70% of Americans Want This Out of Their Town

Three-quarters of Americans say they would fight a data center if one showed up in their community, and that number is going the wrong way for the companies building them. A survey from Heatmap News, released Aug. 19, found that 75% would somewhat or strongly oppose a project near them, up from 42% in August 2025.

The pushback lands as towns and city councils try to weigh the money these projects promise against what neighbors say they lose: control over land use, a say in how things get decided, and the feel of the place they live. The fights are not hypothetical. They are already in courtrooms, county council chambers, and zoning meetings that run past midnight.

The opposition is growing, not fading

Data centers used to be background noise. They stored things like health records, and nobody paid much attention. What changed is the size. The Heatmap survey shows most people now say they would oppose one in their own town, and the share doing so has risen 33 points in a year. The complaints tend to cluster around the same handful of things: environmental effects, how much land the buildings eat, whether the public gets told the truth about who is behind them, and plain old quality of life. Supporters point to jobs and tax revenue. A lot of residents are no longer buying it.

Wisconsin residents fought a 320-acre plan

Blaine Halverson, founder of a group called Uniting West Wisconsin, said residents worry that hyperscale projects will change the whole character of the places they call home. He wants local governments to write stronger ordinances and put safeguards in place before they sign off on big land-use decisions, not after.

Halverson said data centers have long been needed to hold information, but the speed and scale of recent building has forced towns to confront much larger projects with little warning. In Menomonie, Wisconsin, residents raised transparency concerns when the city looked at a 320-acre facility. The public reaction pushed the city to draft data center guidelines, which were introduced on Aug. 3 and have not been voted on.

St. Louis opponents took a $3 billion project to court

A group of residents in St. Louis is trying to stop a $3 billion data center planned near the Armory in Midtown, and they filed a lawsuit to do it. The city's Board of Adjustment had already rejected appeals challenging a conditional use permit for the project. That decision came after a hearing packed with nearly 11 hours of public comment.

The suit, filed on Aug. 28, argues the board erred when it denied the appeals and granted the permit, calling the decision arbitrary and contrary to law. The plaintiffs want a court to freeze the action while the case plays out and to reverse the board entirely. Two of them, Daniel Pate and Kerry McCullen, told St. Louis Public Radio that the appeals process felt rushed.

McCullen was blunt about it. "These hyperscale data centers are not welcome in St. Louis, and the residents are going to continue to fight tooth and nail at every chance we get to stop them," he said. Pate said the city was "bending and twisting themselves into pretzels to try to get this thing through," and called the lawsuit the last real chance opponents had. A spokeswoman for Mayor Cara Spencer said the city does not comment on pending legal matters.

The Armory project keeps moving anyway

The lawsuit has not stopped the Armory Innovation District, a $3 billion, 120 megawatt center that is still going forward. Because the city's broader rules are not finished yet, officials attached conditions directly to the project's permit. Those include measures to handle sound and heat, a closed loop cooling system meant to conserve water, and a requirement that at least 50% of the center's energy come from renewable sources within five years.

Behind that permit sits a year of work. City planning staff, led by City Planning Executive Miriam Keller, built a zoning plan after Mayor Cara Spencer issued an executive order. The trigger was news last September that a developer hoped to put a data center in the Armory building. The plan sorted data centers by size, spelled out where they could go, and set renewable energy, light, and sound restrictions.

Then the politics got messy. Alderman Tom Oldenburg won an amendment letting developers get waivers if they could show they would not hit 100% renewable energy within 10 years. Alderwoman Jami Cox Antwi added two more, including a path for some downtown buildings to blow past a 30% cap on using ground floors for data centers if they signed a community benefit agreement. Ward 1 Alderwoman Anne Schweitzer said the changes weakened the rules and left the city exposed. The Planning Commission rejected the amendments on Aug. 12. Aldermen returned in special session on Aug. 28 and tightened the renewable energy and sustainability requirements, sending the rules back to the commission for a second look.

St. Charles just banned them outright

Some towns skipped the regulation debate and went straight to no. On May 19, the St. Charles City Council effectively prohibited large-scale data centers inside city limits, making permanent a one-year ban it had passed after a developer walked away from a project. The ban writes data centers into the zoning code and then simply does not allow them.

What soured residents was the secrecy. The proposed St. Charles project was hyperscale, the largest category, meant to train artificial intelligence systems. City staff signed nondisclosure agreements, and lawyers for the end user would not say who was actually moving in. Records obtained by St. Louis Public Radio under the state's open-records law pointed to Google. The company never confirmed it. The lack of straight answers is what pushed people to demand a ban.

Neighboring governments took similar swings. St. Charles County passed a six-month moratorium in July and talked openly about making it permanent, saying it needed time to study the impact on water, energy bills, and daily life. In unincorporated St. Louis County, officials are still drafting rules that sort projects by size, from a micro category under 10,000 square feet and 3 megawatts up to a major one above 250,000 square feet and 50 megawatts. No data center projects were pending there as of late August, but nearly a dozen speakers turned up at a county Planning Commission hearing on Aug. 10 to demand an outright ban.

Why these fights keep happening

The money is real, and so is the reason it keeps getting bigger. Missouri passed one of its only data center laws back in 2015, creating a tax break on sales and use taxes for these developments. At the time, that made sense. Then artificial intelligence arrived, the buildings ballooned, and a tax exemption written for modest projects suddenly applied to enormous ones.

More recently, the state folded data center rules into a wide-ranging energy bill known as SB4, which Gov. Mike Kehoe signed in April 2025. It told utility companies to set up special electric rates and terms for large data centers, partly so existing customers would not end up subsidizing the projects and partly to lure the business in. That tension, a state trying to attract these centers while residents line up to block them, is what runs underneath nearly every one of these disputes. The poll suggests the residents are not backing down. Three out of four say they would rather not have one nearby at all, and far more feel that way now than did in August 2025.