates suggesting that GPT-3 used up almost 185,000 gallons of water with older systems, while the increasing popularity of AI, especially AI agents which use up a lot more tokens than just chatbots, means that data centers could still use more water compared to almond farming.

In fact, multiple data centers across the United States have faced issues with their water consumption, with one site in Fayette County, Georgia, using up 29 million gallons over a span of 15 months and another development in Morgan County, Georgia, allegedly causing the water of its neighbors to turn muddy. Altman admitted that data centers that used older technologies like evaporative cooling used a lot of water, but he also mentioned that new techniques and technologies have been developed that cut down data center water use. Some examples of this include Nvidia’s liquid cooling system that runs “hotter than a hot tub,” which cuts water use by 100%, and Microsoft’s closed-loop cooling systems, which use the same amount of water as a restaurant. Amazon even claimed that its data centers consume only 0.075% of the water that Americans use for their lawns and gardens.

You can watch the complete podcast episode below.

GoPro just announced a merger with Starman Optical, Inc., an optical-photonics company, saying that the deal would allow the combined entity to produce U.S.-made optical transceivers for use in AI data centers. According to the press release, Starman will pay shareholders $285 million in cash for the action camera company, amounting to $1.14 per share, and will also pay off its outstanding debt of $92 million. Despite that, current GoPro investors will retain 10% ownership of the post-merger company.

Starman said that the move will give it access to GoPro’s intellectual property, which amounts to more than 2,500 patents, as well as its imaging solutions, advanced optics, and other technologies that it has developed. This deal is crucial in keeping the camera company afloat, especially as it has recently faced declining sales and increasing costs, leading the camera maker to warn investors that there is “substantial doubt about the company’s ability to continue.”

On the other hand, the merger would expand GoPro’s portfolio to include optical transceivers, which are getting increased demand as AI data centers transition to fiber optics for their networking needs. Aside from data centers, the deal would also allow GoPro to expand into defense, government, robotics, and the aerospace industries, where it “intends to leverage its IP, optics, and imaging capabilities” to supply the increasing demand for solutions made within the U.S.

While GoPro has successfully moved its manufacturing out of China to protect its supply chain from U.S. tariffs, it still has no local manufacturing. So, this merger would allow it to have production within American borders and help isolate it from further economic instability brought about by surprise tariff announcements.

This could help it secure its future, especially as the FCC has recently been making moves to keep foreign-made tech like routers, LiDAR-equipped drones, and robots. It also makes sense for the two companies to partner — even though consumer action cameras and optical transceivers for data centers sound like they have nothing in common, they share a lot of technologies between them, like imaging sensors and advanced lenses or optics.

This isn’t the first company with seemingly no relation to data centers to expand or pivot towards it. Struggling shoemaker and apparel brand Allbirds pivoted towards it earlier this year, resulting in a 580% jump in its stock price after the announcement, although it has since settled back down to its pre-announcement prices. AI data centers are indeed a tempting investment, with consultancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers saying that investment on the technology could hit $32 trillion by 2050.

PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) estimates that spending on AI data centers could reach as much as $31.6 trillion in the next decade and a half, with optimistic outlooks suggesting that capital expenditure could potentially hit $50 trillion. Bloomberg reports that this amount exceeds the spending that railways, electrification, or the internet required when they were being set up for the first time. It also pointed out that investments in AI data center infrastructure aren’t a one-time expense that would last decades, unlike railroad networks, the power grid, or fiber optic cables — instead, data center operators are expected to purchase new GPUs and related infrastructure every four to six years.

GPU development is happening at breakneck pace, with Nvidia, AMD, and other manufacturers releasing new generations every two to three years. In fact, one Google architect said that a data center GPU service life is only about one to three years, which has got some experts concerned that GPU depreciation could be the next big crisis for hyperscalers. “Railways. Electrification. The internet. Each required enormous amounts of capital and defined an era,” the publication reiterated from the report. “The AI infrastructure cycle underway dwarfs all three. This one resets every four to six years — and shows no signs of ending.”

Nvidia and other chip manufacturers would be some of the biggest winners in this spending spree, but other hardware industries would also benefit, like networking equipment and even the copper material needed for running power inside data centers. PwC is confident in its forecast, especially as it claimed that both capital and demand for the AI build-out exist. It also broke down the investment in each region — spending in the U.S. is projected to hit $15.1 trillion, followed by the Asia-Pacific region, including China and India, at $8.2 trillion. Europe will likely spend $5.6 trillion, and it’s trailed by the Middle East at $1.1 trillion and Africa, with $255 billion.

The AI build-out is not without risks, though. The report cited power availability, data sovereignty requirements, and chip availability as factors affecting the build-out. For example, data centers in the U.S. are forecasted to consume 20% of its total power supply by 2035, which is why operators are turning to natural gas turbines for on-site power. However, this has also led to jet engine shortages, which is why SpaceX has started in-house turbine blade manufacturing to cut delivery delays by up to 18 months. It also said the geopolitical tensions, like trade bans on rare earth elements and high-end chips, could cut the global investment forecast by 20%.

There are still some concerns that the current AI boom is a bubble that will pop sooner or later. This is especially true as some AI tech companies currently have “hidden debt” worth around $1.65 trillion, while costs have started spiking as AI companies like OpenAI look for a path towards profitability. Despite that, Nvidia is still going full steam ahead, partnering with several firms to build a $500 billion AI infrastructure fund for further AI investments.

The Oklahoma Office of the Attorney General commanded the City of Claremore to release body cam footage requested by farmer Darren Blanchard and his legal team without charging them $17,125.44. According to 404 Media, the city is asking for that amount so that it will release information on Blanchard’s arrest in April 2026 for speaking 30 seconds longer than the allowed time during a public consultation for a proposed data center in the area, as well as city records of previous disturbances in other public meetings. This led Kate Griffin, one of the farmer’s lawyers, to complain to the Oklahoma Attorney General, which looked at the situation.

Claremore justified the fees by saying that it would need to spend $16,540.44 for a legal review of requested records “to ensure that all information which must be withheld relating to members of the public and the City’s personnel is redacted in order to protect their privacy.” It’s also asking for $585 — equal to the 15-hour pay of a city clerk — to conduct the search of the documents.

“The City knows and is aware that any documents released to Mr. Blanchard and to those associated with him, regardless of the privacy implications of individuals named in such documents, are subject to wide distribution, including on social media,” Claremore said in its response to the Oklahoma AG. It also added, “Her persistence in maintaining an overly onerous request demonstrates that this dispute has nothing to do with transparency and likely has everything to do with causing excessive time/money expense to the City in order to generate public sympathy for her client and negative publicity for the City.”

However, Assistant Attorney General for Oklahoma Anthony Sykes said that this isn’t a valid reason to charge Blanchard thousands of dollars for this request. He said that the state’s law says that public bodies can only charge for the direct costs of searching and copying data when it comes to information requests. More than that, all the fees being charged must be disclosed publicly beforehand.

“The City has not posted a schedule of fees as required by the Open Records Act. Having failed to give the requisite notice of the fees charged for public access to City records, the City is foreclosed from charging search fees,” Sykes said. “If I were to conclude otherwise, there would be no incentive for public bodies to comply with the statute. They could simply ignore what the ORA requires and charge what they deem reasonable on a case-by-case basis.”

Another justification the city used for the egregious fees is the need to redact the body cam footage “to protect the privacy of the public and City personnel.” However, the assistant attorney general said that the incident happened at a public meeting with no reasonable expectation of privacy. Because of this, the city should hand over the requested data as soon as possible.

Blanchard is being charged with trespassing, a municipal crime with a penalty of just $200, making these charges very steep by comparison. Even though it might’ve been easier to plead guilty and pay the fine, the farmer is fighting the city on the grounds that it’s violating his right to free speech.

This isn’t the only arrest across the country that’s related to resistance from data center projects. A Kansas teacher was arrested in July 2026 for lightly clapping at a meeting in support of a speaker after they finished speaking, although the town eventually dropped the charges against them. In fact, as of August 2026, at least 37 people have been arrested for protesting against data centers.

Donald Trump doesn't appear to be a fan of the data center backlash that has swept the nation. Posting on his Truth Social platform, the President said that communities that reject data centers only do so because "they want to end up being backwards and poor," and posited that China "could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement." The comment comes amid a wide, albeit unorganized, pushback to data center buildouts in the United States that's left local communities and municipalities reckoning with an unanticipated and rapid infrastructure buildout.

Local pushback has been widespread and consistent across the country. Earlier this month, an Amazon data center came under fire for circumventing public feedback based on old laws. Since April, leaders across the nation have received an elevated number of credible death threats related to data centers since April. And last month, the number of local bans on data center developments crossed over 500 within the United States.

The President says to "let Data Reign" if communities "want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place." Presumably, the President missed a comma after "taxes" and does not mean that data centers will lower the number of jobs available. The economic argument surrounding data centers is a tough issue to quantify, though it's not completely detached from reality.

A July study from Georgia Tech found that data center developments increase local employment by 3.5%, total wages by 5%, business establishments by 4.7%, and median household income by 1.9%. Further, the developments reduce unemployment rates. Critically, however, the study found that these benefits mainly show up in metropolitan areas, calling the benefits in rural areas "negligible." The study also highlights that data centers often employ fewer than 100 permanent workers, with specialized services "imported from outside the country."

The research also looked into trade-offs with electricity prices, finding that prices rise an average of 5% after a data center is built in a community.

In another analysis, Brookings found that, although new data center construction creates jobs, the number is somewhere between 100 and 200 permanent positions. Additionally, it found that areas with data centers see average home prices rising between 2% and 5% without any impact on wages.

Early attempts at studying the effects of data centers on local communities have, on one hand, substantiated the claims that data centers bring economic activity. On the other, they suggest that economic activity is smaller than expected, localized to the area in question, and comes with unintended side effects like higher electricity prices. There's also an environmental concern, one that is difficult to study in the midst of buildouts.

Instead of outright banning data centers, local governments and increasingly state governments have paused development to study the impact. In July, New York Governor Cathy Hochul signed a one-year moratorium on data center construction to study the economic and environmental impacts. In early August, Texas Governor Greg Abbott directed state agencies to cut data centers off from connecting to the Texas power grid until an audit of the facility's power and water usage is completed. Republican Governor Mike DeWine of Ohio has made similar directives.

At a national level, the Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act, sponsored by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, proposes a pause on data center construction and new AI products until the government can review both the environmental impacts of new data center construction, as well as the impacts on jobs for new AI products. The bill has been introduced, though it has yet to be debated in committee or voted on in the House.

Electricity supply in the U.S. is a limiting factor preventing AI data centers from coming online as quickly as possible. Because of this, many projects are turning to portable natural gas turbine generators to get the electricity they need and bypass long wait times to connect to the grid. This has driven demand for turbines, so Elon Musk said on X that SpaceX will bring turbine blade and vane casting in-house.

Musk was one of the first to deploy “portable” power generators to power a data center, allowing him to bring the Colossus data center in Memphis, Tennessee, online in record time. Note that these mobile generators aren’t small devices — they’re massive units about the size of one trailer and may also include another trailer or two of other necessary parts and accessories to run it (not including the tank needed for its fuel). OpenAI followed suit a few months later, announcing it will deploy turbines at the first Stargate data center to deliver additional power.

This sudden influx of demand has led to jet engine shortages for data center operators. Beyond the fact that engine manufacturers weren’t prepared for the AI boom, commercial aviation has already been suffering from its own shortages due to supply chain and engine design issues even before data center developers started buying up turbines.

Turbine blade and vane manufacturing is one of the biggest bottlenecks in jet engine production right now. The blades used in these engines are difficult to build, with one batch often requiring 60 to 90 weeks to produce from start to finish. That’s because these are specialized parts that are subjected to extreme forces and temperatures, especially in the core of the engine. Even if the engines that these blades will end up on are bolted to the ground or strapped to a trailer instead of hanging under the wing of an airliner, manufacturing them still requires the same level of care and precision.

Because of this, it seems that Musk wants to take things into his own hands by making SpaceX manufacture its own turbine blades. He says this move could cut deliveries by 18 months, allowing xAI to get brand-new turbine generators much faster instead of waiting behind a long queue expected to stretch into 2030.

SpaceX and Tesla aren’t abandoning solar power, but Musk says that “natural gas will still be needed to supplement and bootstrap solar for several years.” Because of this, it seems that he’s willing to invest in parts of turbine manufacturing as demand for turbine generators for data centers increases in the coming years. He has even reportedly quietly bought a portable gas and diesel turbine fleet for around a billion dollars, possibly to take advantage of this boom.

It’s unclear how Elon Musk intends to make turbine blades and vanes, especially given how complicated the process is. Nevertheless, he’s no stranger to tackling “impossible” problems, especially given his track record with Tesla and SpaceX.

The DataOne data center in Vineland, New Jersey, has faced a slew of complaints from the community since construction began in 2025. According to Stand.earth, the project has reportedly been operating several unpermitted gas turbines on site, spewing air pollution in the area near two local schools. Aside from that, the site has also faced allegations of constructing an unpermitted 1.5-million-gallon liquefied natural gas storage tank and of unacceptable noise levels at night, which affected residents within a half-mile radius of the data center.

Matt Williams, chairperson of the Sustain South Jersey group, told Tom’s Hardware that construction had already begun even before Nebius signed a multi-year agreement to “deliver dedicated capacity to Microsoft from its new data center in Vineland, New Jersey,” in October 2025. However, the residents only became aware that the project was a data center after the $19.4 billion deal to secure around 100,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs for the tech giant was made public.

Vineland residents began seeing references to the data center in various government documents, prompting several questions to the city government. Because of this, the city called a town hall meeting last January 2026 — several months after construction on the data center had already begun, with DataOne CEO Charles-Antoine Beyney admitting that the meeting should have been initiated several months before.

A few weeks before the town hall, some people living within a half-mile radius of the site started complaining about noise from the development. While they couldn’t confirm the source of the noise, it was often described as a low hum, similar to that of a generator. A later investigation revealed that the site had 62 gas turbines deployed in the area, with at least 45 running at any given time. This is similar to what SpaceXAI has done in Memphis, Tennessee, where it deployed 69 unpermitted natural gas turbines to power its data centers. While the company has since promised to remove these polluting generators, it will do so only over a span of one year, as they’re being slowly replaced by a 1.2-GW on-site power plant.

There have also been concerns that the site’s stormwater management system does not comply with the state’s regulations. A third-party engineering review stated that if these issues are not fixed, they could result in on-site and off-site flooding, especially given the site’s massive 55-acre size. The experts also noted that the data center has “underestimated the annual groundwater recharge by at least 20 million gallons per year,” which could result in lower aquifer levels and reduce the amount of water available or the water quality for the people living in the area.

“The incident should shatter the illusion that Microsoft is a ‘good neighbor’ or in any way more responsible than the other Big Tech companies,” Stand.earth Senior Campaigner Nathan Taft said in the statement. “This investigation has revealed that far from ‘doing this work differently than other’ as it promised, Microsoft is drawing directly from Elon Musk’s xAI playbook of doing the damage first and asking for permission later.”

In an interview with Tom’s Hardware, Nathan said that even though Microsoft does not directly own or operate the Vineland data center, it stands to reason that the tech giant should do something about all these complaints, as it’s the one that has contracted Nebius for the computing power, which resulted in DataOne’s construction project. He compared this to a contractor making a mess on their client’s neighbor’s property. Even though a third-party provider — DataOne — was at fault for the issue, the fact that the people have already been complaining should give Nebius pause and compel Microsoft to do something.

DataOne’s actions in New Jersey directly contradict the promise Microsoft made back in January 2026, and residents are asking the tech giant to stand by its word. Although the concerns about air and noise pollution are technically not mentioned in the company’s “community-friendly” commitments, these issues still impact the quality of life of the people living around the DataOne data center. Aside from that, the unpermitted construction shows it does not adhere to the rules of Vineland. “The developers have been ‘act first, pay the fine, and ask for forgiveness later,’” says Mr. Williams.

Indiana Michigan Power, or I&M, which serves over half a million residential customers across the two states, said that it’s planning to cut rates for residential customers in Indiana. According to the company, it’s planning “one of the nation’s largest base rate reduction plans,” with the total bill reduction saving Hoosiers approximately $59 million in electric bills by 2027. This translates to about $100 per year for each home that uses around 1,000 kWh monthly. Aside from that, I&M wants to freeze rates for the next three years, offering its customers a measure of stability as data centers are forecasted to use 20% of U.S. power by 2035.

The plan is still under consideration by the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission (IURC), with a decision expected by June 2027, with residents seeing savings by the summer of that year. This also isn’t the first time the state has seen electricity rate cuts in recent months. I&M has already reduced its rates twice in the first half of 2026, offering some users much-needed relief from rising electricity costs brought about by the massive demand from AI data centers.

PJM Interconnection, which operates the grid that I&M uses, has implemented “irreversible” price hikes of up to 76%, but it seems that I&M was able to isolate ratepayers from increased prices. It achieved this through load growth, allowing it to recoup its capital investments on grid upgrades more quickly, and the increased revenue brought by the massive consumption of large customers like data centers.

“As Indiana continues to experience unprecedented growth, we are taking action to help our customers benefit from that growth through lower costs, enhanced value and continued investments to strengthen our system,” said I&M president and chief operating officer Maryam S. Brown. “We are proud to join forces with state leaders to advance economic development and make energy more affordable – while continuing to provide system reliability upgrades.”

Indiana isn’t the first state to see reduced rates driven by increased rates or usage by larger customers. Oregon approved a 1.3% reduction in residential electricity prices in early July, as customers that used up 20 MW or more saw a 30% increase in their utility bills. Virginia, which plays host to a ton of data centers, is now following suit, with its regulators requiring firms to pay for dedicated upstream electrical infrastructure being built to serve their needs.

Moves like this should allow some Americans to see their bills go down a little bit and address one of the major concerns that they raise whenever a data center project is proposed in their neighborhood. However, several other issues like water supply impact and noise pollution must also be resolved to reduce the community’s resistance to these developments.

Researchers from the University of Mary Washington in Virginia found that of the 31 localities with an existing, approved, or proposed data center, 25 of them have non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) that make it difficult, if not impossible, for their citizens to find information about these projects. According to NPR, these NDAs have left the questions of many residents unanswered, making them feel left out of the decision process and increasing their distrust of their leaders.

Many officials defended signing these secrecy agreements, saying that this is standard practice among tech companies, and that they could lose the potential business and revenue that data center projects could bring to their jurisdiction if they fail to sign the NDA. Louisiana Economic Development Secretary Susan Bourgeois even told the publications that NDAs are “fundamental for economic development” as they allow the state to compete with other states and territories for the data centers’ business. “The last thing that they want to have happened in the beginning of the discussion, or in any part of the discussion, is for their information that they’re sharing to be disclosed publicly. So, without NDAs, our work, frankly, just doesn’t happen,” the agency secretary said to NPR. She also added, “The irony is that we, we use NDAs not to be more cloaked, we use NDAs to be more forthcoming.”

NDAs aren’t only limited to Louisiana, as other towns across the U.S. have signed these secrecy agreements even before they started talks with potential data center projects in their regions. Some Wisconsin citizens raised a similar issue in early 2026, when at least four municipalities reportedly signed NDAs with Microsoft and Meta as they negotiated with the two companies. These confidentiality agreements are some of the things that drive the heated debate between elected officials and ordinary citizens, with the latter often feeling betrayed and sold out by the former when they belatedly find out that a data center will be put up in their community.

However, West Feliciana Parish proved that it could get a data center deal without keeping its details top secret. Parish President Kenny Havard said that economic development does not require NDAs. “I don’t think NDAs are necessary unless they’re going to bring you in a room and share some proprietary information. When you’re talking about land sales, tax incentives, those sorts of things that affect the citizens, it should be out in the open. It should be transparent,” Havard told the outlet. He also said, “We’re proud that we did it without having to sign NDAs. And I think it just shows that you can do these projects without keeping the people in the dark.”

Data centers are unpopular among U.S. citizens right now, with projects facing resistance and moratoriums across the nation. While we’ve seen over a hundred protests against the developments happen simultaneously, researcher Andy Masley wanted to answer one question: what is driving the pushback against these projects? Is it big tech? AI skepticism? Or maybe even China? But after reviewing data from multiple polls, his answer seems quite simple: the “object-level local environmental and economic harms” that have been widely reported in the media.

Multiple data center sites owned and operated by different hyperscalers have found themselves in hot water with the people surrounding them. The biggest issue that caught the attention of the public is the massive amounts of electricity that these developments use, requiring grid operators like PJM Interconnection to expand their infrastructure to service AI data center needs, which costs billions of dollars. Unfortunately, the capital expenditure for these upgrades has typically been passed on equally to all users, with ratepayers seeing price hikes of up to 76% on their utility bills.

It has gotten to the point that President Donald Trump had to make tech giants, AI hyperscalers, utility operators, and state governors sign a “ratepayer protection pledge” so that AI companies “pay their own way” when it comes to their electricity needs. But this move was too little, too late to halt increased electricity costs to the huge swathe of the American population that PJM Interconnection serves. Oregon is the only state, so far, to have passed a law that requires sites using 20MW or more to pay for their own share, with PGE, the state’s largest power provider, hiking data center bills by 30% while also cutting residential costs by 1.3%.

There have also been reports of two data centers in Georgia and another in Wyoming causing water issues in the surrounding neighborhoods. This includes low water pressure due to excessive consumption, a drop in quality with muddy water pouring out of taps, and water discharges that contaminated a city’s reclamation water supply. Aside from those, there are also problems with noise pollution, like the site that generates noise 24/7, as if “someone set up a vacuum, like in your living room,” and air pollution from mobile turbine generators and dedicated natural gas power plants.

All of these are “object-level” concerns, meaning these are specific issues that exist, have happened on other sites, and are directly observable by other people. However, Masley also points out that some of the coverage of these issues was either overblown or only showed the concerns of the residents, without putting them into the context of the actual project and comparing them with other existing data centers in other areas. Because of this, many people have become fearful that the issues found in other developments will automatically apply to the data center being proposed in their community.

Some data center developers also aren't helping to assuage fears. Some are pushing back against moratoriums and bans, and have begun suing local jurisdictions. One town in Pennsylvania listed 43 specific demands that the developer called “too difficult” and pulled out of negotiations before applying again, with the council calling the move an attempt at “approval by tantrum.”

Lux Claridge, the teacher who was arrested in Emporia, Kansas, during an AI data center meeting for clapping, said that the city has dropped the charges against them. According to 404 Media, the Emporia assistant city attorney told Claridge’s lawyer that the case has been dismissed without prejudice in municipal court because of conflicts on the matter. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that they’re in the clear yet, as the case has been bumped to the County Attorney’s office for further review.

“Today, I was informed by my attorney that the city has dropped my charges and has passed my information along to the county,” Claridge told the publication. “As far as I know, I’m in the clear unless the county is feeling froggy.” This series of unfortunate events started when the teacher politely clapped five times after a speaker gave their comments against the proposed data center in the city. It seems that the city’s commissioners had warned against clapping and other reactions beforehand, saying that it was disruptive. So, when they clapped, someone from the crowd, presumably someone with authority, asked a police officer to take the next person who claps outside of the venue.

This was when several cops approached Claridge, who asked them to leave, but they stood firm, saying, “I have a right to speak.” When the authorities insisted that they go, they just said, “Drag me out,” after which the four officers cuffed the individual, physically lifted them, and hauled them off to the Lyon County Jail. They were finally let out after eight hours, after which they were charged with disorderly conduct and interfering with a law enforcement officer.

After this incident, the city canceled the public meetings set for August 5 and August 19, 2026, and moved them online. The city said that commissioners were receiving death threats from external sources and that it’s taking the measure to protect the safety of its officials and the public. However, it also didn’t allow public comments, which some are questioning, although it did tell citizens that they can phone in their concerns instead. Nevertheless, the city will return to in-person meetings soon, and it will also open public comments once more, with Claridge quoting Emporia mayor Becky Smith saying that she’s “willing to give us another shot to act like grown-ups.” Emporia is expected to put the data center ban to a vote in November via public ballot. However, it also said that even if the people approve the proposed ordinance, it can only take effect after it has been ruled that the petition is deemed legal in the first place.

For as much as we might discuss the performance of an individual CPU, GPU, or other chip in a rack-scale AI system, the ultimate constraint on the performance of those chips is the amount of power one can get to the building and into each of the racks that contain them. The management and allocation of that power is a major concern for maximum productivity from a data center installation going forward.

During Nvidia's Hot Chips presentation on the Rubin GPU, the company emphasized this hard limit on data center capacity and touted the amount of compute that Vera Rubin NVL72 systems can deliver within an example fixed facility power budget of 100MW.

Nvidia says that the use of all of Vera Rubin’s power management technologies, in tandem with its DSX MaxLPS (Land, Power, Shell) suite of design and site-level dynamic power management resources, will allow operators to provision installations of 40,000 of those next-gen chips GPUs (or about 40 Rubin DGX SuperPODs) within that 100MW budget, and expects that hardware to deliver up to 2 zettaFLOPS (ZFLOPS) for NVFP4 inference and up to 1.4 ZFLOPS for NVFP4 training.

Doing some back-of-the-napkin math for ourselves from publicly available Rubin specs, we feel safe in assuming that those performance figures are estimated, not measured. The maximum number of achievable FLOPS from real-life workloads is likely to be significantly lower for a host of reasons.

But the overall point still stands: getting the most compute out of precious power budgets when planning the AI data centers of the future is going to require more refined planning, monitoring, and facility management than simply applying the coarse measure of estimated peak power draw for every electrical component in the facility. And Nvidia has those building blocks ready for data center constructors in the form of its DSX toolkit.

According to a companion blog post that Nvidia shared, as data center operators provisioned their facilities in the past, many of the assumptions they made around power usage focused on those fixed, worst-case power peaks per rack, potentially leading to inflated power budgets that end up stranding power allocation in racks that will rarely, if ever, use all of it.

In just one example, if there was an application load differential between racks in a cluster such that one system would benefit from having more power sent its way in that moment, it couldn’t be re-routed under a static provisioning scheme. The less-utilized rack would use less of its allocated power budget, and the more heavily loaded one might still run into the limits of an overly conservative guard band.

The DSX MaxLPS approach is meant to overcome the limitations of static power provisioning by instead applying an intelligent, dynamic scheme that is continuously aware of power usage at the chip level, rack level, and groups-of-racks level. Where unused power is available due to workload characteristics or idle capacity, Nvidia's Dynamic Power Software control loop can find and redistribute that energy to systems where it's most needed in the moment, maximizing the number of systems that can be installed and performance per watt from the facility over time.

In Nvidia's measured example of current GB300 racks, within a 540kW power budget and with static provisioning, an operator might be able to install four 135kW systems by statically provisioning for peaks rather than measured values from workloads. But in practice, as much as 170kW of that power budget might sit unused due to differences in rack utilization.

For modern rack-scale systems like Nvidia’s NVL72s, that’s an entire rack and change that could safely be installed within the same power budget, and indeed, that’s just what the company’s example shows. And across those five systems, the amount of reserve power allocated for peaks can be much lower.

At the rack level, DSX MaxLPS offers further flexibility through workload-specific power profiles. Much like the quiet, balanced, and high-performance power modes that client PC users are familiar with, Nvidia has produced rack-level power profiles that can be assigned to systems performing example workloads like inference, training, and more general memory-bound or compute-bound tasks.

As we noted, Nvidia didn’t share measured Rubin power or performance-per-watt results, but it has characterized the benefits of MaxLPS for prior-generation systems running inference workloads to prove the concept.

For a Grace Blackwell GB300 system running DeepSeek-R1, Nvidia says the past fixed-peak regime would have assumed a 1400W GPU TGP and an estimated rack power of 136kW. Applying MaxLPS, however, the typical GPU TGP under this workload falls to 1000W, and the total rack power falls to 101kW, all without affecting delivered performance.

That less conservative envelope translates directly into higher performance per watt, larger numbers of racks that can be installed within the same facility, and ultimately more tokens that can produce revenue for the data center operator or its tenants.

Nvidia further notes that designing a data center with MaxLPS from the start grants an operator greater flexibility over the life of the installation. For example, if a site starts as a training-focused facility outfitted with cutting-edge hardware, each installed system is likely to need a greater share of the available site power for that more intense workload, and so an operator might not want to populate every available floor space for those racks from the get-go.

But later in the life cycle, as training shifts to new generations of hardware and older systems transition into inference roles, the power demands of each GPU and rack will fall, and so a facility with dynamic power provisioning would be able to free up capacity that can then be used to install more hardware within the same facility and to generate more profitable tokens.

Another major component of MaxLPS in data centers deploying Vera Rubin hardware is the use of higher liquid coolant temperatures for the exclusively liquid-cooled Rubin NVL72 racks. Those systems are designed to work with 45 °C inlet coolant temperatures, much higher than for past liquid-cooled systems. We learned more about this “dry cooling” approach during our visit to Nvidia’s Vera Rubin proving grounds earlier this year.

The use of this higher coolant temperature for Rubin installations is important because the mechanical chillers used to shed waste heat in non-evaporative systems also consume a large portion of the site power budget – as much as 40% for past installations, Nvidia says. As with static provisioning for servers, the company notes that those chillers have traditionally been sized for the worst-case scenario that a facility might face, even if they’re operating well below that capacity for much of the year.

Again, this approach strands power that could be dynamically reallocated to compute given the proper operating conditions and site-level monitoring and management. Those chillers might still need to run during the hottest parts of the year, but outside of those conditions, the higher coolant temperature generally enables more power to be put to productive use, improving a site’s power usage effectiveness (PUE) figure, all else equal.

Power for AI data centers, whether generated by public utilities or behind the meter using alternative power sources, is expected to remain one of the most critical constraints for those facilities for the foreseeable future, and we heard that concern from multiple presenters during Hot Chips.

Nvidia’s DSX MaxLPS approach looks ready to provide the building blocks needed for dynamic allocation of that resource to extract the maximum possible performance per watt from Rubin facilities, and it reflects a comprehensive concern for the interplay of power and achievable performance that only seems likely to grow in importance going forward.

The U.S. government is looking to move a critical transparency step in the approval of data centers behind closed doors. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has plans to remove a requirement that forces states to seek public feedback on applications for air pollution permits, as reported by The New York Times. The change, if it goes into effect, would apply to a subset of air pollution permits. However, the primary concern is around data centers, as local communities seek to delay, or outright ban, AI data center construction.

The latest proposal applies to permits for a "minor source" of air pollution, which includes landfills, laundromats, steel mills, and, of course, data centers. However, recent analysis of the expansion of AI data centers suggests that environmental impact is growing. The Harvard School of Public Health estimated that the Vantage data center in Loudoun County, Virginia, contributed between $53 million and $99 million in annual health damages, the largest estimate for any single facility ever.

In another example, the analysis conducted by researcher Michael Cork directly influenced a proposal in Fluvanna County, Virginia, to expand a fossil fuel plant. The expansion was ultimately denied based on the findings from the analysis that "shaped the public discussion leading up to the... vote."

The proposal from the EPA would remove, or at least create the opportunity for states to remove, the public discussion that shapes these decisions. The EPA's stance has been that these minor sources don't require federal oversight. However, there's a clear gap when a federal agency decides to stop enforcing federal rules and asks states to step in to make their own decisions.

The Attorneys General from 14 states and three cities signed an open letter opposing the change, writing, "despite the name, even 'minor' sources can pose significant health and environmental impacts." The letter suggests that removing the required publicization of permit applications and 30-day comment period "sidelines these fundamental transparency and democratic safeguards in the name of administrative expediency and relieving regulatory burdens, particularly for accelerating the buildout of data centers and other artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure."

Although the EPA requires a public comment period after an air pollution permit application, the process has been circumvented in some cases.

In Gilroy, California, an Amazon data center began construction last month without the knowledge of many residents. A years-long approval process between the city and Amazon meant the public comment period had lapsed two years before construction began, leaving the public little time to react. In another case, residents of Festus, Missouri sued the city, arguing that it didn't give the public enough time to review a data center proposal before moving forward with it.

With the EPA's proposed change, responsibility for regulating data centers is placed on the states. Current environmental law allows states to impose stricter environmental standards than the federal minimum, provided the state does not fall below it. The EPA change would allow a state to eliminate the public comment period, since it's not required by federal law.

Currently, a public comment period is still required. The proposed change would go into effect within the next year.

Officials in Marshall, Michigan, did what data center opponents across the country have been demanding: on August 3, its city council passed a one-year moratorium on new builds. Ten days later, police told council members they were the subject of a credible death threat tied to the project. The same week, the 300-person town of Salix, Iowa, postponed its own moratorium vote after Facebook posts put its government "in the crosshairs," and in Box Elder County, Utah, a commissioner who approved a project told KSL he has police stationed outside his house. Then, on August 21, NBC News reported that city leaders nationwide are now receiving death threats over data centers, regardless of which way officials vote.

Marshall Mayor Scott Wolfersberger told local news station WWMT that the city's police department contacted him on August 12 about the threat and that the investigation is ongoing. Councilor James Hackworth wrote in a social media post that members had received "a legitimate death threat" and that disagreement, protest, and voting the council out are all part of democracy. It's unclear whether the sender supports or opposes data centers, and no suspect has been identified to date.

Meanwhile, Salix Mayor Kevin Nelson has said that the Woodbury County Sheriff's Office is investigating posts that called for "various death and terroristic type things" against the entire city government. Nelson said threats first came in May, after the town annexed 900 acres of farmland in April for a site Google is evaluating.

Woodbury County is separately challenging the annexation in court. The council met a week late on August 20 and voted 3-2 against the moratorium, with Nelson calling officers into the room as members of the public and councilman Gene Monk objected. "We ask for a cool-down period for a year to research, then we can make an educated decision. We can let the people vote for it after that — do something different," Monk said. "It's too big of a decision for us five people [council members]."

Over in Box Elder County, Utah, Commissioner Lee Perry has said that he and fellow Commissioners Boyd Bingham and Tyler Vincent had received threats after voting through two resolutions for the Stratos project area, with an audience of roughly 500 chanting "shame" at the meeting.

Previous incidents show these are more than idle threats. In April, Indianapolis councilman Ron Gibson had 13 rounds fired into his home after backing a rezoning, and Saline Township, Michigan, treasurer Jennifer Zink resigned in May citing threats over the 1.4GW Oracle and OpenAI campus that triggered moratoriums in at least 19 Michigan municipalities. Emporia, Kansas, moved its August 5 and August 19 commission meetings online and dropped public comment after its leaders were threatened.

Recent data published in the Soufan Center's July IntelBrief, which is based on a year of scraping X and Reddit, found hundreds of posts with threat language between July 2025 and July 2026, and a volume surge beginning in April that hasn't receded. Most violent threats in its dataset are targeted towards infrastructure rather than people, with posts naming council members and planning commissions a small minority. Many use memes, emojis, and misspellings to dodge moderation.

The center also found that each new incident now draws far more secondary amplification than it did earlier in the year. Emporia's mayor said the threats to his commission didn't appear to come from locals, and Salix, Emporia, and Marshall have all now canceled, moved, or restricted public meetings because of them, at a point when more than 500 local restrictions on data centers are in place nationwide.

Many towns, counties, and states have been passing data center moratoriums to delay these projects so that they could study their impact and create mitigations before this infrastructure even before they get off the ground. However, Ypsilanti, Michigan, is taking a different approach to this issue. Instead of putting a moratorium on data centers, the township put a temporary ban on the underlying electrical infrastructure needed to run them. According to 404 Media, the six-month delay is intended for studying the potential effects that the proposed electrical substation needed to power the project will have on noise pollution and existing customers.

“We need to make sure it’s in the right location from a planning standpoint, and we need to make sure that we have ordinances in place that require DTE or any electrical company to go through a process,” Ypsilanti Township Supervisor Brenda Stumbo said in a statement. The township will determine “the nature and scale of electrical infrastructure necessary to serve new high-energy-demand land uses [...] including infrastructure associated, but not limited to hyper-scale data centers, mid-sized data centers, artificial intelligence computing facilities, and high-performance computational centers, industrial facilities, and other intensive electrical users” during the six-month period.

This move is related to the University of Michigan’s announcement that it will build a 220,000 square-foot hyperscale data center on a 144-acre plot of land on Textile Road. The data center, which costs $1.25 billion, is part of the University of Michigan and Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL) work on nuclear weapons. The University said in its press release that the development “will give scientists the computing power needed to solve the world’s most complex challenges” and that it’s “not a military instillation or weapons production facility.” It also added, “No hazardous nuclear materials will be stored or used on-site, no weapons production will occur at the site, and the facility will not conduct real-time defense operations.” However, that isn’t the primary concern of many of Ypsilanti’s residents. Instead, it’s the fact that many other data center projects have caused grief to the communities that they are in.

The electricity moratorium isn’t the first one that the township took to delay the data center project. In April of this year, Ypsilanti voted yes to another moratorium — a one-year temporary ban on delivering water to hyperscale data centers as it studies the impact of the massive water demands, which was estimated to be at 500,000 gallons per day.

It’s unclear what will happen after the moratoriums that Ypsilanti set expire, but even after the first temporary ban was set, the University of Michigan still went forward with its groundbreaking. The institution also threatened to sue the township, calling its action to delay its data center project “discriminatory.” Aside from that, the federal government has historically supported data center projects that it deems crucial for its projects, like when the Department of Justice asked the court to dismiss the NAACP lawsuit against xAI’s use of unpermitted gas turbines at its Colossus data centers.

Loudon County, Virginia, located just 22 miles west of Washington, D.C., has the greatest concentration of data centers in the United States. According to The New York Times, after years of booming data center construction that has brought lots of benefits to the local region, the county is beginning to rein in data center construction in response to local residents' complaints.

It all started when a federal government demand led to the installation of fiber internet lines in the area, owing to its proximity to Washington, D.C. This grew even more during the dot-com craze of the late ‘90s, when many companies built a ton of fiber connections in the region. This made it ideal for building early data centers in the area, with AOL moving its headquarters in the region in 1996. By the year 2000, the county voted to categorize data centers as office parks, meaning companies can build these structures with little oversight and approvals.

This incentivized tech giants to build data centers in the area; by 2007, there were already 29 such facilities in Loudoun, with the number growing almost ten-fold nearly 20 years later. Interestingly, it seemed that the negative impacts of these projects in the area were little to none. In fact, the people of Loudoun appreciated them, as they brought in a lot of money for the county. Data centers brought in a $150 million income in 2015, but this number has grown to $1.1 billion in 2025. This cash windfall allowed Loudoun to cut property taxes to just $0.805 per $100 of assessed value — that’s less than 0.8%, making it among the lowest in the United States, especially for a suburban area.

Aside from that, the tax windfall from data centers allowed the county to fund more schools, with two new ones opened in the area, plus another one under construction, build a $102 million recreation center that has multiple pools and hydro massage chairs, plus spend $22 million converting a former presidential estate into a public park. This also allowed the county to expand its fire and emergency services, and ensure that its roads, bridges, and tolls are in excellent shape. Because of this, many residents support data centers in the region; in a July town hall meeting discussing it, some people attended wearing shirts that said: “I Support Data Centers Because I Like: Lower Taxes, Excellent Schools, Better Job Opportunities, and More.”

This is a stark contrast to what the rest of the country is seeing when it comes to data centers. New developments have raised various issues nationwide, from electricity price hikes up to 76% in the biggest power region of the U.S. and excessive water consumption that caused low water pressures for neighboring communities to 24/7 noise pollution that basically made the area unlivable and allegations of air pollution brought about by unpermitted gas turbines needed to power the data center. It’s for these reasons that many people are protesting the development of these projects in their communities, and several counties and states have passed data center moratoriums.

Despite widespread support for data centers in Loudoun, people are starting to push back against more recent developments. Loudoun Board of Supervisors member Juli Briskman, who is among the people in charge of its land, zoning, and economic policies, said, “It’s gone way too far. We’ve become addicted to the data centers for their tax revenues, but at what cost?” Some residents have also started complaining about data center developments in their vicinity. A Vantage data center, which has started operations recently, was the center of a noise complaint because of its diesel and gas turbine generators, while another resident in nearby Ashburn is raising an issue about Dominion Energy planning to put up a 185-foot-tall high-voltage electricity transmission tower in her backyard. There have also been reports that another tech company is buying over 100 homes in a luxury community for $4 million apiece, which is double their current market value.

Because of these issues, Loudoun ended its policy of zoning data centers as office parks, meaning anyone who wants to build a project in the area must now go through an approvals process from the public. This will make it significantly slower to get projects like these off the ground, and there’s also no guarantee of approval. Just last month, Amazon applied to build four more data centers in the region, and some board members have already signaled that they will reject the project.

When done right, data centers can bring economic prosperity for the community that they are in, which is exactly what Loudoun County was able to achieve. After all, data centers aren’t just about AI — they’re also used to serve the digital economy and keep the internet running, so that online services like Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, Spotify, Google Maps, Uber, and more can operate smoothly at scale. However, the massive processing power demanded by artificial intelligence workloads means that data centers serving its needs use up tons more power and water, which can make living near one untenable for most residents unless the local government takes steps to protect their interests.

Beijing has been encouraging its tech giants to build data centers across the country as the central government believes that computing power, especially in the age of AI, correlates to national power. Because of this, many Chinese companies like Huawei and Tencent have been actively building AI infrastructure in rural provinces, like Guizhou province, which is located more than 500 miles to the northwest of Shenzhen. According to Tech Xplore, dozens of these facilities have been constructed in the area in recent years, with more on the way.

Unlike the U.S., where data centers face increasingly tough opposition, these build-outs are seemingly approved with relative ease, and the people living around them apparently appreciate the changes that the data centers and related infrastructure brought to the area. “It used to be a barren mountain, but since the area has developed, transportation has become more convenient, trade has picked up, business opportunities have emerged,” one shopkeeper told the publication. Another local, Li Xixiu, praised the development of the main road as tech companies entered the area, saying that it “boosted the economy of the area,” and that there have been more local opportunities since then. “All the villagers in our neighborhood now find jobs nearby, unlike before, when they had to go to other places,” said Li. Still, it must be noted that Beijing places tight control on objections and protests, and that ordinary people cannot just object to policies set by the central government.

One of the reasons behind American opposition to data centers is the egregious electricity price increases they’ve brought on the average user. The PJM Interconnection region, the biggest power region in the United States, has seen a massive 76% increase in electrical costs because of the burden that data centers have put on the grid. Aside from that, it’s estimated that 20% of power generated in the U.S., amounting to 194GW, will be allocated to data centers by 2035. By comparison, analysts say China has a massive advantage in power generation, with several western Chinese provinces offering steep discounts on their electricity bills for AI companies that use Chinese chips. Furthermore, because the state subsidizes the power costs of residential and agricultural users, the average citizen does not worry that a nearby data center would cause their utility costs to increase.

These rural provinces also have large swaths of land allocated for renewable energy production, with energy overproduction becoming a problem for some operators. So, the construction of these power-hungry buildings actually helps solve the problem by using up surplus power instead of letting it go to waste. The availability of land and power in these western provinces makes it more attractive and affordable to put up data centers, compared to areas east of the country which are largely built up and have higher population concentrations.

Still, this development is not without issue. The Research Institute for Democracy, Society, and Emerging Technology (DSET) in Taiwan said in an email to AFP that while Guizhou has seen an average GDP growth of 7.4% over the past 10 years, wages didn’t increase as much and lagged behind much of the rest of the nation. “This contrast suggests that while data centers drive heavy investment in land and equipment, their impact on boosting local per capita income remains limited,” DSET researchers Cartus Bo-Xiang You and Angela Glowacki wrote.

Data centers have become a hot topic uniting Americans recently, with over 70% opposing the building of this infrastructure near their homes. So, Liquid Death and Garage Beer have banded together to create a viral ad asking viewers to drink their products, create pee, and then send it to the AI data center of their choice. According to Marketing Dive, the concept started with Liquid Death’s creative team, with comedian Sabrina Jalees coming up with the data center idea. It was repurposed into this ad, featuring NFL star Jason Kelce, who co-owns Garage Beer, showing the two brands teaming up together to promote their products and asking people to pee on computers "to save humanity."

“We have a lot of affinity for what those guys are doing: they’re doing comedy, and they’re also an indie trying to break into the mainstream. We’re positioning our energy drink as a light beer of energy — it’s fewer calories, it’s lighter, it’s more drinkable — so that was the strategy,” Liquid Death vice president of creative Andy Pearson told the publication. As for the peeing on data center concept, Pearson added that it’s the one issue that's common across America. “When you look at the data, it is literally the one thing that unites all Americans right now, across the spectrum.” In the video below, Kelce opens by stating "AI data centers waste millions of gallons of water."

Aside from electricity use and consumption pushing prices for all consumers, the next big issue that many data centers face is the amount of water that they consume in their operations. There have been several instances of data centers affecting the water supply of the neighborhood that they’re in. One example of this is this 615-acre campus in Fayetteville, which has been causing low water pressure for over 15 months as it secretly sucked 29 million gallons of water, while another report showed a Meta data center allegedly muddying the water supply in a Georgia town.

These concerns had tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon release claims that their data centers only consume a small amount of water, while Nvidia has also been developing technologies that will cut data center water use by up to 100%. Still, many feel that these efforts aren’t enough to address the issues being felt right now, leading to passionate and widespread resistance against these projects across the nation.

The two indie brands are trying to get on board the issue in a more lighthearted, less preachy way, making use of humor and a bit of crudeness to touch on sensitive issues like data centers. While the video has a disclaimer saying, “to please don’t actually send your pee,” some developments plan to use treated wastewater instead of fresh water for their water demands, so some data centers already use “pee” to cool their GPUs. We just wish that more of these facilities did this from the beginning, instead of making thousands of people suffer from water problems.

PJM Interconnection, the grid operator serving 67 million people across 13 states and Washington, D.C., asked federal regulators on Thursday to approve rules that would cut power to new data centers ahead of households during supply shortages, Reuters reports. The filing with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission follows two consecutive capacity auctions that failed to secure enough generation, and PJM's board projects roughly 70 GW of new large load by 2038 against roughly 15 GW of generation retired since 2022.

Existing facilities aren't affected, with the proposed Interim Resource Adequacy Service applying only to new loads of 50 MW or more at a single site that connect without bringing their own generation, or otherwise securing supply, by June 1, 2027. Those facilities would be curtailed before PJM deploys Pre-Emergency Load Management, which are the demand-response programs that pay other customers to cut consumption during grid stress.

Attached to the scheme is a new Large Load Registry, which tracks the location and megawatt draw of every 50 MW-plus site in PJM's territory and whether it brings its own supply. Affected customers would be compensated at a FERC-approved hourly rate set at 50% of the penalty rate PJM pays existing demand-response resources during full grid emergencies. It’s understood that operators can waive that payment in line with the White House's Ratepayer Protection Pledge.

PJM can't actually flip the switch itself, however. The operator told Reuters that it lacks the authority to curtail individual sites and would need to rely on utilities and state governments to carry out the reductions, which is why the registry data will be shared with states to set load-shedding priorities. Virginia, home to the world's largest data center cluster, has already ordered operators to pay for their own dedicated grid infrastructure.

Data centers in PJM’s territory have been curtailed before under a Department of Energy emergency order issued in May, which enabled the operator to call on large loads with backup generation as a last resort ahead of rolling blackouts. PJM expected less than 5,800 MW of reserves during that heat event, with Maryland and Virginia under the most strain. Thursday's filing would turn that one-off emergency authority into an established mechanism.

In July, PJM’s capacity auction for the 2028/29 delivery year hit its $325 per megawatt-day price cap and still came up some 6,800 MW short of the operator’s reliability requirement. Its independent market monitor has attributed a 75.5% jump in regional power costs directly to data center demand.

A separate one-time backstop procurement, running September 30 through October 21 with offers capped at $555 per megawatt-day, aims to backfill the shortfall, and from the 2029/2030 auction onward PJM plans to exclude new large loads that don't bring their own supply from the demand it procures for at all.

Cherokee Nation, the largest tribe in the U.S. with more than 475,000 citizens, has banned hyperscale data center development on its tribally owned and trust lands, after a task force convened by Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. found that 64% of 1,593 surveyed citizens opposed construction of the facilities inside the tribe's 14-county reservation in northeastern Oklahoma. The 37-page report cited energy and water consumption, air quality, noise, and cultural resource protection among citizens' concerns, and the tribe said it won't support projects on non-tribal land within the reservation without early consultation.

"Our primary responsibility is to protect our citizens and tribal communities from these threats, so we will not support any hyperscale data centers on our reservation without proper consultation," Hoskin said in the tribe's statement.

The task force couldn't establish how many data centers Oklahoma actually has, however. For the same June 2026 date, the report cites Cleanview counting 12 operating and 17 planned projects statewide, DataCenterMap listing 46 operational facilities, and ConstructConnect showing 33 in the pre-construction pipeline. No state or federal rule requires data centers to register anywhere, so the task force's most reliable method for detecting sites was monitoring the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality for backup-generator air permits, which themselves don't cover every project.

Every active hyperscale project inside the reservation is sited on non-tribal land and is unaffected by the ban. Google's Pryor campus, for example, has operated since 2011 through at least five expansion phases and forms part of the company's $9 billion Oklahoma commitment, while Project Clydesdale near Owasso and Project Mustang in Claremore, which received a 25-year property tax abatement per phase, both proceed under municipal and county approvals. The report concedes the tribe has no direct regulatory control over such land, only leverage via consultations.

Most projects purposely avoid federal permits that would trigger such tribal consultations under NEPA, and Cherokee Nation joins the Seminole Nation and Kickapoo Tribe, which passed their own moratoriums in March and July according to Tribal Business News. Tulsa itself paused new approvals for nine months in March, part of a wave that has seen at least 69 US jurisdictions block new builds and 19 Michigan municipalities freeze approvals after the Saline Township Stargate fight.

The same survey that recorded 64% opposition found 73% of respondents use generative AI tools, with 34% using them daily and 19% weekly. The report calls this "a clear disconnect" between citizens' perceptions and their actions, and recommends fact sheets and explainers on how everyday AI use feeds hyperscale demand. It also recommends a permanent advisory committee to evaluate future proposals and advise the principal chief as new projects emerge.

Blake Hurst, a farmer in Atchison County, Missouri, who led the Missouri Farm Bureau from 2010 to 2020, invited data center developers to bid on his land in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, writing, "Developers, make me an offer." His farm sits roughly 40 miles from the proposed White Cloud Acres project in neighboring Nodaway County, a data center campus that local reporting has valued at $6.3 billion and that county commissioners halted on July 21 with a moratorium of up to six months. Hurst's pitch runs against national polling that now puts opposition to nearby data centers at 63% to 70%, and against a wave of restrictions that passed 500 jurisdictions nationwide this month.

Nodaway County's commissioners passed their moratorium ordinance while they negotiate a development agreement with Scale Microgrids, the developer behind White Cloud Acres. A petition against the project gathered more than 7,000 signatures in roughly two months, according to the Northwest Missourian, and Maryville's mayor has said he opposes it.

Hurst's counterargument focuses on the fact that Nodaway County's population fell from 23,402 in the 2010 census to a 2025 estimate of roughly 20,300, a decline of about 13%, and its largest employer is a university with falling enrollment. He cites project projections of 130 on-site jobs and more than $1 billion in tax revenue over the facility's 35-year life, and contends that a blocked project doesn't disappear; it gets built somewhere else while the tax base stays gone.

Emerson College polling found opposition to nearby data centers jumped from 42% in December 2025 to 63% in July, while a March Gallup survey put it at 70%, with 48% strongly opposed. New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed the country's first statewide moratorium on July 14, pausing permits for projects of 50 megawatts or more, and Maine's legislature passed its own before Governor Janet Mills vetoed it.

The refusals Hurst references have become something of a genre of their own. A Kentucky family turned down $26 million for roughly 900 acres in Mason County, about 10 times the local going rate of $6,000 per acre, while a neighboring cattle farmer rejected offers of $35,000 per acre, more than four times market value.

The Mason County developer redrew its site plan around willing sellers and kept moving, which supports Hurst's relocation argument. Holdouts have raised the price of farmland near transmission lines without stopping a single hyperscale campus outright, and Hurst, who ran the lobby representing farmers like them for a decade, is publicly volunteering to sell.

Somerville in Morgan County, Alabama, is a quiet, idyllic town full of green pastures, grazing animals, and soon enough, a Bitcoin mining center. Despite the many protests from residents and moratoriums at both county and town level, the 50-MW facility from VoltCore is going ahead, due to a teeny weeny problem with the zoning laws: there aren't any, or at least, none that apply.

More specifically, Alabama is one of the many states where counties don't have any power over zoning (Dillon's Rule) until they hit at least 600,000 residents, which isn't the case in Morgan County. Municipalities and towns do have that legal ability, but many towns don't apply it, and when they do, they have limitations on how they apply it outside of town borders. That's precisely the situation that Somerville and its residents find themselves in, having had no need for zoning control until now.

Both the county and Somerville have enacted moratoriums against VoltCore's buildout, but those cannot legally stop the construction, since it's built on private land. According to Ray Long, Morgan County Commission Chairman, "We can’t keep them from doing anything right now because there's no laws at all in Morgan County in rural areas [...] There's no zoning, there’s none of that, so we really don't have anything to stand on other than what we can say is, 'We really wish you wouldn't do it.'"

There are also several petitions running, the largest with about 2,000 signatories, and a GoFundMe campaign to try and hire a lawyer to help with the situation. Alabama's Limited Self-Governance Act does predict having to deal with noise and pollution concerns, but it's written in such a way that specifically prevents it from being used to control zoning. The VoltCore build even has an approved energy connection from the Tennessee Valley Authority, and work is reportedly proceeding as usual, connecting water, gas, and AT&T lines.

Even if the Somerville town drafted a local law for zoning, it would take many months and multiple rounds for it to pass, and even still would almost certainly only apply prospectively and not to the VoltCore installation. Furthermore, the data center's location just outside the edge of town could put it outside legal reach regardless.

Other Alabama counties have taken notice of the problem, though, as a recent report indicates that data center bans will be a hot topic at an upcoming Association of County Commissioners. The dim view of data centers in general across the United States has rallied quite a number of states. South Dakota signed a law limiting installations of 10 MW or more, while New York, Oklahoma, North Carolina, and many others all have proposals in motion to hold or control new buildouts.

A few AI data center developers have started suing local governments after the latter either denied their application or passed laws that banned or put a moratorium on such developments. According to Bloomberg Law, some of the lawsuits alleged that officials exceeded their authority in banning data centers, while others say that their right to due process and equal protection has been violated by these moratoriums.

“If people just start to say ‘no, we’re never approving data centers anymore,’ especially in locations where they are needed and available, that’s going to be a problem,” John Crossley of K&L Gates LLP told the outlet. One example of this lawsuit is in Hill County, Texas, which was the first county in the Lone Star State to pass a one-year data center ban. The developer sued the local government, alleging that it did not have the authority to pass a ban. This resulted in the rescinding of the law a week after the case was filed, after which the case was dismissed. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott recently passed a moratorium on data center approvals, but it’s unclear if this project is affected or if other affected developers will sue the state government.

We see another case like this where a cryptocurrency mining operation sued Hawkins, Tennessee for banning data centers. It said that its right to due process and equal protection is being violated by the move, even as the county said that developments like this “sap valuable natural resources while spewing both environmental and noise pollution.” Hawkins County lawyers wrote, “In short, data centers take a lot more than they give in a place like Hawkins County.”

While many AI data center developers argue that they bring in significant benefits to the communities they enter, like tax revenue, construction jobs, and more, it’s widely reported that these projects have placed an unnecessary burden on the residents who live nearby. While Virginia has now required data centers to pay for all dedicated upstream electrical infrastructure that they need, it has only arrived after electricity prices in the PJM Interconnection region already have risen precipitously by as much as 76%.

Multiple Meta data centers have also caused water issues in various regions — from low pressure and muddied water supply to contaminating a city’s water system. Elon Musk’s Colossus data centers are also facing allegations of air pollution, although it has since promised to remove its 69 unpermitted power generators after an on-site 1.2GW power plant has replaced them. One data center in Michigan is also facing a lawsuit for emitting a loud, distressing noise 24/7, with residents saying that “It sounds like someone set up a vacuum, like in your living room.

Even an Amazon data center, which finally received its approval after years of processing and has begun construction recently, is in the middle of a controversy as residents alleged that they only knew about the project after the workers started pouring in the site. One Pennsylvania town offered a solution that protected both its people while allowing a data center project to proceed — it gave 43 specific demands that covered everything from noise, light, and air pollution concerns to water and power use, land use, taxes, and even the decommissioning of the data center. Unfortunately, the developer called these demands “too difficult,” which the council slammed as “approval by tantrum.”

These aren’t isolated reports and have been happening all over the country. This is probably the reason why even the Trump Administration, which has an aggressive AI policy, has made AI hyperscalers, state governors, utility providers, and data center operators agree to the “ratepayer protection pledge” and promise that they will “pay their own way” when it comes to their required infrastructure.

The negative news surrounding data center developments has definitely made it harder for projects like these to get off the ground without opposition. Data centers need to win the approval of their neighbors if they want to get their projects running quickly, but this has gotten exponentially difficult, especially with all the negative publicity that all the other sites have generated.

The number of local bans on new data center developments jumped to over 500 in July, according to recent data. Local politicians in the United States are refusing to approve new data center construction in greater numbers, posing a threat to the expansion required by AI firms to provide the capacity needed to power the new technology. The analysis, conducted by The Information from legal documents and local news reports, shows that this isn’t a partisan issue.

Republican- and Democrat-run states, towns and counties have all begun to block new data center projects, with Texas and New York both prominent entries from both sides of the political divide, and with the majority of the bans appearing in the Midwest and South, according to the report.

Politicians aren’t doing this out of spite, but in response to the growing concern from residents over the impact on communities. Among them are the impact of noise on local residents, as well as the disproportionate impact on public services, including on water and electricity supplies. It follows Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s moratorium on data center approvals in recent weeks until an extensive audit has been conducted of companies looking to hook their new centers up to the Texan power grid.

The Information’s analysis shows that the bans are growing fast, jumping from 300 in late June to over 500 in July. The ban in Texas is particularly noteworthy due to the state becoming a prominent home for AI data centers. Despite Governor Abbott’s pause, Amazon is still hoping to build a new gas power plant in Pecos County, Texas, to power a data center at the same location. That location is already believed to likely become the single biggest source of environmental pollution in the U.S. once it’s operational.

The rapid growth of new data centers in Texas and nearby states has likely fueled those concerns from residents. The Information reports that most of the bans are in the Midwest and South, with more than 400 restrictions now in place, with nearly three-quarters of the moratoriums approved in July occurring in southern states like Georgia and Florida. Florida, in particular, is quickly stopping new developments, with 14 out of 23 current active restrictions in that state being approved in July, and 15 more under consideration.

Small and big, rural and urban states alike are all seeing political capital used on preventing AI data center expansion. Kathy Hochul, Democrat Governor of New York, recently signed an executive order that paused approval for all data centers consuming 50 megawatts of energy or more. Massachusetts and Nebraska halted tax breaks for developers, while in Colorado, 19 bans are now in place around Denver, and more elsewhere in the state, due to concerns specifically around the impact on the environment and on water usage. In Nashville, Tennessee, a 23-acre data center development next to a zoo, expected to cost up to $700 million, is also facing local and political resistance.

It’s no surprise to see politicians begin to wake up to the public malaise against AI development. Over 70% of Americans are reportedly against more AI data centers, and direct resistance against them is growing, with at least 37 people arrested so far this year for protesting against new developments.

The public pushback against data center construction projects is only growing stronger, even as some protesting local residents have been arrested in the process. That hasn't perturbed those still standing against the AI infrastructure projects, though, and they continue showing up at town meetings, holding protest rallies, and making themselves heard — even with the 24/7 drone of a data center hum in the background.

The latest effort saw Nashville residents and local politicians move to block the construction of a $700 million data center set to be built right next to the Nashville Zoo at Grassmere. The city council approved a blocking measure last week, and now Mayor Freddie O'Connell will wield it to make sure the project doesn't go ahead.

This follows on from another recent story where a Kentucky farming family was offered 10 times their land value to sell up to data center developers, and they refused. Virginia's State Corporation Commission, which regulates public utilities, just ruled that data centers must pay for all the required transmission infrastructure that they have exclusive use of, in an effort to reduce energy bills for residents.

Nobody wants to live near a data center

Data center projects have been firmly disliked by large bodies of Americans since the beginning of this major AI buildout. Early in 2025, it became clear that even as the major AI companies were promising hundreds of billions for "AI factories," governments around the world rushed to build capacity. There was only one problem: residents near the proposed build sites would not be taking it lying down.

In April 2025, Elon Musk's Colossus data center was an early target for protest after it was found to be using permitless mobile gas turbines for power. It's been hit with enough pushback since then that SpaceX has now agreed to remove the 69 turbines it ultimately installed, although it is going to take over a year to complete the move of these allegedly mobile turbines.

By the Fall of last year, evidence had begun to mount about the negative impact of these installations. Water shortages and potential contamination, electricity price increases for residents, and the constant, unending noise that may be causing health problems with sub-audible frequencies.

There's also the slowly growing number of "against" voices in polling for new data centers. What started as a light advantage to the "supports" respondents in September became a near-majority a few months later. Now more than 70% of Americans don't want data centers near their homes, and there's little chance of that changing as the stories of issues during and after construction of these facilities continue to mount.

How the people are fighting back

Protest has been at the forefront of the anti-data center campaigners' playbook since the start, and that's not stopping any time soon. On one weekend in July, anti-data center protestors organized in 42 states to stage 142 protests across the country, all calling for blocks, halts, and moratoriums on the data center rollout.

This is after months of campaigning, which led to close to 70 jurisdictions around the country blocking new data center builds. Some of them, permanently.

Where politicians are more on the side of the developers, the people are going to meet them in person. They're going to town halls and seeking meetings and making their voices heard.

Sometimes politicians don't like that, and people are removed - even when protesting peacefully - and in several cases they've actually been arrested. Close to 40 people have been arrested in 2026 for pushing back against data center rollouts. In one case, because they went beyond their allotted speaking time, and in another, because they clapped following an impassioned statement by a fellow citizen.

In other cases, though, politicians are listening. In Nashville, the local council and the mayor are all on board to protect the local Zoo and residents' bills and ears. This is particularly important because it shows that local legislators can use their political power to block data centers — potentially preventing the White House from using its own to drive projects through.

The forever war

The data center builders aren't taking all of this helplessly. They have the ears of government and massive platforms to evangelize AI and data centers; They've been doing it everywhere from the White House to social media. They've tried building in more rural areas where there are fewer people to protest, paying for their own behind-the-grid power, and offering to spend millions in local investment to counter negative effects.

But it's not working. People don't like data centers. They don't want to live near them. And on top of that, many don't even like the technology the hyperscalers want to build this all for, anyway.

It's unlikely that those bankrolling (and hoping to make money on) the data center AI build-out will just give up and go home, but the residents fighting back against their gargantuan construction projects aren't going to do so either.

This is a long war, and one that neither side is likely to back down from. But in a rare ray of hope in 2026's landscape of high PC and electronics prices due to AI data centers soaking up computing hardware, it's one that the people seem to be winning, for now.

A new Amazon data center is set to become the single largest source of environmental pollution in the U.S., according to a New York Times report on August 8. The tech giant — which already operates the most data centers worldwide — is reportedly building a natural gas power plant in Pecos County, Texas, to power its new data center at the same site. According to project permits, the plant would generate up to 7.65 gigawatts of power using 35 natural gas turbines. The new plant — which burns natural gas to generate electricity — has been authorized to release 33 million tons of CO₂ annually, more planet-warming gases than any other power plant in the country, says the NY Times report.

Conversely, Amazon had pledged to achieve net-zero carbon emissions across all its global business operations by 2040. The company made the promise in 2019 when it initiated and co-founded The Climate Pledge — a voluntary coalition of over 700 companies and partners — aimed at addressing its own corporate footprint and rallying global supply chains. However, the company has seen its emissions rise each year for the past several years, something analysts attribute to a spike in data centers to support the AI boom. The company is currently building several additional AI data centers globally, including the one that the new gas plant would power in Texas.

Amazon has acknowledged the impact of its intense AI ambitions on its earlier climate pledges but insisted the company remained committed to them, despite obvious struggles. “The world looks different now than when we co-founded the climate pledge,” said Margaret Callahan, an Amazon spokeswoman. Still, “our commitment hasn’t changed,” she said, echoing similar statements by Microsoft, which is struggling to fulfill its 2030 sustainability promise amid carbon-heavy AI expansion, but insists it remains committed to it.

As detailed in our data center power roadmap, an increasing number of hyperscalers and data center operators are switching from grid connections to dedicated on-site power generation. The “behind-the-meter” moves are being triggered mainly by the long timelines required to set up new power infrastructure to connect new power-hungry data centers to the grid, but also by growing anti-data center sentiments over irreversible hikes in the electricity bills of nearby communities.

While many companies are also pursuing nuclear and renewable energy options — examples being Microsoft’s Three Mile Island nuclear deal and Meta’s agreement to secure up to 1GW of orbital solar energy capacity — gas appears to be the leading preference due to its scalability and speed of availability. The Trump administration has thrown its weight behind such projects for data centers, promoting oil, natural gas, and coal over renewable energy sources.

The city council of Emporia, Kansas, the same council that had a teacher arrested for clapping in support of the opposition, announced that it will move its meetings online after its members received death threats. According to 404 Media, Emporia announced this move two days before the meeting set for August 5, 2026, and will also affect the one set on August 19, 2026.

“In the interest of public safety, the Emporia City Commission meetings scheduled for Wednesday, August 5, 2026, and Wednesday, August 19, 2026, will be conducted virtually. No public comment period will be provided during either meeting,” the city said on its Facebook page.

“The City remains committed to conducting the public’s business in an open and transparent manner while taking reasonable measures to protect the safety of elected officials, City staff, and members of the public. The City appreciates the public's understanding and cooperation as it implements these temporary measures while ensuring the continuity of City business.”

The move to a virtual meeting is an understandable move given the death threats on some of the city leaders. However, it also canceled public comments and instead directed citizens to an email address and phone number where they can air their concerns privately. This led to some citizens airing their complaints in a protest outside the Emporia municipal auditorium.

“While I don't doubt that there are credible threats, my big question is on how many there are and from where they are coming. Mayor Smith did mention in yesterday's meeting that the threats don't seem to really be coming from locals but ‘it only takes one’ to ruin a meeting so they went virtual. I feel like we're being punished for the actions of outsiders,” Lux Claridge, the person arrested in the previous council meeting, told 404 Media.

“I'm not so upset about going virtual, it makes sense, but back it up with examples of these threats. I'm more upset that they opted to close public comment and I don't understand why.”

One of the things that the council considered during the meeting was the petition to put a data center ban on the ballot, with the members voting unanimously to send it for judicial review. The council claimed that doing otherwise could open the city to a lawsuit from either side, although it did not elaborate on the reason why this would happen.

While we haven’t heard of a local jurisdiction getting sued for passing a data center ban, one Texas senator warned a county in the state that it cannot legally impose this. So, the commissioners are likely being careful to avoid legal issues, even if they’re in another state.

The community of Gilroy, California, about 30 miles southwest of San Jose, was surprised when an Amazon data center started construction in their town last month. But as many projects like these have been suffering from opposition and delays across the country, the Wall Street Journal reports that this specific site avoided scrutiny by adhering to local zoning rules set 45 years ago.

Amazon’s Gilroy project sits on a 56-acre piece of farmland between a Walmart Supercenter and the Gilroy Premium Outlets. The company and the city didn’t exactly keep the project secret when it started its application in 2020. In fact, there were disagreements between the tech giant and the city government during the process. The publication noted that some Amazon officials were frustrated by slow permitting progress, which was delayed by at least one year. At the same time, the city pushed back on some of the company’s requests, especially if they were no longer up for discussion.

Roger Wehner, Amazon Web Services vice president of economic development, told WSJ that the site had gone through a long approval process, which required public notices and public-comment periods. However, when Gilroy resident Rosa Rodriguez wanted to state her concern about the damage a data center can do to a region suffering from drought, she was told that the comment period had already lapsed in 2024, long before data centers became a hot topic across the country.

Gilroy City Mayor Greg Bozzo said that other industrial projects that had a similar scale to the Amazon data center have previously been approved without resistance.

“It didn’t bother them that a food-distribution center came to Gilroy without their engagement, but now it bothers them that a data center is coming to Gilroy without them having the possibility of engagement,” Bozzo said.

Still, he conceded the people are now more aware about data center developments and added, “We…have an opportunity to change the way that we do business in Gilroy. We’re adapting to the times.”

The tech giant also said that it’s engaging more with the community, with Amazon officials claiming that they met residents directly and even hosted an open house where people can ask questions and leave comments. It also addressed fears that the development would cause a water shortage, which other data centers have already caused, saying the company is constructing a wastewater recovery system to supply its water needs and will even build a pipeline to bring wastewater from the source to its plant.

Bozzo also highlighted the benefits that Amazon will bring to the city, especially increased tax revenue, construction jobs, and a million-dollar donation towards a new fire truck. He also pointed out that the tech giant has been giving grants to non-profit organizations in the city, as well as sponsoring the annual Gilroy Garlic Festival.

But at this point, it’s not the Amazon data center the people of Gilroy are having an issue with. Instead, it’s the fact that a major project that has the potential to have a major impact on the community has been approved without the knowledge of many residents.

The Salem City Council convened a public meeting last July 27, where it discussed the proposed $5.1 billion Oakline at Mill Creek data center by Verrus. As the people converged on the meeting site, a TikTok user spotted a guillotine towed by a bike outside of the venue, signaling the people’s discontent with the project.

According to NewsData, the consultation lasted for more than six hours as several members of the community voiced their opposition towards it. The developer’s representatives were initially on-site to hear the comments, but had to leave midway through as they were confronted by some protesters.

“During a break in the proceedings, a group of opposition members cornered Verrus representatives and shouted insulting remarks, to the point where it no longer felt safe to stay,” Verrus spokesperson JP Newmann said, according to the publication. “We appreciate the support of local law enforcement in helping de-escalate the situation and escorting Verrus representatives from the site safely.”

One week after the meeting, Salem announced a data center moratorium that would halt all data center developments in the city for one year as it considers zoning laws to accommodate developments such as this. This adds Salem to the long list of jurisdictions that have passed similar moratoriums, including Seattle, Washington, and the State of New York.

Unfortunately, the Verrus project will likely not be affected by this delay as it filed its application three days before the announcement. Despite this, Governor Tina Kotek (D) announced that Oregon will terminate a deal to sell a 32-acre plot of land that forms part of the three plots of land on which the project will sit. While it still leaves Verrus with approximately 43 acres, it means that it would have to go back to the drawing board to change its plans. This is similar to what Nashville did when it used its eminent domain power to deny the land that another developer wanted to use to build a data center near the historic Nashville Zoo.

But because Verrus submitted its application before the moratorium announcement, the city is still processing its proposed data center project. That does not mean that it will get an immediate green light, though. It still has to go through an extensive permitting process, which includes technical studies, permit conditions, and enforceable agreements, among others.

Oregon is one of the first states to enact a law that ensures large consumers, like data centers, pay for the majority of the grid upgrades needed to serve their needs. This allowed Portland General Electric, the state’s largest power provider, to increase the bills of users who used more than 20 MW by 30%, while also affecting a 1.3% cut in residential electricity costs. But despite this protection that stops ratepayers from price shocks, many people are still against data center projects in their towns and cities.

The State Corporation Commission, Virginia’s independent state agency that regulates public utilities, has ordered data centers to pay for all the required transmission infrastructure that the project will use exclusively. According to Realtor.com, Governor Abigail Spanberger (D) has recently been pressing AI hyperscalers to reduce their impact on the power grid and utility prices.

Virginia currently has the greatest number of data centers across the U.S., with the state hosting at least 570 sites. Because of the massive power demand of these sites, the state has been experiencing issues with electricity price hikes, with one county even asking its employees, including schools, to conserve power. PJM Interconnection, which distributes power to the state, has increased prices by 76%, with Monitoring Analytics, the independent watchdog keeping an eye on the utility company, saying that this is mostly due to AI data centers.

The move requiring data centers to pay for their own upstream electrical infrastructure should, hopefully, ease the burden on the average Virginian. "We are taking real steps to address rising energy costs for Virginians," said Gov. Spanberger. "I will continue to work with the General Assembly and take action to make sure data centers pay their fair share, adhere to strict environmental standards, and listen to the concerns of local communities.”

This is one of the first statewide announcements that will enforce President Donald Trump’s ratepayer protection pledge. Trump summoned the biggest AI hyperscalers to the White House in early March and made them promise that they will “pay their own way” when it comes to building the infrastructure they need. But despite this, the burden of more expensive electricity hasn’t eased for the average American. The administration expanded this promise in late July to include state governors, utility companies, and data center developers.

Many critics said that this pledge is nothing but a piece of paper, with some comparing it to a “pinky promise.” After all, this is just a commitment and not a regulation that would penalize companies that don’t comply. Nevertheless, it seems that it has spurred at least one state to make a move that should, hopefully, have a material impact on the average citizen.

Aside from Virginia, Oregon is the only other state, so far, that has raised electrical rates for large consumers, like data centers. According to the Oregon POWER Act, facilities that consume 20 MW or more are assigned to a higher rate class. Portland General Electric, the state’s largest power supplier, has already implemented this, resulting in a 30% rate increase for these big power users, while also cutting residential costs by 1.3%.

While the average consumer isn’t necessarily paying for the power that data centers consume, utility companies had to conduct massive grid upgrades to support the increased demand from these developments. The utility companies then equally passed on all the necessary capital expenditure to all consumers, instead of just the data centers. By requiring data centers to spend on their own grid upgrades, further increases in electricity prices could, hopefully, be prevented.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is working on a ruling that will ban the import of Chinese-made optical transceivers, which are widely used in data centers to convert electrical impulse data into light and vice versa. Sources told Reuters that the agency wants to publish the ruling so that it would take effect before the end of the year.

"Transceivers definitely ⁠pose a risk," AI policy expert Divyansh Kaushik of advisory firm Beacon Global Strategies told the publication. "As the data center buildout scales up, you want to make sure the ​data center supply chain is secure from the get-go.” The administration fears that these components could be used to steal data, install malware, or disrupt data center operations in the U.S.

These optical transceivers are crucial for data centers as they require less electrical energy than traditional copper-based wiring and are also much faster. There are several U.S.-based manufacturers of these components, like Lumentum, Coherent, and Apple Optoelectronics, but Reuters said that they do not have the scale and capacity of leading company Innolight, which has cornered 27% of the global market.

This isn’t the first industry-wide ban that the FCC has imposed in recent months. While the U.S. has banned Huawei products from the country since 2019, it recently enforced several other bans that have primarily affected major Chinese or China-connected companies. This includes the ban on foreign-made drones, applied in December 2025, foreign-manufactured routers, enacted last April, and advanced robotic devices that weigh over 4.4 pounds and have a 200-kbps connection, which was announced just last month.

The first ban primarily affected DJI, while the one set in April hit TP-Link badly, even though it has since separated from its Chinese parent company in 2024. While you may not think that consumers will be affected by the Chinese robot ban, the July ruling also affects robot vacuums, with the top brands in the U.S. like iRobot, Roborock, Ecovacs, Dreame, and Xiaomi all being owned by a Chinese entity.

Although the U.S. said that all companies are affected by these bans, it also allows for conditional approvals. For example, Netgear and Amazon were able to secure exemptions for their foreign-made models through October 2027. TP-Link also applied for an additional approval in April but has yet to receive one until now.

It’s been said that the FCC wants to head off these Chinese components before they become more prevalent in U.S.-based AI data centers. This is what happened with Huawei, which was already so entrenched in the U.S. when it was banned that it became an expensive, years-long process to remove and replace all components made by the company from all its systems.

The Chinese embassy in Washington told the publication that it’s urging the United States to “heed the objective and rational voices of the business communities in both countries" and "stop smearing Chinese companies and threatening them with sanctions.” It also warned that it will take “necessary measures in response to any action that causes material harm to its interests.” Beijing has already done this last year, when it banned rare-earth exports to the U.S. in response to Washington’s EDA software ban, causing the White House to backtrack on its decision.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) just announced a moratorium on all data center approvals through the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) until the agencies have completed an audit of data centers seeking approval to connect to Texas’s electric grid. According to The Texas Tribune, the governor wants to ensure that data center applicants provide the following: tax break information, power use and generation, water use and cooling operations, community impact reduction measures, and facility ownership. Applicants that haven’t submitted these details will not be allowed to connect to the grid.

“Our top priority is to protect Texans’ safety and quality of life,” Gov. Abbott wrote in his statement. “Any project that fails to comply with the requirements set forth by the PUCT and ERCOT, and by state law, must be denied connection to the Texas grid. Simply put, Texans must come first.”

This review reportedly stemmed from several data centers’ failure to comply with a PUCT survey to determine water and power usage. The agency says that it asked 377 data center companies to send the required information, but only 28 have submitted so far.

While this is not a statewide moratorium, it nonetheless affects the progress of many data center projects going through ERCOT approval. More than 1,800 projects are awaiting the go-signal from the regulator to connect to the grid, 90% of which are data centers. The combined demand that these applications will put on the grid is expected to hit 474 gigawatts, which is five times that of the current peak demand that ERCOT has recorded and is much higher than forecasted data center demand by 2035.

This will put a dent in a lot of data center build-outs in Texas, but it still does not affect all projects, unlike the statewide ban that New York imposed. For example, El Paso, Texas, is outside the jurisdiction of ERCOT, so data center developments in the country can still continue unimpeded. Projects that are also bringing their own power are unaffected, as they do not have to connect to the ERCOT grid.

Data center opponents say that this measure isn’t enough, although some agree that this is a step in the right direction. They say that the state legislature needs to pass a law to regulate the industry, which is already the second biggest in the U.S. after Virginia. “Without legislative action, this directive is all hat and no cattle — empty political rhetoric wrapped in meaningless fluff,” Commissioner Sid Miller wrote on the Texas Department of Agriculture’s official Facebook Page. “Texans need laws with teeth, not another press release designed to make it look like something is being done while hyperscale projects continue moving forward.”

State Representative Gina Hinojosa Abbott’s opponent in the gubernatorial race in November 2026 had harsher comments for the governor. “So nice to see another strongly worded letter from Abbott after he proudly made Texas the wild west of data centers. Abbott’s call for a ‘pause’ could be for one day – and no one buys it,” she wrote in a statement. “He’s taken millions from data center CEOs while giving Texans lip service to non-existent restrictions.”

Although the majority of Americans oppose data centers going up in their backyards, several local governments still support similar developments as they believe that these will bring investments and opportunities for their constituents. However, the passionate but peaceful resistance of some people has resulted in their arrests, with Futurism reporting that 37 regular people have been arrested so far this year.

What’s more interesting is the wide demographic diversity of those who have been detained and charged. The two arrests Tom’s Hardware previously reported on included a farmer who went a few seconds over the allotted speaking time during a town hall meeting in Oklahoma discussing an AI data center project and a teacher who was dragged out of a community meeting in Kansas for clapping after a speaker finished giving their statement opposing another similar development. The protesters also crossed ideologies and party lines — the only common thing among them was the fact that they were concerned about the impact of a data center in their community.

The publication also noted that there were 12 other instances where the police were called because of a confrontation between politicians and protesting individuals. One example of this is when police intervened after a Utah senator got physical and slapped the phone out of a reporter’s hand, who was only there to cover the harassment by anti-data center protesters against his business.

“In my opinion, I was kicked out to prove a point that the law is on their side and if people continue to try and express themselves and speak, they will also be intimidated or arrested by law enforcement,” Pablo Payan, a maintenance manager who was arrested in Indiana after he refused to identify himself on the record, told Fox32. “So, I think it was a flex of power.”

Data centers have become a hot topic among the American public recently, especially as there have been widespread reports of these developments causing massive increases in electricity costs, negative impacts on the local water quality, 24/7 noise pollution, among other issues. The federal government has taken steps to reduce some of the impact through its “ratepayer protection pledge,” which includes AI hyperscalers, utility companies, data center operators, and even state governors. However, some experts say that this is just a promise that has no legal bearing, meaning companies necessarily don’t need to follow it.

Even though a few jurisdictions are pushing forward with data center projects despite local opposition, there are also some local and state governments that have paused their development. These include multiple Tennessee counties, Seattle, Washington, which is home to the headquarters of Microsoft and Amazon, and the State of New York. Most of them said they will use the one-year delay to study the effects of data center developments and how to best mitigate against them. One Pennsylvania town even took a different approach by listing 43 specific demands for a proposed data center, which its developer allegedly shot down as “too difficult.”

This is likely what made these protesters emboldened in their fight against data centers — the fact that other communities have successfully lobbied against data center developments means that they can push back, too.

Data centers on land are facing increasing opposition and having a hard time getting off the ground — from power connection issues that can take months or years to resolve, to neighborhood concerns about noise and air pollution, as well as their impact on the local water supply. One startup called Atomarine wants to solve this by building nuclear-powered data centers on barges and deploying them at sea.

There have already been various proposals to put data centers out at sea (or even submerged) from established names and startups. We’ve seen conventional examples from companies like Samsung Heavy Industries and Japanese shipping company MOL who to put the servers on dedicated ships and are powered by liquefied natural gas (LNG). There are also more innovative solutions from startups that want to put them in the bases of ocean-based wind turbines or in wave energy converters.

Atomarine differs by building data centers as floating barges, similar to floating oil platforms, which can be deployed anywhere — even in international waters. This should help cut down on the permitting process, and it doesn’t have to worry about disturbing neighbors. The electricity needed to run the infrastructure is then delivered by a power ship moored alongside the barge supplied by LNG ships. Once small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) become commercially available and certified for shipboard use, operators can then swap out the conventionally powered electricity suppliers with a nuclear one relatively quickly. And because these data center barges are modular in nature, it would be relatively easy to upgrade and scale the floating data center.

While this project sounds promising, building a megastructure like this comes with several challenges. The biggest one is that the ocean is massive and unpredictable, so these barges must be engineered to face extreme weather conditions, making them quite expensive to deploy. It must also be connected to high-speed internet (unless the operators plan to ship tons of drives daily), so they’ll have to lay undersea cables, as well. Furthermore, data servers are particularly sensitive equipment, so they must be upgraded to ensure that they can withstand the continuous rolling motion and the salty environment of the sea. There’s also the question of an SMR’s viability in shipborne use, although the U.S. Navy already has a good track record of running nuclear reactors aboard massive vessels.

The mounting opposition against data centers, both by the general public and politicians, is making it harder and more time-consuming to build new projects across the U.S. While an ocean-based data center like this is likely going to be significantly more expensive and technically challenging than land-based developments, this might become the fastest option in the future if the idea proves to be viable.

The largest utility company in Georgia is conducting a massive upgrade of its grid, and part of this project requires the connecting its Ashley Park Substation to Plant Wansley, which is currently undergoing an upgrade. The 35-mile stretch between the two facilities will go through Fayette, Heard, Fulton, and Coweta Counties, and require the removal of 30 residential properties along its path, reports Fortune. This included Ansley Brown’s family home, who took to Instagram to share her story.

“Georgia Power is forcibly taking people’s homes, okay? They have no choice in this matter,” Brown said in her IG post. “As you can see behind me, these are the power lines, and this is my childhood home. My childhood home is being taken by Georgia Power — they’re going to bulldoze this entire property to the ground. We don’t have a choice in this. They’re going to be expanding these power lines. Why? For the data centers. All of this is for the data centers.”

Thankfully, her family was able to get in touch with their representative, Brian Jack (R-GA), who sent people on the ground to take stock of the situation and connected the two parties. Brown said in her last update that they’ve already settled with Georgia Power, with the company telling Fortune that the family has agreed to a settlement for an undisclosed amount.

While this ended up on a somewhat positive note for the family, this is an example of what one report previously warned about government using eminent domain to seize land for the AI infrastructure build out. Georgia Power isn’t exactly building the transmission line to connect a power plant directly to a data center, but AI data centers’ massive power demands have caused massive opposition to projects like this to appear nationwide. It also doesn’t help that an AI data center, which is being accused of secretly using up 29 million gallons of water, sits less than five miles to the southwest of the substation.

The current administration has been pushing for AI data centers, believing that it needs all that infrastructure so it can win the “AI race” against China. However, the U.S. power grid is sorely lagging behind its Asian rival, meaning U.S. power utilities and electricity providers are spending billions of dollars to upgrade the grid. This, in turn, is being passed on to every power consumer, which is heavily affecting the average American. President Donald Trump instituted and expanded the “ratepayer protection pledge” in attempt to control the spiraling costs.

California has been trying to pass a law that will codify these promises, but the same tech companies that signed the pledge are also reportedly lobbying against the bill. At the moment, Oregon is the only state that has a regulation that forces big consumers (like data centers) to pay their fair share, with industries using 20MW or more getting slapped with a 30% increase in their power bill while residents and commercial users get their costs slashed by 1.3%.

Plymouth Township, which sits roughly 13 miles to the north of Philadelphia, said that it will approve a new data center project on the condition that it meets 43 specific demands. While Pennsylvania state law prohibits blocking a landowner from using their property lawfully, Ars Technica says that townships can impose zoning restrictions and health and safety regulations. Because of this, Plymouth created a nine-page plan that covers everything from noise, light, and air pollution, to water and power use, as well as land use, taxes, and even future decommissioning of the data center.

Many jurisdictions would have just outright rejected or delayed the data center project, which is owned by Brian O’Neill, but Plymouth Township decided to go in a different direction. It still allowed the application to go through, as not doing so would expose the local government to legal action, but gave the developer the outlined demands (listed in pages 4 to 12 of this PDF) that it needs to meet to get the green light from its people. The township said that the applicant initially showed that they would implement that township’s provisions, which were derived from the demands of its residents.

“The Council can, should, and will do everything in its power to ensure the health, safety, and welfare of the Township, our environment, and our residents. This is always our top priority,” Council President Lynne Viscio said in a statement. “We understand that a hyperscale data center raises numerous significant concerns, issues, and questions. Accordingly, we spent considerable time researching and developing a comprehensive set of requirements to address the concerns raised by residents, our own concerns, and the issues raised by other subject matter experts.”

Unfortunately, the data center developer rejected the concerns after seeing the breakdown of demands. It then filed a second application challenging the provisions set in the zoning ordinance, saying that they make building the project “too difficult” for the developer. Plymouth Township did not look kindly upon this, saying it “is a blatant attempt by the Applicant to demand approval by tantrum.” It’s currently unclear how Plymouth Township will move forward with the issue, with the application currently awaiting approval from the Zoning Hearing Board.

As for O’Neill, he told the Philadelphia Inquirer that the accusations of was part of a “misinformation campaign” against his project, and that he has been “negotiating in good faith” with the township’s attorney and had even agreed to most of the provisions. “We are sympathetic to the fact that they are under tremendous political scrutiny from people outside the township, as well as residents inside the township, and that makes giving a landowner their property rights … challenging,” he told the local newspaper. “However, I am a landowner, and I do have rights, and it is their job to be impartial and fair in their analysis and response.”

These requirements are meant to prevent the various challenges that other communities face with data center deployments. Examples of these include a Michigan data center generating noise 24/7 that has been affecting residents for over two years, PJM Interconnection, the U.S.’s largest power region, hiking electricity prices by 76% due to AI demand, a Meta data center contaminating a city’s reclamation water supply, and Elon Musk’s Colossus 2 data center facing a lawsuit for its unpermitted natural gas turbines spewing nitrogen oxides and other pollutants.

Police from Emporia, Kansas, arrested a teacher for applauding a speaker who was speaking out against a proposed zoning change to accommodate a planned data center in the area. According to 12 News, the police dragged 37-year-old Lux Claridge from the community meeting and charged him with disorderly conduct and interference with law enforcement. The commissioners had reportedly repeatedly warned against clapping and making other reactions while someone was speaking.

A video circulating on the internet shows Claridge clapping five times after a speaker closed their statement. We can hear in the clip below someone saying, “Ask him to leave,” followed by a second voice confirming, “Can I?” The voice then asked a police officer, “Chief? Will you ask-will you take the next person out that claps or anything, please? Thank you.”

The cops then approached Claridge, who said, “I have a right to speak.” The police were nonetheless insistent, which is when he said, “Drag me out.” Four officers then proceeded to cuff the teacher and hoisted him off to Lyon County Jail.

The data center’s critics warned against the project, saying that it could strain the local power supply and negatively impact the residents’ water quality. Their concerns are not without merit, as AI data centers have caused a massive 76% increase in electricity costs in the U.S.’s largest power region, while a Meta site is accused of muddying an entire town’s water supply.

Despite that, Emporia, located about 100 miles Southwest of Kansas City, approved the zoning changes needed for the Flint Hills Digital Campus project to move forward with the permitting process. This does not mean that the data center will immediately start construction, though, as it probably still needs to go through several more steps before it can break ground.

This isn’t the first time that a data center dissenter was hauled off to jail for reasonably pushing back against the said project. An Oklahoma farmer was arrested back in April for trespassing after going a few seconds over his allotted time and handing paperwork to the commissioners. Pushback against projects like these have been happening across the country, with several jurisdictions like Seattle and New York State enacting one-year moratoriums to study the potential effects of these infrastructure projects and how they could be mitigated.

President Donald Trump created the “ratepayer protection pledge” to force AI hyperscalers to “pay their own way” when it comes to electricity costs. He has even expanded this recently to include states and utility companies, with 23 governors and 187 firms signing up on the promise. Unfortunately, this is just a piece of paper and has no legal or regulatory power over the signees, with tech companies pushing back against a California bill that wants to turn this into law.

At the moment, Oregon is the only state that has passed and enacted a law that forces electricity consumers that used 20 MW or more to cover their fair share. Because of this, Portland General Electric, the state’s biggest power generator, has increased data center bills by 30% while cutting residential electricity costs by 1.3%.

Claridge is currently out on bail and is awaiting his hearing in September. "I'm glad to be out, but this is an inconvenience, really," Claridge said to local media. "It's not really deterring me from speaking out or, I guess, clapping."

OpenAI is in advanced talks to lease SB Energy's 10 GW data center campus in Piketon, Ohio, with Nvidia in discussions to guarantee roughly $250 billion of the financing behind it, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter. The site would be OpenAI's first as a tenant rather than a customer of Microsoft, Amazon, or Oracle, and Nvidia is separately discussing financing the accelerators going inside, which could run to another $350 billion. Terms haven't been settled, and the arrangement could still collapse.

OpenAI has no investment-grade credit rating, and Nvidia's involvement would let SB Energy raise debt against Nvidia's balance sheet instead of its tenant's. Nvidia has already put $30 billion into OpenAI, which has raised its projected compute spending to around $750 billion through 2030, up from roughly $600 billion earlier this year, according to the Journal. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick controls allocation of the site's power, and Anthropic, Microsoft, and Google have all spoken to him about it in recent weeks.

Nvidia's Q1 FY2027 10-Q caps maximum gross exposure across all of its partner facility lease guarantees at $3.5 billion, shrinking as partners pay their lessors, with $712 million sitting in escrow against it. Nvidia took the guarantees in exchange for warrants and carries them as credit derivatives, describing their fair value as immaterial.

The first one, disclosed in the third quarter of fiscal 2026, was capped at $860 million with $470 million of escrow behind it. The partner separately contracted to sell the data center cloud capacity, and Nvidia retained the option to assume the lease for internal use or sublease it if the escrow and that contract came up short. Neither remedy has an obvious equivalent at a 10 GW campus on federal land.

Nvidia held $62.6 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities when fiscal 2026 closed on January 25, against full-year revenue of $215.9 billion and net income of $117 billion. A $250 billion guarantee works out at roughly 71 times the guarantee book Nvidia has disclosed, more than a year of revenue, and about four times its cash.

SB Energy broke ground at the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant on March 20 alongside Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Lutnick, and SoftBank chairman Masayoshi Son. The site enriched uranium for the U.S. weapons program from 1954 until 2001 and is still being decontaminated. The Department of Energy had listed it among 16 federal sites opened to data center construction, and SB Energy leases the land rather than owning it. Powering the campus takes 9.2 GW of new natural gas generation plus $4.2 billion of transmission work with AEP Ohio, funded by $33.3 billion Japan committed under its trade agreement with the U.S. The first phase, roughly 800 MW, is expected in 2028.

OpenAI gave up on building its own data centers last year in favor of leasing capacity, and SoftBank carries more than $130 billion of debt while funding buildouts in Ohio, France, and elsewhere.

Residents of Dowagiac, Michigan, just filed a lawsuit against a data center that allegedly generates a high-pitched whining sound — and has done so 24/7 for the past two years.

The data center, which is owned by Alliance Cloud Services LLC, a subsidiary of Hyperscale Data, used to be an industrial building that sat behind a row of pine trees across the street from the most affected residents, according to ABC-affiliateWXYZ. The site started development in 2018 and was eventually turned into a cryptocurrency mining center in 2021. But in 2024, something changed drastically when the building started emitting noise pollution around the clock. Residents say it sounds like a vacuum cleaner in their living room, and the company has offered to buy up homes from unhappy residents.

“It sounds like someone set up a vacuum, like in your living room. And the vacuum is just... that thing needs to be cleaned ... the filter is clogged up, so it’s a high-pitch whining. And they just left it on and walked out," said Lindy Valenzuela, one of the residents living across from the data center. Billy Finn, who also lived nearby, added, “You’ve seen movies and stuff where they have somebody in a cell torturing them with sound. And that’s basically what it is."

Dowagiac has recently instituted an industrial noise ordinance, with a daytime limit of 65dB during the day and 55dB at night, and it has fined the data center for violations. However, Hyperscale Data is challenging the city’s readings and methodology. The company said that it’s planning to expand its operations in the footprint in the area, but the city said that it hasn’t received any permit applications.

Hyperscale Data CEO William Horne told the residents directly in a special council meeting that the site is pivoting away from cryptocurrency operations towards AI computing and advanced robotics, and that it’s spending $100 million to achieve this. It has also bought acres of adjacent properties for use as a natural buffer to reduce the noise that affects residents in the future, alongside other efforts that will reduce sound levels. "If they still aren't happy, and feel that their home isn't enjoyable, then we'll buy their property from them,” Horne said.

Still, this statement did not sit well with the affected residents. One of them said that their family has been living in the area for close to a hundred years, with their friends and support system, while another has a 17-month-old baby and another on the way, meaning moving for them is going to be difficult, if not impossible. Because of this, the residents asked the CEO why they didn’t act on the complaints as soon as they started and accused the company of not being a good neighbor.

This isn’t the first noise pollution lawsuit that a data center is facing in the country. A Microsoft data center is facing a similar class-action lawsuit in Wisconsin from residents who live within 1.5 miles of the facility. One non-profit organization also said that inaudible vibrations, called infrasound, that these industrial sites emit can be heard and felt for hundreds of feet in surrounding areas and could potentially have negative health effects on anyone who can feel it.

After decades of charging only a one-time fee for undersea cables along its coast, Oregon's lawmakers have recently been discussing a missed opportunity for tax revenue. The state is set to charge cable operators a one-time fee for cable installations within three miles of its coastline, and will be funneling that money into its Common School Fund.

The currently existing fee structure dates back to 2001 (25 years ago), and is simply a $5,000 application fee. The new pricing is still undergoing discussion, but the simplified version is $3 per linear foot of cable, plus $7 per each section of bore pipe — the protective structure that covers the portion closest to shore. Oregon's Department of State Lands (DSL) estimates that on a 20-year lease, this would bring in millions per undersea cable over that time span. The DSL did some rough math with Amazon's Bitfrost cable, and came up with a grand total of $1,450,380 for two decades, paid in one lump sum.

It's worth noting that the aforementioned rates were revised from an earlier, more expensive proposal that would take bore cross-section into account (a calculation that was dismissed as too complicated and, presumably, too onerous). The state wants to continue attracting investment to its tech sector, which includes around 140 datacenters and 16 undersea cables of various types. Oregon also doesn't have sales tax, and its enterprise zoning incentives has made it an attractive location for players like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

The DSL calls the revised rate "competitive-to-low," reinforcing the notion that Oregon is trying to stay competitive with its southern neighbor, California, which charges an estimated $5 per cable foot on an annual basis.

It's worth noting that spending a million or two over two decades is peanuts compared to the initial outlay required to put an undersea cable down in the first place, especially one coming from across the world. These reportedly ring in at around $250 million for a transatlantic connector — and a whopping $400 million to cross the Pacific.

Although it's not set in stone, it seems that already-approved cables might be almost entirely exempt from the new fees. Some recent contracts, such as the one for Amazon Bifrost, did include a clause that said that any fees applied by new state laws must be paid for. However, the contract also included a specific $300,000 "out" for this clause — which Amazon paid at the time.