Picture a village hall on a wet Thursday evening. Every chair is taken and people are standing at the back. On a trestle table at the front, a developer's team has laid out renders of a long, low building behind a line of young trees. A farmer asks how much water it will use. A retired teacher asks about the hum at night. Someone at the back asks how many local people will still work there in five years' time. The answers are careful, accurate and, to most of the room, not quite enough.
That scene, in some form, is now happening every week somewhere in Europe or the US.
The question the industry usually asks is how do we get this through planning?
The more useful question is why are so many towns saying no, and are they right?
The numbers behind the no
This has moved well beyond a few angry meetings.
Data Center Watch, which tracks local opposition in the US, counted at least 45 projects worth $68bn blocked or delayed by local opposition in the second quarter of 2026 alone. That followed a first quarter it reportedly described as the largest concentration of blocked projects on record, with around 75 projects and about $130bn affected. By its count, organised local opposition groups have roughly doubled since the end of 2025, and now exist in almost every state.
Public opinion points the same way. In March, Gallup asked Americans for the first time whether they'd support an AI data centre in their local area. 71% said no, 48% of them strongly. That's higher than the share who oppose a local nuclear power plant.
And the opposition is winning in places that matter. In Virginia, the Prince William Digital Gateway, a planned corridor of around 37 data centres on 2,100 acres next to Manassas National Battlefield Park, was approved in December 2023 after a public hearing that ran for more than a day. Residents and a battlefield conservation group challenged it. In March this year the Court of Appeals upheld a ruling voiding the approvals because of public-notice failings; the county dropped its appeal in April, and the developer withdrew its own appeal in July.
Europe has its own versions. The Netherlands has, since 2022, restricted new hyperscale campuses (10 hectares and 70MW or more) to a small number of designated areas, and even some of those host communities now want to pause. In Ireland, An Coimisiún Pleanála overturned permission for a €1.5bn data centre in Killala, Co. Mayo, last month, after around seven years of development work, finding the applicant hadn't shown the project fitted the Climate Action Plan. And this month Finland's licensing authority told a Google subsidiary to pause land clearing at two sites in Muhos and Kajaani until environmental impact assessments are complete.
What residents are actually worried about
It's tempting to file all of this under "nimbyism". That would be a mistake, because the objections are specific, and most of them are reasonable questions.
Water. In Tucson last year, the city council voted 7–0 to end talks on a proposed campus known as Project Blue, after months of public concern about water use in a desert city.
Noise, light and land. Cooling plant and generators run around the clock. Dutch residents in Haarlemmermeer have objected to data centres "being built directly behind homes". In Virginia, the objection was a Civil War battlefield.
Bills. In the US especially, residents increasingly link new campuses to rising electricity prices. (Issue #2 looked at that one in detail.)
Transparency. Code names, non-disclosure agreements and tax incentives agreed before the public hears about them do more damage than almost anything else.
Jobs. This is the one our industry should look at most carefully. Labour market analysts Lightcast estimate that a major project can need 1,000 to 10,000 construction workers, but once it's running the permanent workforce is closer to 50 to 400. Residents notice that gap. Most of the jobs they're promised are ours, and they're temporary.
The case for saying yes
The other side of the ledger is just as real.
Loudoun County in Virginia is the clearest example. Data centres there generated about $1.2bn in property tax revenue in fiscal 2026, around 39% of the county's budget. The county says that money has helped it cut the residential property tax rate year after year, and that the sector supports more than 17,000 direct and indirect jobs.
Developers are also putting money into communities more directly, and earlier. The Texas Tribune counted more than $340m of donations and investment by data centre companies in Texas communities, from a replacement water tower to hospital funding to fixing a leaking pipeline. In Scotland, some developers now publish community fund commitments per megawatt, for every year the site operates. In the Nordics, waste heat feeding district heating networks is turning a few campuses into something the town can actually feel in winter.
And not every local fight ends in a refusal. In Ennis, Co. Clare, a 200MW campus has survived years of legal challenges; the Supreme Court declined to hear a further appeal this week, and its founders say work will start in 2027.
So, are they right?
Often, partly. The concerns about water, noise, transparency and permanent jobs are real, and pretending otherwise loses the room. But a flat "no" also has a cost: lost tax base, lost investment and the work going somewhere else.
The useful pattern is this: towns rarely object to the building alone. They object to what they're asked to absorb, and to how little they were told. That includes something our industry rarely talks about.
The crews are part of the story
When a big campus arrives in a small place, the first thing the town actually meets isn't the data centre. It's us.
Picture several hundred Irish, British and Polish electricians and fitters arriving in a Finnish town of a few thousand people, or a Norwegian fjord community, or a county seat in West Texas. They need beds, meals, parking, a GP, a pub. In many cases, they need them for two years.
In the US, that pressure is already visible. Around the Stargate site in Abilene, Texas, Time reported sharp rent rises, a local housing authority struggling to place voucher holders, and the city approving extra RV parks. In Richland Parish, Louisiana, a parish of around 20,000 people, local reporting has described rents rising sharply as peak construction heads towards an expected 7,500 trades on site. In Cheyenne, Wyoming, a proposed camp for around 5,500 workers has become a local issue in its own right. In Finland, specialist firms are now marketing accommodation specifically for data centre crews.
None of this is anyone's fault in particular. It's what happens when a very large workforce moves into a very small place. But it means the crew is part of the developer's social licence. A full car park at the only supermarket, rent rises for local families, a rowdy Friday night in the one hotel bar: residents remember these things, and they come up at the next planning meeting for the next phase.
What this means on site
- Plan for the delay, not just the build. Planning challenges, judicial reviews and paused permits now regularly add months, sometimes years, to start dates. Decide early who you'll keep together through a slipping start, what you'll do with them in the meantime, and how you'll tell them. The best supervisors won't wait indefinitely.
- Know what was promised locally. Developers increasingly commit to local hiring, apprenticeships and community funds as part of the planning case. Find out what those commitments are before you mobilise, because the contractor is usually the one who has to deliver them.
- Treat accommodation and conduct as part of the programme. Book beds as early as you book cranes, spread the load rather than emptying a town's rental market, and brief every crew on how they're expected to behave off site as well as on it. In a small town, the site's reputation is set at the hotel bar and the supermarket as much as at the gate.
Three numbers worth knowing
$68bn: the value of US data centre projects blocked or delayed by local opposition in Q2 2026, across at least 45 projects (Data Center Watch).
71%: the share of Americans who oppose an AI data centre being built in their local area (Gallup, March 2026).
39%: the share of Loudoun County's FY2026 budget funded by data centre property taxes, about $1.2bn.
So, why do towns say no?
Because they're asked to take on the water, the noise, the traffic and the strain on housing, often before anyone has explained what they get back, and the jobs they see most of are the ones that leave.
The towns that say yes are usually the ones that were told more, earlier, and saw the benefits arrive before the bulldozers did. For contractors, that's not someone else's problem. Opposition is now a programme risk, and how our people live and behave in those towns is part of the answer.
One question back to you: has local opposition or a planning delay moved one of your start dates this year, and how did you keep your team together through it? Reply and tell me. I read every answer, and the best ones will shape a future issue.
Alex The DC Build Network