Building data centers is broadly unpopular across the political spectrum, but so far, banning new development is a mostly metropolitan area phenomenon. While more data centers are located in metropolitan areas than nonmetropolitan ones, two-thirds of all new facilities are planned for rural communities.
The rural data center boom comes amidst rising backlash to the facilities. Earlier this year, my colleague Sarah Melotte and I mapped rural opposition to data centers. In June, we found that there were 129 groups organized on Facebook who were fighting against data center development in rural areas, compared to 345 groups in metropolitan areas. At the time, the rural groups were representative of around 27% of all of the opposition groups present on Facebook, spanning 43 states. We used data from the Data Center Opposition Report, a coalition of organizations and academics tracking resistance to the facilities.
Since June, the coalition has continued monitoring new groups as they emerge. As of August, the researchers have identified 580 local opposition groups active on Facebook, encompassing more than 640,000 members across the country.
It’s still early to identify trends in whether and how local opposition translates into local policy, especially in rural places where development is just starting to ramp up. One reason why there are more bans in metropolitan areas than in rural areas may just be a result of data center development history.
Metropolitan areas have long hosted data centers that provide cloud services. But the AI-driven campuses being built now require much more land, energy, and water resources than their 2000s and 2010s-era counterparts. Now, as data center development expands into the countryside, rural communities often face unique barriers to organizing, compounded by news deserts and projects’ lack of transparency.
At a national level, hostility toward data centers is quickly calcifying into an election issue ahead of November’s midterms. The sentiment has prompted politicians of all stripes to call for stricter regulation on the facilities, and, in some cases, flat-out moratoriums.
Local Data Center Bans
Data center-related policies being proposed at local levels of government range from 90-day pauses to permanent bans on the facilities. Of nearly 700 bans we looked at, 25% are in rural areas, as of August 2026. The Daily Yonder uses a county-level definition of rural derived from the Office of Management and Budget.
The information on local data center regulations comes from FracTracker Alliance, an organization that provides the public with interactive tools to understand oil, gas, petrochemical, and data center development across the country.
Many of the policies in the dataset have already been put in place, with 84% of local regulations enacted, including 151 in rural areas across 34 states, as of August 2026. These policies include bans, zoning updates, moratoriums, and other protective ordinances that restrict data center development.
Residents pushing for local data center bans say it’s a way to buy communities time to enact stricter regulations on development.
In rural Wiscasset, Maine, newly elected town officials have proposed a 180-day moratorium on data centers to go on the ballot in November. It comes after plans, now abandoned, for a $5 billion data center on town-owned land were made public in September 2025. In May, The Daily Yonder first reported, based on extensive public records findings, that data center talks last fall ultimately derailed nearly a quarter of a million dollars in federal funding the town had been awarded for much-needed affordable housing.
If the moratorium is approved by voters in November, the town government will have the opportunity to put permanent guardrails on the books. “During that 180 days, they are required to be working on language that will address whatever issue it is, whether it’s a Walmart or a data center,” said Richard Davis, a local resident and cofounder of the Protect Wiscasset community group. “We’re hoping that during that time, the select board will come up with something that really restricts data centers in the town of Wiscasset.”
Data Center Politics
Communities’ desire for data center regulation extends outside the confines of local government. In the South, where nearly half of the country’s data center construction is planned, clean energy advocates are calling for an 18-month pause on the facilities to put economic, health, and environmental guardrails in place.
Stephen Smith, the executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE), an advocacy organization that works across the South, criticized data center developers and the Big Tech companies backing them for moving quickly through project proposals, often without local transparency.
“Move fast and break things is 180 degrees opposite of the way a lot of people think in the South,” Smith said. “There is a need to recognize the communal, cultural impact of this.”
When asked whether state governors and legislatures in the South have an appetite for data center regulation, Smith said, “We’re about to find out,” adding that there may be consequences for politicians who don’t pay attention to constituents’ concerns over the facilities.
On August 28, U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock, a Democrat from Georgia, called for a statewide data center moratorium during a visit to the site of OpenAI’s proposed 3.2-gigawatt data center in Effingham County, Georgia, in the Savannah metropolitan area. “Data center developers across the country are not operating in partnership with communities, and that’s why everyday citizens on both sides of the aisle are rightly and equally concerned about this,” Warnock said at the site.
Earlier in August, Pennsylvania’s Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro followed New York’s Governor Kathy Hochul, also a Democrat, in signing an executive order restricting data center projects (Hochul became the first governor in the country to enact a statewide moratorium in July). The move was a shift from Shapiro’s earlier embrace of the industry. In Texas, Republican Governor Greg Abbott, who had also been a staunch advocate for data center construction, issued a directive last month to pause data center grid approvals.
It comes after a call he made earlier in the summer to prohibit building in rural Texas neighborhoods. Both Texas and Pennsylvania have seen significant data center development, with Big Tech companies eyeing increasingly massive sites across both states. Texas alone has at least 248 data centers proposed, the majority of which are planned in rural areas, according to The Texas Tribune. There, companies are working around Abbott’s demands by constructing facilities and power plants off-grid, like Amazon’s 7.65 gigawatt natural gas-powered project in rural Pecos County, Texas. And, as the midterm election nears, Big Tech-backed super PACs have already spent nearly $9 million across the state as of early September to support their aims, according to Reuters.
But beyond Texas, the politics are still shaking out. On August 31, President Donald Trump referred to data centers as “the Golden Goose,” saying communities who don’t want them will “end up being backwards and poor” in a Truth Social post. Other pro-AI advocacy groups and super PACs are planning to spend millions of dollars in battleground states before November to promote candidates who back data center development.
The post Most Data Center Bans Are in Metro Areas, Despite More Facilities Heading for Rural Areas appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
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