Turning “Not in my backyard” into “Please, in my backyard.”
A community backlash that started as a handful of local zoning fights is now a national movement, and it has become the single biggest thing standing between the data-center industry and the capacity it needs to build.
This is the map of that movement: where it came from, what it’s costing, and why it exists. Every concern driving it is a concern SET Energy’s community-first model was engineered to answer.
Opposition went from fringe to mainstream in under a year.
Public sentiment on data centers didn’t drift; it broke. Two independent national pollsters now put opposition to a nearby data center at roughly seven in ten Americans, cutting across party lines, and the organized movement behind it has more than doubled in a matter of months.
A restriction map of the United States
cities, towns, and counties have proposed or passed data-center moratoriums; Michigan alone accounts for roughly 50.
restrictive actions by state and local governments in a single year (May 2025 to May 2026): a near-tenfold rise.
The origin of the “No.”
Today’s national movement grew out of a single Virginia land-use fight. Understanding that arc is how you get ahead of it.
Residents organize against a transmission line partly serving an Amazon data center. Local, contained, easy to miss.
A ~2,100-acre, multi-billion-dollar rezoning becomes a national symbol. Land deals and stock-sale scandals turn a zoning case into a trust crisis.
A judge voids the Digital Gateway rezoning over public-notice violations, showing even the largest projects are beatable and handing every local group a playbook.
Opposition groups multiply into the hundreds; statewide moratorium bills appear in 14 states; 300+ data-center bills are filed in the first six weeks of the 2026 sessions alone.
Every stalled project is locked capacity, and locked capital.
The backlash isn’t just noise; it is measurably slowing the build-out. Projects are being withdrawn, rejected, and moratoriumed off the board, taking gigawatts of planned compute and tens of billions in investment with them. This is precisely the value SET Energy’s model is built to unlock.
The billions sitting in limbo
Investment blocked, delayed, or contested, by project (Data Center Watch, May 2024–Mar 2025 tracking). Virginia dominates the list.
“Rejected 7–0.”
In Tucson, AZ, an Amazon-linked 600 MW campus (“Project Blue”) was voted down unanimously over water and secrecy concerns. In Naperville, IL, a project was rejected 6–1 even after the developer scaled back the project. In San Marcos, TX, a denial was followed by a citywide ban in every zoning district.
A generational build-out is coming. The only open question is whether communities fight it or welcome it, and that is a design choice.
A textbook standoff, and exactly the one SET’s model is built to prevent.
In Calvert County, large grid-dependent campus proposals collided with an organized community: residents gathered 1,300+ signatures petitioning for a moratorium, and a measure to require an independent environmental study before any approval was debated at the Board of County Commissioners in spring 2026, where the proposed moratorium was ultimately voted down 3–2. The controversy became a defining issue in the county’s 2026 primaries. Calvert’s underlying concerns – electricity prices, water, grid strain, and a transparent process – are the same ones every one of these fights turns on. They are also the exact concerns SET Energy’s distributed, self-powered, closed-loop model resolves by design, so that a community never has to choose between economic growth and its own quality of life.
The eight concerns driving the backlash, and SET’s answer to each.
Opposition is rational. When you look at how the conventional, grid-dependent megacampus is built, the fears are earned. SET Energy’s entire model is a point-by-point response: the same concern that triggers a “no” becomes the reason a community says “yes.”
Infrastructure a community asks for, because the friction was engineered out.
Put the answers together and they stop being eight separate rebuttals and become one coherent model. This is what “community-first” means in practice: the design that resolves the objection is the same design that makes the project faster to approve, cheaper to finance, and durable for decades.
Bring your own power
On-site hybrid generation and storage as a microgrid, so the campus adds capacity and resilience instead of competing with residents for a strained grid.
Distributed, not dominant
Smaller campuses in existing industrial corridors: closed-loop cooled, low-water, low-noise. They preserve rural character and spread jobs across the county.
Transparent by design
Community advisory groups, public performance dashboards, and independent audits from day one, turning the process itself from a liability into a reason to say yes.
The next generation of digital infrastructure will be built where it’s welcome.
If you’re a community leader, utility, or hyperscaler tired of watching capacity die in a zoning hearing, let’s talk about building it the way that gets a yes.
Start a conversation Partner with us