The town of Saline, Michigan, didn’t want a $16 billion data center in its backyard. Residents voted against it. Weeks later, as Fortune‘s Sharon Goldman reported, construction began anyway.
That dynamic — community opposition steamrolled by corporate momentum — is playing out across America at accelerating speed. At least 48 data center projects representing $156 billion in investment were blocked or stalled by local opposition in 2025 alone, according to Miquel Vila, a supply chain and political risk analyst at 10a Labs who maintains the Data Center Watch initiative.
Project cancellations jumped from six in 2024 to 25 in 2025, and in the first quarter of 2026, more than 20 additional projects were killed — a record quarterly pace. There are now 188 local opposition groups operating across 40 states…