When Voters Got to Say No to the Data Center Next Door

Picture a quiet town meeting where the agenda item is not a road or a school, but a windowless building the size of several football fields, humming day and night. Last week, in dozens of places across the United States, ordinary voters got to decide whether that building should be allowed to exist at all.

On Tuesday 3 November, voters in ten states weighed in on 41 local measures about data centers, the big warehouses full of computers that power AI chatbots, streaming and cloud storage. Baxtel, which tracks the industry, reported that voters sided with limits or rejected pro-development proposals in 40 of the 41. Al Jazeera, a few days later, said two races were still being counted. One measure, in Harwood, North Dakota (a town of under 800 people), went the other way. Counts differ slightly between outlets, and Latitude Media said "at least 40" on the day, so treat the exact tally as a close estimate for now.

What the votes actually did

Ohio was the centre of it, with 21 measures. Granville voted to ban data centers inside city limits, with about 82 percent in favour. In Ashville, voters turned down a deal for two proposed data centers by roughly 82 to 18. Defiance passed a cap on projects above 25 megawatts, which is a measure of power demand.

Elsewhere the rules varied a lot. Maine towns passed pauses of around six months. Alhambra in California banned them outright. Janesville in Wisconsin will now require a public vote on any project over 450 million dollars. Some measures, such as ones in Bloomington and Morgan County in Illinois, are only advisory, so they send a message without binding anyone.

Why now?

I think the simplest answer is the electricity bill. Al Jazeera pointed to a Dallas Federal Reserve working paper estimating that data centers pushed wholesale power prices up about 7 percent. Think of the grid as a shared pizza. If a giant new customer orders half of it, everyone else's slices get more expensive, or smaller. Water use and noise come up too, and so does a vaguer worry that the AI these buildings feed might one day replace people's jobs.

It's not simply a revolt against the technology, though. Climate Power polling cited by Latitude Media found only 28 percent support for a generic new data center nearby, but 56 percent if it ran on clean energy and the company paid its own way. That gap is the interesting part. People seem to be asking who pays, not whether computers should exist.

The industry has a different case. The Data Center Coalition says these facilities bring jobs, local tax revenue and investment. After the vote, OpenAI published a framework promising low-water cooling and to pay its own way on energy and infrastructure. That's a pledge, not a result, and I'd want to see it tested in a real town before judging it.

The scale of the build-out explains some of the nerves. Pew figures cited by Al Jazeera put the US at about 3,000 data centers as of April, with more than 1,500 more in progress. When the count is about to grow by half, people who live next to the sites start asking questions that national debates tend to skip, like where the water comes from and who signs off on the power line.

What to watch next

More votes are coming, including Clarksville, Arkansas on 1 December and Mandan, North Dakota on 15 December. State legislatures are likely to see plenty of data center bills in 2027, according to law firm Venable. Markets noticed too: Nvidia lost about 450 billion dollars in market value on Thursday before bouncing back, though nobody has shown that was caused by the votes.

My reaction is mixed, and I'll admit I can see both sides. Communities deserve a say over something this big landing next door. But AI demand isn't going away, so the buildings will go somewhere. Do you think local votes are the right tool, or should these decisions be made at a state or national level?

Sources: Baxtel, Al Jazeera, Latitude Media, Venable.