Christopher Jordan is a program manager at the National League of Cities and Kate Stoll is a project director at the AAAS Center for Scientific Evidence in Public Issues.
In August, the Tucson, Arizona City Council voted unanimously to oppose Project Blue, the code name for a proposed $3.6 billion Amazon data center campus on the city’s southern edge. The decision came after months of sustained community opposition driven by a lack of transparency from the city and the developer, fears about the project’s estimated water consumption, and concern over how the cost of intense energy needs might get passed on to local ratepayers. The project may yet move forward, but the debate exposed fault lines between developers, city officials, and front-line communities.
Tucson’s experience is part of a growing pattern of communities becoming more attuned to the trade-offs of hosting hyperscale AI data centers. As demand for data center capacity accelerates, local government officials across the United States are weighing the promise of jobs, tax revenue, and other economic development benefits against the strains these facilities place on land, water, and power systems that often exceed the assumptions built into existing zoning codes, permitting processes, and infrastructure plans.
Some US states are moving to restrict the latitude that local developers have to negotiate, and the federal government is doing its best to remove obstacles to data center build out. Yet within their remit, local governments retain important tools and bargaining power to shape these projects and the terms on which they proceed. Their responses so far, both reactive and proactive, fall into a few distinct patterns, from outright rejection to securing concessions. Federal, state and civil society counterparts can learn from these early local responses for what they might signal for the hundreds of proposals currently being considered across the country.
A taxonomy of local responses
The latter half of 2025 has seen a growing amount of community opposition to data center proposals and developments. This is in large part due to growing community awareness of the energy and water demands these facilities impose, but also noise and aesthetic complaints that threaten to erode community character. In response, some city and county officials have moved to enforce pauses and moratoria…