As AI drives demand for new data centres, operators are discovering that the hardest constraints aren’t (just) land and power – they’re communities, politics, and staffing. Local opposition, public sentiment, and workforce shortages are reshaping where and how new AI facilities can be built.
In sum – what to know:
Community resistance – local residents are pushing back hard, citing noise, traffic, and environmental impacts.
Political dimensions – operators must navigate partisan and non-partisan resistance to gain community approval.
Workforce challenges – attracting staff to facilities in tertiary markets is difficult, creating another bottleneck.
Data centre construction is getting tougher – inside and outside of so-called ‘primary markets’, which have fielded much of the demand for new AI engine rooms until now. Beyond default challenges around the availability of land and power, the biggest problem is people, it seems, whose objections might be broadly characterised in two ways: not in my back yard, and not in yours either. The community backlash is easier to track: local news publications are full of stories about protest groups kicking up a stink about data-centre digs all over the US.
See cases in California (Imperial Valley, Monterey Park), Texas (College Station, San Marcos), Wisconsin (Beaver Dam, Port Washington), and across the Northern Virginia suburbs, notably; plus in Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, and many places between. They cite energy costs, infrastructure strain, environmental impacts, and community engagement. Outcomes have varied: lawsuits, regulatory scrutiny, tighter approvals, scrapped projects. Last week, New York’s state legislature said it is considering a three-year moratorium on new data centre permits.
There are 130 data centres in New York, apparently. UK-based National Grid, managing electricity and gas in New York and Massachusetts, says requests for “large load” connections have tripled in a year. At least 10 gigawatts of demand is expected to be added in the next five years, reports The Verge. It is not just a US phenomenon, of course; people are protesting across the world at the physical encroachment of AI factories in their communities – search for the same in Malaysia (Johor), Japan (Akishima/Tokyo), Ireland (Dublin), and the UK (Abbots Langley, Havering).
Curiously, the people-problem is more political – perhaps. EU-based publication Politico has a new poll of US voters ahead of the midterm elections (November), asking whether the proximity of new data centres matters to them. It writes: “A partisan split is emerging: people increasingly see the tech companies as aligned with Republicans, the survey shows.” It notes that new Democratic governors Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill triumphed in Virginia and New Jersey, respectively, on grid-modernisation mandates for data centre operators. Which is a national view.
At local level, 37 percent of respondents don’t mind a data centre in their backyard, citing new jobs as the benefit, the poll finds; 28 percent do mind, and the rest (36 percent) “could swing either way”, it writes. The fault line, it concludes, is with a big-tech backlash among Democrats at national level and a both-ways backlash in local politics, on the ground in primary and secondary markets, where data centres are being built – and where opponents are concentrated and motivated, and prepared to vote on the issue, and “often quite conservative in their politics”.
The community challenge for data centre operators was a major talking point at PTC in Hawaii – a 1,000-person telecom trade show, transformed into 10,000-person data centre show in just a couple of years – towards the end of last month. A major chunk of a headline panel talked about the issue at some length; RCR may yet transcribe and report. But the theme was scattered through every other session at PTC. “Public sentiment… [has] gotten very, very noisy over the course of the last four or five months,” said Jonathan Lin, chief business officer at Equinix.
He was hosting a session with AlixPartners, DataBank, Oracle, and Verizon, parts of which have already been covered here. “How do you work with communities to get them to understand the benefit and value?” Raul Martynek, chief executive at data centre operator DataBank, responded: “It’s definitely becoming a big issue… The community opposition is getting more fierce, which means you spend more energy… It is about partnering with the community – before site acquisition. We are building a 192 MW campus in Culpeper [County] because Culpeper is proactive.”
Martynek explained: “It wanted data centers but only in a certain area – in this technology zone, where data centre operators are welcome. That type of collaborative approach will be necessary. We are avoiding anything that’s even close to residential because it is becoming a ‘third rail’ type of thing. People are blaming data centres for the rise in electrical prices even though there’s a lot of other factors there – like modernization of the grid, which costs hundreds of billions of dollars. It is going to be a rocky road.”
Lin chimed in: “Same thing for [Equinix] – just having deep engagement and educating folks about the benefits: job creation, tax value creation, low utilization of resources, investing back into the community. We are going into markets, and we’re not going to up and leave; we’re building 30-50 year assets, and campuses that will last longer. We’re in for the long haul. [But] the most important point is to develop where there is interest and excitement [about data centres], rather than trying to push a way into areas that might just be optimized for a short game.”
David Liggitt, chief at data centre analytics firm Datacenter Hawk (stylised datacenterHawk), said on a separate panel: “The pushback [against data centres] seems to be more around the social (cost) side… [than because of] price rates going up… People that were very pro are not so excited about data centers in their communities, suddenly… We are all grappling with the [social] cost for communities that have never had projects like these before – everything from the labour market to general conditions, around simple things like traffic.”
He went on: “Like, if you are going down Waxpool Road in Loudoun County (in Virginia) at 4:30pm, the traffic is really bad because there are 10 projects within a two mile radius. There are other places like that in the US; and that’s how it has to be if you want to complete some of these bigger projects. The good news is those issues go away when the work is done; the traffic goes. But there will be a cost to keep this pace of growth – and watching how communities are impacted is important. But the big users interact very differently with communities now than [years ago].”
His point, at the end, is that the data centre business used to be “very secretive” – mysterious buildings in the suburbs, so anonymous “you would never know they were there”. He said: “The industry is still secretive in nature, but the big users are much more open to working with the community – to giving back. And the whole industry is going to have to be like that.” The other people-issue, referenced at the top of the piece, is how to staff these new venues. There is a discussion, variously, that data-centre tech is “evolving faster than most teams can adapt”.
“These facilities aren’t just getting bigger – they’re becoming harder to operate [and] harder to staff,” writes Texas-based B2B marketing platform MarketScale. This may be so, but the challenge to site new data centres in primary and secondary markets, amid all the community protests, has forced operators to look further afield, way beyond big metro hubs – even to tertiary markets like the Dakotas, notably, and Montana, Nebraska, Wyoming, and elsewhere. Land is cheaper, and power is more available – or less contested, and more potentially-available.
During another session at PTC (as reported already), Jason Nance, in charge of client solutions at CBRE Data Center Solutions, a service group within commercial real-estate services and investment firm CBRE, said just this. “The tertiary markets are more and more in the mix… [and] could very well become primary markets.” But a part of the challenge, beyond electrical power, is (hu)man power – and how to attract workers to the back-end of nowhere to staff a big rural AI factory,” he remarked.
“Everybody knows [about] Abilene (in Texas, where the Stargate project is based)… [but] people forget that the infrastructure for people to support these projects [has] to be there… The biggest problem is getting people to move to these tertiary markets. People look at the power and the network, but… you still need people at the end of the day. And that may stymie growth in these tertiary markets… Sometimes it’s a bridge too far… to move to North Dakota.”
