digest

When people hear that a “data center” is coming to their county, they often picture one generic warehouse full of blinking servers. In practice, the industry builds at least three genuinely different kinds of facilities under that name, and the difference matters: who owns it, what it's for, and how much say a community will ever have in what happens there next.

The rarest and most narrowly defined type is the research computing center: publicly funded supercomputers built to answer scientific questions rather than sell a product. The U.S. Department of Energy operates the world's three fastest supercomputers, Frontier at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Aurora at Argonne National Laboratory, and El Capitan at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, all housed inside government-run national labs rather than commercial campuses. Frontier reached 1.1 exaflops on the standard performance benchmark and roughly seven exaflops of AI performance when it launched in 2022, and DOE says its exascale systems support work including climate modeling, fusion reactor materials design, and COVID drug research. Aurora, released to outside scientists in January 2025, has since been used to discover new battery materials, design drugs, and accelerate fusion energy research. These systems are open to outside academic researchers who apply for time on them, a structure almost nothing else on this list shares, and they are essentially never what a community is fighting over at a local zoning hearing, since national labs sit on federal land rather than land a private developer is trying to rezone.

Most of what actually gets proposed in a town today falls into a second category: commercial data centers built and owned by a single company to run its own products, most often a hyperscale cloud or AI campus owned outright by Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, or an AI lab like OpenAI or xAI. This is also the fastest-growing category by far. Hyperscale operators controlled 44% of the world's data center capacity in the first quarter of 2025, according to Synergy Research Group, which projects that share will reach 61% by 2030. A commercial hyperscale campus typically has one tenant, meaning the company that builds it controls every future decision about what gets added, cut, or repurposed on that site.

The third category is colocation: facilities built and operated by a specialist company that leases out space, power, and cooling to many different customers rather than running its own product on the servers inside. Equinix and Digital Realty dominate the two main flavors of this business, retail colocation (many smaller tenants) and wholesale colocation (fewer, larger ones), respectively, with QTS, Iron Mountain, CoreSite, and newer entrants like Vantage Data Centers and Applied Digital also competing for share. The U.S. colocation market is on pace to reach $46.84 billion in 2026 and grow to $72.37 billion by 2030, increasingly driven by AI-focused tenants such as CoreWeave and Lambda Labs renting GPU-dense space rather than traditional enterprise IT. A colocation facility's tenant list can and does change over its lifetime, which makes it harder for a community to know years in advance exactly who will be operating inside.

A fourth category, enterprise-owned data centers that a bank, hospital, or retailer builds purely to run its own internal IT, still exists but is shrinking fast: Synergy pegs on-premise enterprise capacity at 34% of the world total in early 2025, down from 56% just six years earlier, and forecasts it will fall to 22% by 2030 as more companies shift workloads to the cloud. That leaves hyperscale commercial campuses and colocation as the two types a growing share of new local projects will actually be, with research computing centers remaining a rare, federally sited exception most communities will never encounter directly.

For a resident trying to make sense of a groundbreaking announcement nearby, the fastest way to tell these apart is asking one question: who owns it, and who's actually going to work there. A single company's name on the permit generally means a hyperscale commercial campus. A property developer or REIT's name usually means colocation, with tenants to be named later. And a federal agency's name means, almost certainly, that it isn't open to the public at all.

Developer Energy Storage Solutions has withdrawn its $19.2 billion AI data center proposal in Edgecombe County, North Carolina, as confirmed by county manager Eric Evans at a July 6 board of commissioners meeting. The project, planned for the Kingsboro development area near Tarboro some 70 miles east of Raleigh, was described as a multi-phase campus potentially spanning 300 acres with a total capacity of 900MW. The county board had previously denied a special-use permit for an eight-phase 300MW campus on 52 acres, and an appeal from the developer remains ongoing. Commissioners also discussed a 24-month moratorium on new data center developments, with a public hearing scheduled for August.

At least 75 U.S. data center projects worth roughly $130 billion were blocked or delayed in the first quarter of 2026, nearly equal to the total for the prior full year, as active opposition groups climbed from 396 to 833 across 49 states in that same period. Underneath local objections over water and power lies a deeper question about who owns compute, since revenue flows to companies headquartered in Seattle, Redmond, or Menlo Park while counties absorb costs including substation strain, truck traffic, and tax incentives forfeited in advance. Technical developments are beginning to loosen the requirement for massive co-located clusters: a 2023 Google DeepMind finding showed geographically separated machines could train models while exchanging roughly 500 times less data, and a March project called Templar trained a 72-billion-parameter model across more than 70 contributors over ordinary internet connections. Nvidia also introduced Spectrum-XGS Ethernet in August 2025 specifically to stitch sites together across long distances as individual facilities hit power and capacity ceilings.

Average data center rack power density has risen from 12 kW in 2024 to 26 kW in 2026, more than doubling in two years, driven by AI accelerator deployments, space constraints, and improved thermal options such as direct-to-chip liquid cooling and immersion. Individual GPUs in some configurations reportedly draw up to 700 watts per device, and some facility designs are now targeting as high as 1 MW per rack, though that figure remains an outlier. Higher per-rack loads create cascading demands on power distribution architectures, cooling infrastructure, and building structures, since facilities designed for lighter racks may require structural reinforcement and new floor systems. Operators facing permitting delays or moratoriums on new builds are likely to densify existing space, accelerating these pressures further.

Iranian drones struck two Amazon Web Services data centers in the United Arab Emirates on March 1, 2026, and a third AWS facility in Bahrain on April 1, in what Rest of World and other outlets described as the first known military strikes on a hyperscaler's infrastructure. The attacks, launched amid Iran's broader retaliation for U.S. and Israeli strikes on its territory, knocked out services for regional apps including the ride-hailing platform Careem and payment service Alaan, and the April strike on Bahrain's ME-SOUTH-1 facility, operated by telecom company Batelco and described as Amazon's largest Middle East data center, caused a fire, according to Bahrain's interior minister. Days later, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps named 18 U.S. companies, including Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, and Nvidia, as legitimate military targets in the region.

“Physical attacks are only going to become more common moving forward as AI becomes more significant,” Sam Winter-Levy of the Carnegie Endowment told Rest of World. IDC's Ashish Nadkarni described the shift more starkly: “Now suddenly, protecting data centers is like protecting top-security government offices.” The industry has historically built its defenses around cyberattacks and natural disasters; the drone strikes forced a reckoning with the idea that a data center could simply be bombed.

That reckoning has domestic roots too. On April 6, 2026, Indianapolis city-county councilman Ron Gibson said someone fired 13 shots into his home just after midnight while he and his 8-year-old son were inside; a note reading “No Data Centers” was left at the door. No one was injured, and police called it an isolated, targeted incident with the FBI assisting. Gibson had voted days earlier to support a rezoning petition for a Metrobloks data center project in his district. Jordyn Abrams, a research fellow at George Washington University's Program on Extremism, told the Associated Press that data centers have increasingly become a symbol for grievances spanning the political spectrum, citing energy and water consumption concerns and confidential utility power deals as recurring flashpoints.

Security researchers say the physical exposure compounds an already underappreciated vulnerability in data centers' operational technology. More than half of data center professionals identified human threats, internal or external, as their biggest security risk, according to a 2026 AFCOM survey cited by Bloomberg Law. Anthony Ferrante, global cybersecurity head at FTI Consulting, told Bloomberg Law that compromising the systems controlling cooling, fire suppression, and access control “could essentially shut down” a facility's computers entirely. Dave Wulf, co-founder of the Center for Cross-Sector Coordination, warned that a data center failure can cascade into banking, pipelines, hospitals, and defense systems that depend on it.

Congress has not settled on how to respond. The House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection has held hearings on whether data centers, or AI infrastructure more broadly, should become the 17th federally recognized critical infrastructure sector. “If a major data center is attacked, disrupted, or taken offline, the consequences can reach far beyond one company,” Rep. Andy Ogles said, arguing the current framework lacks a clear, unified approach. Industry witnesses split on the remedy: USTelecom's Robert Mayer and the Space Information Sharing and Analysis Center's Samuel Visner backed a standalone sector designation, following the United Kingdom's own move to designate data centers as critical infrastructure, while the IT-ISAC instead created a “special interest group” for data center providers rather than pushing for new federal machinery. The debate is complicated by capacity at the agency that would have to run it: CISA's headcount has fallen from roughly 3,300 to about 2,200 employees over the past year, including 96 of 189 people in its Stakeholder Engagement Division, according to a letter five House Democrats sent the Government Accountability Office asking it to investigate what capabilities were lost.

A year ago, data centers were mostly discussed in terms of power bills and zoning fights. Between a foreign government's drones, a councilman's front door, and a Congress still arguing over jurisdiction, the industry is now confronting a threat model it did not build for, and no clear consensus yet on who is responsible for closing the gap.

State Sen. Jim Runestad, chair of the Michigan Republican Party, introduced Senate Bills 1018 through 1020 alongside co-sponsor Sen. Ruth Johnson to pause all data center projects in Michigan for one year. The bills are framed as a temporary measure to gather information on potential electricity rate hikes, environmental harms, farmland loss, and other community impacts rather than a permanent ban. The legislation follows a groundbreaking ceremony Gov. Gretchen Whitmer attended for a large OpenAI-Oracle data center in Saline Township and mirrors a companion package introduced by three state House members. Both packages have been referred to government operations committees in their respective chambers, where legislation frequently stalls.

Flex will acquire EPC Power for $4.4 billion, adding 800V DC, grid-forming technology, digital rectifiers, and DC-DC converters to its Cloud and Power Infrastructure segment. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, with Flex planning to spin off that segment as an independent public company in the first quarter of 2027. EPC Power, which opened a 167,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Fountain Inn, South Carolina in July with 27 GW of initial annual capacity scalable to 40 GW, is projected to generate about $800 million in revenue during calendar 2026. Flex expects approximately 40% organic revenue growth and an EBITDA margin of around 30% for EPC Power in 2027.

National Grid Partners released its third Utility Innovation Survey, based on responses from 134 utility innovation leaders collected between May 20 and July 7, 2026. The survey found that 83% of respondents report AI data center infrastructure costs are being passed to residential customers through higher bills, while 74% say AI-driven data center load growth is affecting grid reliability. Grid reliability rose to a top-three priority for 73% of respondents, up from 43% in 2025, while net-zero goals as a top-three priority fell sharply from 54% to 16%. National Grid Partners also announced new investments in AI-related startups Terragrit and LineVision and said its total investments have surpassed $600 million since 2018.

Abandoned cloud workloads, often called zombies, have long consumed wasted resources in data centers, but the GPU era has dramatically raised the financial stakes. IDCA chief research officer Roger Strukhoff said IDCA research indicates that as much as 13% of US cloud usage comes from zombie workloads, while FinOps vendors including Broadcom and AWS estimate overall cloud waste at 25% to 30% or more. Graziano Castro, a developer relations engineer at AI optimization platform maker Akamas, noted that GPU inefficiencies that were once rounding errors on a cloud bill have become very large costs, saying the cost of ignoring inefficiency rose by an order of magnitude almost overnight with the LLM era. Tools from vendors including Google, Flexera, Datadog, and IBM are being used to detect and decommission idle assets, though AI-specific workloads on Kubernetes present new challenges still in early stages of being addressed.

Microsoft has filed an application with the US Army Corps of Engineers to build a data center campus called MNZ07 Wellington at 13490 University Boulevard in Prince William County, Virginia. The project calls for two one-story data center buildings and an on-site substation on 123 acres, situated south of Interstate 66 and north of Wellington Road. Microsoft purchased the 124-acre site in 2024 from local landowner Chuck Kuhn for $465.5 million, and a separate application was filed with the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality in July. The company says the campus is needed to address expanding customer demand for cloud platform services in the region.

The Arkansas Public Service Commission has denied Entergy Arkansas' application for a 20-year power purchase agreement with Big Island Solar, a 440-megawatt solar facility being developed by Pattern Energy on 3,200 acres in Mississippi County. Commissioners ruled the agreement's cost was not reasonable or prudent and would not produce savings for retail customers compared to other generation options. The denial has direct implications for Google's $4 billion West Memphis data center, which is under a separate 20-year special rate contract with Entergy; Entergy had argued Big Island's renewable energy credits could help Google meet its pledge to power all data centers with carbon-free energy by 2030. The commission said it would reconsider if Entergy and Google reach an agreement on the renewable energy credits that addresses its concerns.

At the AI Infra Summit in Santa Clara on September 16, 2026, industry figures including Ed Nelson, strategy director and co-founder of the summit, and Joe Wells, founder and chief growth officer of Data Center Signals, said securing electricity and local consent has become the central challenge for data center builders. Nelson noted the summit has grown from roughly 300 attendees at its launch to 9,000, with 12,000 expected when it moves to the San Jose Convention Center for its 10th anniversary. Wells said the industry lacks an established approach for managing community opposition around water use, electricity demand, and project secrecy, though he argued confidentiality agreements and open public discussion can coexist. Broadband Breakfast reporter Akul Saxena observed that the shift from AI training to inference workloads is driving demand for more distributed, lower-latency facilities that now touch nearly every U.S. state.

Electricity consumption from data centers has grown 12 percent per year over the last five years, and AI training workloads are expected to drive a substantial further increase, pushing developers toward gigawatt-scale facilities with compressed delivery timelines. The analysis, published by Data Center Dynamics, argues that meeting this demand requires integrating power, cooling, transmission, water, and digital systems as a single industrial campus rather than treating them as separate procurement decisions. Where grid interconnection timelines delay projects by years, behind-the-meter generation such as gas turbines can accelerate deployment, though at higher capital and operational costs. Thermal energy storage is identified as one mechanism to shift cooling demand away from peak pricing periods, reduce demand charges, and support utility demand-response programs without interrupting operations.

Crusoe, which describes itself as the first vertically integrated AI infrastructure provider, announced the initial closing of a $3.9 billion Series F round at a $30.9 billion post-money valuation on September 17, 2026. The oversubscribed round was co-led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital, and Valor Equity Partners, with additional backing from Founders Fund, GIC, NVIDIA, Qatar Investment Authority, Radical Ventures, and TPG, among dozens of other investors. The company reports over $140 billion in total contracted value, more than 6 GW of gross contracted capacity, and 20x year-over-year growth in Crusoe Cloud bookings. Proceeds will fund expansion of AI factories, modular Crusoe Spark data center units, and Crusoe Cloud, supported by a workforce of over 1,800 across five countries.

Google announced it is exploring a new data center project in Lea County, New Mexico, located in the state's southeast corner on the Texas border. The company did not share location specifics, facility size, or a project timeline. This would be Google's first self-built development in New Mexico; the company already has projects in neighboring Arizona and Texas. New Mexico has a relatively small data center market compared to those two states, with existing operators including Stack, Meta, Csquare, and H5.

National Grid Partners released its third annual Utility Innovation Survey on September 18, 2026, drawing on responses from 134 innovation leaders at U.S. utility companies collected between May 20 and July 7, 2026. The survey found that 78% of respondents are deploying or operationalizing at least one AI application to manage interconnection demand, while 74% say AI-driven data center load growth is already impacting grid reliability. Grid reliability has overtaken net zero as the top industry concern, with 73% of utility leaders ranking it in their top three priorities, up from 43% in 2025, while net-zero goals fell from 54% to 16%. The survey also found that 83% of respondents say the cost of building infrastructure to serve AI data centers is being passed on to residential customers through higher electricity bills.

March 2026 brought a wave of major data center transactions and expansions across North America and Europe. AMD announced a $100 billion agreement to supply up to 6 GW of AI capacity to Meta, while Microsoft secured approval for 15 new data centers at the former Foxconn site in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, with a taxable construction value exceeding $13 billion. Meta broke ground on a 1 GW, $10 billion campus in Lebanon, Indiana, and Equinix and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board acquired Iceland-based atNorth from Partners Group for $4 billion. In Europe, the European Data Centre Association's 2026 State of European Data Centers report forecasts cumulative investment of 176 billion euros between 2026 and 2031, warning that grid readiness rather than capital will constrain future capacity growth.

Aligned Data Centers has broken ground on Project Phoenix, a 2GW campus in Shippingport, Beaver County, Pennsylvania, located within the 660-acre Shippingport Industrial Park about 30 miles northwest of Pittsburgh. The campus will consist of three facilities adjacent to the former Bruce Mansfield coal plant site, now being redeveloped by Frontier Group of Companies into a natural gas energy campus capable of supplying up to 3.6GW of behind-the-meter capacity. Aligned CEO Andrew Schaap said the project will use a dedicated on-site power source rather than the local electrical grid. Aligned was acquired last year for $40 billion by a consortium including the AI Infrastructure Partnership, MGX, and BlackRock-owned Global Infrastructure Partners.

Microsoft has filed a Developments of Regional Impact application with the Georgia Department of Community Affairs for a project called ATL50, located at 5235 Stonewall Tell Road in Union City, southwest of Atlanta in Fulton County. The plan calls for two three-story buildings totaling 910,000 square feet on an 88-acre parcel, with the site expected to launch in 2032. Microsoft already has a significant presence across Georgia, with facilities in Fairburn, Douglasville, Palmetto, Rome, East Point, and Tyrone. A separate project reportedly in development with EdgeConneX on the north side of South Fulton Parkway in Union City is said to total 324MW across 2.1 million square feet.

Shares of companies tied to AI data center buildout fell sharply on Monday after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei proposed slowing the pace of frontier model development over the weekend. GE Vernova dropped nearly 9%, Vertiv fell close to 8%, Caterpillar sank more than 4%, and Oracle slipped almost 4%. RBC Capital Markets equity analyst Rishi Jaluria told CNBC that a slowdown in model development and training would likely weigh on Oracle's cloud infrastructure business. Separately, two unnamed sources said hyperscalers are rushing to secure AI debt over the next six weeks, with Amazon raising roughly 4.25 billion pounds last week and Alphabet raising about $10 billion in a euro bond sale in May, though new deals this fall are expected to price at significantly higher rates.

SemiAnalysis has published what it describes as the first verified agentic inference results for NVIDIA's Vera Rubin NVL72 platform, measured using its AgentX benchmark across a fleet of thousands of chips. At 170 tokens per second, Vera Rubin NVL72 delivered approximately 67x the total throughput per TCO compared to the GB300 Dynamo configuration under owning-cost assumptions, and achieved up to 7x better token throughput per megawatt on pre-release software. The benchmark has been validated by major compute buyers including Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Oracle, and Meta, and supported by frameworks including vLLM, SGLang, and PyTorch. SemiAnalysis also estimates that even on early software builds, Rubin can earn over 2x more profit per gigawatt than the Blackwell platform, with that gap expected to widen as the software stack matures.

The Australian Government has announced a public consultation on proposed requirements for large data centres and conditions for AI training in Australia, opening at 6 am Australian Eastern Standard Time on 18 September 2026 and closing at 5 pm Australian Eastern Daylight Time on 9 October. The consultation covers energy use and renewable-energy requirements, sustainable water use, community engagement, project locations, infrastructure and community impacts, workforce skills and training, and thresholds for applying requirements to different types of data centres. Responses will be considered alongside targeted stakeholder engagement and work with Commonwealth, state, and territory governments. The resulting AI standards are intended to establish mandatory minimum requirements for large data centres while preserving state and territory responsibilities.

William Lawrence, the Democratic nominee for Michigan's Seventh Congressional District, released a policy plan called "Stop Tech Overreach" that calls for a federal moratorium on data center development, mandatory environmental protections around data center siting, safety requirements for new AI models, and a national AI compact. The plan also includes a national jobs program funded by a tax on AI industry profits to offset AI-driven employment disruption, as well as limits on AI use in K-12 schools and a ban on AI in decisionmaking roles at the Social Security Administration. Lawrence's opponent, Republican incumbent Rep. Tom Barrett of Charlotte, has introduced legislation barring AI from making medical necessity determinations and ensuring human oversight of AI-enabled weapons systems, but his campaign says Barrett opposes federal dictation of local land use and zoning decisions. The two candidates share concerns about AI's labor market impacts but diverge sharply on the federal government's role in regulating local data center development.

The Scottish Parliament passed amendments backed by the SNP and Labour that block planning decisions on new data centers over 50MW until updated national guidance is published, creating a de facto pause on approvals. SNP minister Hannah Mary Goodlad said full guidance would be released by the end of the year, while a Labour-backed motion requires the Scottish government to publish the guidance in full within 12 months. Separately, the Scottish government announced legislation requiring any developer of a hyperscale data center to conduct a full environmental impact assessment. The Scottish Green Party's motion for a formal moratorium was not passed, though its 50MW threshold shaped the final language approved by MSPs.

Google announced its largest single investment in Europe: at least €13 billion ($15.1 billion) in AI infrastructure across four locations in Finland over the next two years. The investment covers data centers, energy infrastructure, grid upgrades, and renewable energy projects. Google also signed a 22-year purchase agreement with Finnish utility Fortum for up to 50% of the energy from one of Finland's nuclear plants, which Google says would not have continued operating beyond 2030 without the deal. Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo welcomed the commitment, calling investment attraction a top government priority.

ODATA is deploying Aligned Data Centers' DeltaFlow liquid cooling technology at its SP04 campus in Brazil and QR03 campus in Mexico, backed by a combined first-phase investment of US$630 million. The system, developed by Aligned in collaboration with Munters, uses a closed-loop circuit of pure, deionized water and is designed to operate without consuming water during cooling operations. DeltaFlow can also integrate with Aligned's Delta Cube air-cooling system, allowing both liquid and air cooling within the same data hall. DeltaFlow units are already being manufactured at Munters' facility in Araucária, Paraná, Brazil, with production intended to support future projects in Chile and Colombia.

The U.S. House passed the Ratepayer Protection Act 417-3, a bill that would require state utility regulators to consider a standard making data centers with peak demand of at least 100 megawatts at a single site or campus pay the full cost of grid upgrades built to serve them. The measure also requires large data center customers to provide financial assurances before construction begins and holds them financially responsible for infrastructure costs if they later reduce or terminate their electricity contracts. Introduced by Reps. Gabe Evans (R-Colo.) and Kathy Castor (D-Fla.) in June, the bill passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee 52-0 in July before Wednesday's floor vote. A companion bill has been introduced in the Senate by Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio).

Community opposition, not power or land, has become the U.S. data center industry's central bottleneck in 2026. Data Center Watch, a project of AI intelligence firm 10a Labs, found that opponents blocked or delayed at least 75 projects worth about $130 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone, the most in any quarter since the group began tracking in 2023. The number of active opposition groups more than doubled over the same stretch, from 396 at the end of 2025 to 833 across 49 states by March. Separately, Carbon Direct found that at least 46 AI data center projects worth $170 billion were publicly delayed or cancelled between January 2024 and May 2026, with a lack of transparency around ownership, power, and water needs the single most common cause. JLL's own research captures the underlying gap: 93% of communities agree data centers matter in the abstract, but only 35% support one built near them.

That gap is reshaping state and local law at a record pace. State lawmakers introduced at least 375 data center bills by mid-July 2026, according to The Washington Post, up from 243 in all of 2025, 75 in 2024, and 54 in 2023. Nine states have proposed statewide moratoriums, and 27 states are advancing “large load” legislation that requires developers to cover the cost of new energy infrastructure, with California, Ohio, and Utah already enacting versions of it. Seven major AI companies, including Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle, signed a voluntary Ratepayer Protection Pledge with the White House in March 2026, committing to cover their own power and infrastructure costs, though the pledge carries no legal enforcement mechanism. As the Digest has reported, that legal uncertainty is also opening a new front in litigation: law firms including ArentFox Schiff, Davis Wright Tremaine, and Taft have built dedicated data center practice groups in 2026 as opposition groups increasingly challenge project approvals on procedural grounds rather than waiting on new legislation. The real friction now sits locally: state-level moratorium bills have faced resistance in statehouses, while dozens of municipalities have moved ahead with local construction pauses instead. New Hampshire is a case in point: Governor Kelly Ayotte says she will seek a multi-year statewide moratorium after the head of ISO New England told her a large data center would raise regional energy prices.

Across the Digest's own coverage and trade outlets including Data Center Dynamics and Data Center Frontier, the same idea keeps surfacing: trust, not physics, is now the binding constraint on growth. “The next constraint on data center growth, we thought it was going to be power, but it may be community acceptance and political durability,” Loudoun County Economic Development's Buddy Rizer said on a Data Center Frontier podcast, alongside PR strategist Adam Waitkunas of Milldam Public Relations. Some community opposition is genuinely merited; a lot of it stems from mistrust of unfamiliar corporate entities, a lack of basic information, or a project becoming a stand-in for broader anxiety about AI. Below are five moves each side can make to close that gap.

Five things developers can do

1. Lead with radical transparency on power, water, and ownership before site selection becomes public. Carbon Direct's research found that opaque ownership structures, NDAs with local officials, and undisclosed end users consistently triggered faster, sharper opposition; the firm recommends treating transparency as a siting strategy rather than a legal afterthought.
2. Negotiate real, enforceable Community Benefit Agreements, not PR gestures. As one CBA advocate wrote for Data Center Dynamics, a strong CBA “is not a public-relations gesture or a list of voluntary commitments”; it is a negotiated, enforceable partnership that defines responsibilities and impacts, giving developers predictability and communities tangible, long-term value.
3. Map opposition and engage stakeholders before acquiring a site. Identifying local advocacy groups, environmental organizations, and civic leaders early, before land is under contract, can prevent costly delays once a project becomes public.
4. Fund the infrastructure a community actually needs, not just tax revenue. Communities increasingly expect developers to pay for the power and water infrastructure their projects require; some operators have pledged to replenish more water than they consume or to fund local education and workforce programs.
5. Drop the NDA-heavy playbook with local officials. Confidentiality agreements that limit what elected officials can say publicly create a perception of secrecy that can poison a relationship before a developer has formally introduced itself, even when there are legitimate commercial reasons behind them.

Five things communities can do

1. Organize early and understand real negotiating leverage before a developer shows up. Communities that organize ahead of time can negotiate more effectively, aligning corporate needs with local priorities on things like workforce pipelines, rather than reacting only after a project is already announced.
2. Push for a formal Community Benefit Agreement process instead of ad hoc protest. A CBA process typically moves through public education, negotiation, and contract drafting, and once signed it obligates a developer to deliver specific, monitored commitments rather than vague promises.
3. Use zoning and permitting tools to shape projects rather than simply block them. Mason, Michigan is a working example: rather than an outright ban, its city council adopted a new zoning framework in February 2026 that tightened local rules on data centers after a contentious public meeting.
4. Demand transparency as a condition of engagement, not a courtesy. Since opaque disclosure of ownership, power, and water needs was the single most common reason cited across Carbon Direct's 46 delayed or cancelled projects, communities that insist on upfront disclosure are better positioned to evaluate real tradeoffs instead of relying on rumor.
5. Separate legitimate, project-specific concerns from generalized anti-AI sentiment. Distinguishing real site-specific harms, like a documented water or noise impact, from broader distrust or misinformation strengthens a community's credibility and its actual negotiating leverage with both developers and state regulators.

The throughline across nearly every source here is the same: both sides do better with a formal, enforceable Community Benefit Agreement negotiated early, before a site is acquired and before NDAs harden positions. Tax revenue alone is no longer enough to earn public support, and a blanket moratorium is not a substitute for the transparent, ongoing oversight that actually resolves these conflicts, which is exactly the middle ground a well-built CBA is designed to occupy.

NVIDIA, Google, and Emerald AI have launched the AI Energy Management Alliance (AEMA), a coalition aimed at getting data centers connected to the power grid faster by making them more flexible resources. New US data centers can currently wait a decade or more for a grid connection; AEMA argues that if AI facilities could reduce load during peak demand hours, the existing grid could unlock 100GW of capacity for flexible data centers, according to Emerald AI CEO Varun Sivaram. The coalition is proposing standardized technical requirements, performance metrics, and operational data sharing, with proposed tools including on-site batteries, on-site generation, and software to slow or shift less urgent computing workloads. AEMA also plans to lobby state capitals and Washington, asking governors and regulators to offer faster, larger grid connections to data centers that commit to flexibility.

The House passed the bipartisan Ratepayer Protection Act on September 16 by a 417-3 vote, a bill that would require electricity users drawing 100 megawatts or more at a single site to pay the full cost of any new power plants, transmission lines, or grid upgrades built to serve them. Introduced by Republican Representative Gabe Evans of Colorado and Democratic Representative Kathy Castor of Florida, the bill amends the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978 but leaves final adoption decisions to state utility regulators rather than imposing a single federal rule. The legislation comes as the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimated US data centers consumed 176 terawatt-hours in 2023, with projected consumption rising to between 325 and 580 terawatt-hours by 2028. Several states, including Florida, Oregon, Virginia, Texas, Alabama, Nebraska, and South Dakota, have already adopted their own approaches to allocating large-load infrastructure costs.

Keppel DC REIT limits long-term hyperscaler contracts to roughly 30 percent of its portfolio, with the remainder leased as shorter colocation agreements, a model that CEO Loh Hwee Long compares to the anchor-tenant structure of a shopping mall. The REIT's top client, an unnamed hyperscaler, contributed 43.5 percent of total rental income of $210.4 million in the first half of 2026, while the largest non-hyperscaler tenants contributed about 15 percent. On September 1, Keppel DC REIT announced the acquisition of two freehold colocation data centers in the Greater Tokyo area for approximately $1.4 billion, bringing its Japan assets to four. Loh identified Singapore, Japan, and South Korea as the REIT's key Tier 1 markets, citing high barriers to entry from land and power constraints, while noting that building a new data center in Japan can take five to seven years due to energy and construction challenges.

Volato Group (NYSE American: SOAR), previously an aviation technology company, has completed its merger with Alignment Engine Inc., pivoting into AI data center infrastructure with an initial site already under lease in Ohio. Chris Ensey was appointed CEO in connection with the closing, and the company's immediate priorities include securing financing, procuring GPUs, and converting customer discussions into contracted compute capacity. Power, water, and water treatment infrastructure are already operating at the Ohio site, allowing Volato to begin at the equipment installation stage. Alignment Engine is also developing proprietary NeuralSync technology designed to coordinate and improve utilization of accelerator resources across distributed AI infrastructure, which Volato plans to use as a differentiating element alongside its physical data center operations.

Amazon Web Services has determined it cannot restore access to resources and data hosted in its Bahrain region after Iranian attacks caused damage that exceeded what its multi-availability-zone infrastructure was designed to withstand. The UAE region also suffered partial loss, with availability zone mec1-az2 declared unrestorable, while work continues on mec1-az1 and mec1-az3. AWS opened the Bahrain region in 2019 and the UAE region in 2022; Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed a second attack on the Bahrain region in July. Amazon said it will share further updates on Bahrain restoration plans in early 2027.

A report commissioned by the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission and conducted by consulting firm Synapse Energy Economics warns that rolling blackouts could occur more than 13 days per year in a worst-case scenario where data center growth is unrestrained and electricity supplies stay tight. Even with new power plant construction over the next 15 years, the PJM grid would still fall short of demand six times per decade on average, and the system's reliability would be between six and 100 times worse than PJM's planning standard of one loss-of-load event per decade by 2030. The only scenario in which PJM meets its reliability goal is one in which no new data centers are built after 2026. PUC Chairman Steve DeFrank called Pennsylvania's situation an "energy crossroads" and urged policymakers, utilities, and other stakeholders to act.

Microsoft is extending a nature-inspired design approach, first tested at its Middenmeer data center in Noord-Holland in 2022, to more than 20 data center locations across the United States and Germany, and says the practice will be incorporated into all new U.S. data center projects. The approach draws on biomimicry principles to restore wetlands, plant native vegetation, rebuild stream corridors, and create pollinator habitats, with strategies customized to local conditions through an ecological design catalog. A completed example in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, the Chase City Conservancy, opened in April 2025 and protects more than 230 acres, including over 8 acres of wetlands, more than 25,000 planted trees, and over 3 miles of publicly accessible walking trails. Microsoft uses an Ecosystem Intelligence platform to measure biodiversity, water quality, and noise reduction outcomes over time.

The National Institutes of Health's All of Us Research Program illustrates how much computing power modern medical research already demands. In its June 2026 data release, the program made genomic and health data from more than 747,000 participants available to registered researchers, bringing total enrollment past 883,000. The dataset now includes more than 535,000 whole genome sequences, 1.3 billion genetic variants, and nearly 482,000 linked electronic health records, all housed on a secure Researcher Workbench built on Google Cloud Platform. “There’s a paradox at the heart of precision medicine,” NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya said in announcing the release. “To tailor treatments to individuals, you actually need very large populations to uncover the patterns that connect genetics, lifestyle, and the environment to health outcomes.”

That kind of population-scale genomic analysis runs on infrastructure most people never see. Biowulf, the NIH’s in-house Linux computing cluster, is described by the agency’s Center for Information Technology as the world’s most powerful supercomputer dedicated solely to biomedical research. It has grown to more than 100,000 processor cores and 60 petabytes of storage, is used by roughly 75% of NIH principal investigators, and in fiscal year 2024 alone consumed more than 1 billion core-hours and 6 million GPU-hours. The system helped the Telomere-to-Telomere Consortium publish the first complete, gapless human genome sequence in 2022, and NIH says COVID-19 research on Biowulf consumed more than 87 million CPU hours and produced more than 50 peer-reviewed publications.

That demand is emerging just as the broader market for AI compute tightens. Apollo Global Management’s wealth insights team described on-demand GPU capacity as “effectively sold out” in a June 2026 analysis, noting that rental rates for Nvidia H100 GPUs rose from roughly $1.85 an hour in late 2025 to about $2.40 an hour by March 2026, while spot prices for high-bandwidth memory chips climbed roughly eightfold since early 2025. Apollo named healthcare specifically as one of the sectors “only beginning to deploy AI at scale” just as that squeeze sets in, alongside legal services and financial analysis. Data Center Knowledge reported the binding constraint has shifted from the power shortages that dominated 2024 and 2025, when Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the company had “a bunch of chips sitting in inventory that I can’t plug in,” to semiconductor manufacturing capacity itself. “Silicon is the binding short-term constraint. Power is the binding long-term constraint,” HyperFrame Research’s Stephen Sopko told the outlet.

Drug makers with the capital to do so are responding by building and owning compute capacity rather than competing for it on the open market. Recursion Pharmaceuticals brought online BioHive-2, a supercomputer built with Nvidia using 504 H100 GPUs delivering 2 exaflops of AI performance, which debuted at No. 35 on the TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. Recursion’s chief technology officer said the company can now get “80% of the value with 40% of the wet lab work” that traditional drug discovery required. Roche has gone further, announcing an AI factory spanning more than 3,500 GPUs across facilities in Europe and the United States, built on Nvidia’s newest Blackwell chips and expected to be fully operational by early 2027. “Everybody wants to get their hands on Nvidia chips,” biopharma AI consultant Christian Hein told SWI swissinfo.ch.

Hospitals, by contrast, mostly cannot build their own supercomputers and instead depend on outside vendors and cloud infrastructure for the same AI capacity pharma companies are racing to own. In 2026, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs began scaling its ambient AI scribe tool from a 10-site pilot to all of its more than 130 medical centers nationwide. Mount Sinai Health System integrated OpenEvidence’s AI clinical decision support directly into its Epic electronic health record system across all seven of its hospitals. HonorHealth rolled out Abridge’s ambient documentation platform to roughly 3,000 physicians and advanced practice providers, and the University of Texas System’s earlier pilot with Qualified Health generated more than $15 million in run-rate financial impact within six months before expanding across all eight of its health institutions. Each of these systems now depends on rented, high-capacity cloud infrastructure to keep those tools running, in a market where that same infrastructure is getting harder and more expensive to secure.

That dependence is starting to show up in how healthcare organizations plan their own facilities, too. Commercial real estate firm Colliers has noted that hospitals and health systems increasingly compete with data center developers for the same scarce inputs, reliable electricity, available land, and network connectivity, while their own IT infrastructure has to support higher computing density and GPU-ready systems that older hospital data centers were never built for. For an industry historically organized around clinical staffing and bed capacity, the amount of processing power behind a diagnosis, a drug candidate, or a documentation tool is quickly becoming a resource healthcare organizations can no longer take for granted.

Scottish politicians are preparing to vote on a national moratorium on data center development, a move that would make Scotland one of the first national-level jurisdictions to formally halt new construction. The vote follows mounting concerns about power grid strain and land use. No specific date for the vote has been confirmed, but the measure has sufficient parliamentary support to advance to a formal decision.

Virginia's congressional delegation is advancing federal legislation to regulate data centers, focusing on power demand, grid impact, and transparency requirements. The effort reflects bipartisan concern about the concentration of data center infrastructure in Northern Virginia, which hosts more capacity than any other market in the world. Specific bill details and sponsors were not fully disclosed in available reporting, but the push signals a shift toward federal rather than purely state-level oversight.

Vermont Governor Phil Scott vetoed state-level data center regulations, but one of his senior deputies has now urged Congress to pass equivalent rules at the federal level. The contradiction highlights the tension between state executives reluctant to impose local burdens on economic development and the broader need for consistent national standards. The deputy's congressional testimony positions Vermont as an unexpected voice for federal action on data center oversight.

A wave of data center initial public offerings is revealing varied financial structures among new entrants, including pure-play operators, AI-focused neoclouds, and hybrid infrastructure platforms, according to Bisnow. Companies are pursuing IPOs rather than private capital as a path to faster scaling, with some targeting valuations in the billions before reaching stabilized occupancy. The trend reflects investor appetite for data center exposure at a moment when private market valuations have become harder to underwrite.