Data center backlash stalls almost $200B in projects and becomes a US midterm election issue

A Brooklyn election event overtaken by data centers

At a midterm election gathering hosted by the media company Newsreel in a Brooklyn warehouse last Thursday, the planned agenda — attention apps, campaign software, the future of the Democratic Party — kept collapsing into one subject: AI infrastructure. According to TechCrunch, whose reporter moderated a panel at the event, data centers surfaced in every on-stage conversation and ranked as the second most common topic in questions attendees submitted when registering.

Newsreel founder Jack Brewster told TechCrunch the pattern holds even in New York, where data centers are barely visible. In his words, "AI has become an election issue for regular voters" — in rural communities the backlash is about feeling replaced, while in a place like Brooklyn it is about who gets rich.

Nearly $200 billion in projects stalled

The political friction is already producing measurable results for the industry. TechCrunch cites a report from Data Center Watch finding that almost $200 billion in data center projects were delayed, stalled or blocked in the first half of 2026 alone because of political and community opposition.

At the same time, states including Pennsylvania, Georgia, Texas, New York and Virginia are weighing new guardrails and transparency requirements around data center development. Virginia — already nicknamed the "data center capital of the world" — has hundreds of additional facilities planned, TechCrunch reports.

What is driving the anger

When the TechCrunch moderator asked the Brooklyn crowd who was pro-AI data center, the question was booed. Panelists Maia Woluchem, a technology and human rights researcher, and Hilary Flint, an environmental and public health advocate, described grievances that go beyond aesthetics: apparently secret deals between big tech companies and local officials, zoning rules that leave residents unsure what is actually being built until protest is impractical, and worries about environmental and health effects.

The panel's framing, as TechCrunch recounts it, is that data centers have become the physical embodiment of public anger at the tech class and the pace of technological change. When the benefits some communities have seen from data center build-outs were raised, Flint asked "What is a life worth?", saying residents keep protesting because they "value their lives a little bit more than a temporary check."

New York City Council member Chi Ossé, speaking before the panel, said he wanted tech executives held more accountable and argued that CEOs who discuss a technology that could "deplete 10% of human civilization" should be called to testify before Congress.

A divided labor picture

The backlash is not uniform. NewsNation host Batya Ungar-Sargon noted at the event that some labor unions support data centers for the jobs they promise, comparing them to the large industrial buildings Rust Belt communities once took pride in because they represented stability and a share of the American Dream. TechCrunch points to reports showing that data centers create many jobs during construction but that those positions are not permanent once building ends.

Vox's Astead Herndon highlighted what he called a "lack of consent" in how facilities get sited, saying that sentiment exists among Republicans too, and noted that Vivek Ramaswamy was booed in Ohio for making a similar pro-jobs argument. Morris Katz, a strategist who worked on Zohran Mamdani's campaign, was blunter, describing data center developers as the same institutional powers that "robbed labor and working people of jobs and profit" now returning to "take whatever scraps remain."

The opposition is also surfacing in places with little history of it. A software engineer at the event told TechCrunch that residents of her Southern California hometown have placed yard signs showing a dragon choking a data center — signs that have since been translated into other languages.

Why it matters

For cloud and infrastructure planners, capacity can no longer be treated as a purely technical or economic calculation. With midterm races on November 3 and nearly $200 billion in projects already delayed or blocked, community consent and state-level regulation have become gating factors on the build-out that AI demand assumes. Siting strategy, transparency and local benefit-sharing now function as planning constraints in their own right — operators who treat them as seriously as power and land availability are likely to bring capacity online far faster than those who do not.