The artificial-intelligence boom might usher in the next industrial revolution, but first it is going to have to answer to Cheryl Cordes.
The retired nurse and her neighbors in Genesee County, N.Y., have spent months protesting the construction of a data center in their rural community in the western part of the state. The 90-acre facility, whose end user is shielded by nondisclosure agreements with county officials, would likely help provide the massive computing power needed for AI applications.
Demand for such facilities has had hockey-stick-like growth in the past few months, its developer, Stream Data Centers, says. But just as often, projects have run into opponents like Cordes and her husband Mark, who moved to Alabama, N.Y., more than 40 years ago.
Mark Cordes says he doesn't mind the occasional smell of manure when the local farmers are fertilizing their crops, but that the constant hum of a data center would fundamentally change their neighborhood. His wife says she's especially concerned that the center will emit a low-frequency noise called infrasound that she fears could cause health problems.
The couple has planted yard signs opposing the project and gone door-to-door surveying neighbors to collect evidence of the community's opposition. Cheryl Cordes rallied in May on the steps of the New York State Capitol building in support of legislation to impose the first statewide moratorium on large data-center construction. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is now considering signing a moratorium into law.
Tech companies' insatiable demand for AI is facing a reckoning with voters across the country, and the grassroots backlash is threatening to complicate -- or even derail -- the single-most important driver of the U.S. economy and stock market. What started as scattered protests against large data-center projects is snowballing into a national movement, marked by rallies against data-center buildouts, canceled projects, and campaigns to impose statewide moratoria on new data-center construction.
In the past several years, "one could credibly question whether industry, scientific, and commercial developments would overwhelm regulation, but 2026 increasingly seems the start of a long, probably deep regulatory engagement," analysts for 22V Research wrote in a recent note.
About 44% of Americans oppose data-center construction in the U.S., versus 21% who support it, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in June. The numbers are even worse among people asked if they would support construction of a data center in their community, with 14% in favor and 57% opposed.
Traditional data centers for cloud computing have been around for decades, but the new wave of data centers dwarfs the older generation in power usage, scale, and the rapidity with which they are being built. The equipment in some data centers can give off an incessant hum that neighbors describe as torture. The facilities can employ thousands of people in the development phase, but far fewer once construction is completed. Nor do they have the economic impact of other sorts of industrial sites.
Data-center critics say the facilities' intense power needs pollute the air, and studies have shown that they sometimes drive up local electricity costs. Researchers at the Dallas Fed said earlier this year that under plausible scenarios, the data-center buildout could add up to 0.13 percentage points to annual inflation by 2030 as measured by the personal consumption expenditures price index.
Many Americans are wary of AI technology, which doesn't help. Executives at Anthropic have warned that AI models could replace millions of white-collar jobs. The White House has delayed the rollout of some more advanced AI models over concerns that they could be used to hack into sensitive government or financial systems.
To try to address the power costs, Alphabet's Google, Microsoft, Meta Platforms, Oracle, xAI, OpenAI, and Amazon.com all visited the White House in March to promise they would build, buy, or bring all the power needed for their data centers, an effort encouraged by President Donald Trump to address concerns about rising electricity bills. Still, that hasn't satisfied many municipalities.
The resistance comes at a sensitive time for AI companies. OpenAI and Anthropic have both filed confidentially for initial public offerings that could take place later this year or next year. Hyperscalers that operate huge datacenters, such as Microsoft, Google, and CoreWeave, say they are capacity constrained, and warnings that a data-center backlash could hamper growth are starting to bleed into companies' annual reports and earnings calls.
The data-center buildout has effectively carried the economy and stock market in 2026. Morgan Stanley estimates that hyperscalers will spend $800 billion on capital expenditures this year, roughly the same amount that all non-tech S&P 500 companies combined spent on capex in 2025. The Semiconductor Industry Association estimates that the government and industry will spend another $4 trillion on data-center infrastructure through 2028.
AI enthusiasm has been almost entirely responsible for the S&P 500's 84% rise since OpenAI publicly released ChatGPT in November 2022. Goldman Sachs says the AI investment theme is likely to account for half of all earnings growth over the next two years. Many investors think the technology will drive productivity gains and increase demand for all sorts of services as costs go down, rather than wiping out white-collar work.
But the uncomfortable reality for AI companies and their proponents is that a huge portion of the planned capacity may not materialize. In the first quarter, 75 data-center projects worth $130 billion were blocked or delayed by local opposition, according to Data Center Watch, a research firm backed by AI security company 10a Labs. That is as many as faced that fate in all of 2025.
In Genesee County, many residents, much like the Cordes', are concerned that the so-called Stamp facility -- shorthand for the Science & Technology Advanced Manufacturing Park -- will be noisy and drive up power bills. "Even if they put a manufacturer there, that would be fine, " says Tim Molaro, who lives with his wife, Marianne, a few miles from the site. "But to put this data center in there, it's going to draw power and that power is going to be paid [for] by us."
Stream executives have said the company is paying for any required infrastructure and that the facility won't impact residential supply or rates.
The Tonawanda Seneca Nation, a local tribe whose land abuts the industrial park, has helped organize the community against the $19.5 billion project, which would draw about 500 megawatts of electricity, making it one of the largest in the country. The tribe and Sierra Club filed a lawsuit last year to stop a previous data-center project on the same site, alleging it hadn't gone through required environmental reviews. Local authorities rescinded the approvals for that project, mooting the lawsuit, only to come back later in the year with a new proposal for a data center twice as big.
AI executives have acknowledged the industry needs to do more to win over local communities.
"Why is the world angry at us? They're angry at us because we were dopes, " said Andrew Feldman, CEO of AI chip maker Cerebras Systems at a Bloomberg Tech conference in June. "We raced ahead, and we didn't think about the communities into which we were putting these data centers."
Feldman said companies should have made a better case to communities about the economic benefits of data centers and done more to ensure they wouldn't have negative effects on the local population.
Executives at Stream Data Centers say they have been trying to win the support of the facility's potential neighbors. They have taken local officials on tours of existing facilities in an effort to show that the local impact isn't as dire as opponents warn. Some neighbors of those facilities aren't even aware a data center is next door, Stream executives say.
Stream, whose majority owners are funds managed by private-equity firm Apollo Global, has promised that at the property's border, the new data center will be no louder than a residential dishwasher or a quiet conversation. It has given tens of thousands of dollars to the local school.
"The coordinated pushback that we're seeing is definitely creating issues for the industry to be able to grow as quickly as it wants to grow," says Oisín Ó Murchú, Stream's chief development officer.
The pushback "has created so much information online that is just anti-data center that it's hard to have a direct conversation with people about the merits of projects," he says.
Despite its efforts, the industry has found that allies are hard to come by. Some anti-AI advocates say it is the most bipartisan issue they have ever worked on. Moreover, it is an issue that "extends across demographics," says Kristen Gonzalez, a New York state senator and sponsor of the data-center moratorium bill. Hochul has until the end of the year to sign or veto the bill, but Gonzalez says that she and other allies are trying to get the governor to sign it this summer.
Hochul's office said in a statement that she is considering the legislation.
Lawmakers in Arizona, Illinois, and Ohio have recently restricted or ended tax breaks or other economic incentives for data-center construction.
At the federal level, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) has proposed a nationwide data-center moratorium, as has Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.). Rep. Nancy Mace (R., S.C.) wants to pause data-center construction in her home state of South Carolina.
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July 02, 2026 10:15 ET (14:15 GMT)
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