When a southern California city council proposed building a giant datacenter the size of four football fields last December, five residents vowed to stop it.
Through a frenetic word-of-mouth campaign, the small group raised awareness about the proposed facility in Monterey Park, a small city east of Los Angeles known affectionately as the country’s first suburban Chinatown.
No Data Center Monterey Park organizers – working in tandem with the grassroots racial justice group San Gabriel Valley (SGV) Progressive Action – held a teach-in and rally that drew hundreds of participants, knocked on doors, and distributed flyers on busy streets.
They emphasized how the computer systems facility would strain the power grid, drive up energy rates and create noise pollution. A petition quickly amassed nearly 5,000 signatures. All the materials were shared in English, Chinese and Spanish – a concerted effort to reach Monterey Park’s diverse populace, which is two-thirds Asian and one-quarter Hispanic.
In just six weeks, the community won. City leaders issued a 45-day moratorium on datacenter construction and a pledge to explore a permanent ban.
“It’s like the third act of an Oscar-winning movie,” said Steven Kung, a co-founder of No Data Center Monterey Park.
Over the past year, homegrown revolts against datacenters have united a fractured nation, animating local board meetings from coast to coast in both farming towns and middle-class suburbs. Local communities delayed or cancelled $98bn worth of projects from late March 2025 to June 2025, according to research from the group Data Center Watch, which has been tracking opposition to the sites since 2023. More than 50 active groups across 17 states targeted 30 projects during that time period, two-thirds of which were halted.
The movement against these facilities has even made for strange bedfellows, bringing together nimbys and environmentalists in Virginia, “Stop the Steal” activists and Democratic Socialists of America organizers in Michigan.
“There’s no safe space for datacenters,” said Miquel Vila, lead analyst at Data Center Watch, a research project run by AI security company 10a Labs. “Opposition is happening in very different communities.”
A bipartisan dislike of datacenters
Datacenters have exploded in states with abundant land, cheap power and generous tax breaks. Though the facilities power everything from streaming services to artificial intelligence, functioning as an engine for our digital lives, few people seem to want these sites that drain enormous amounts of water and energy, causing energy costs to soar. A November Morning Consult poll found that a majority of voters support banning datacenter construction near where they live and say “AI datacenters” are partly responsible for rising electricity prices.
Vila said a spike in media coverage from national outlets, particularly of protests in the north-east and midwest, had helped consolidate local campaigns against datacenters into a movement. The proliferation of the centers “has become a hot topic at a national level, which reinforces local dynamics”, Vila said.
In Indiana, a datacenter hub with more than 70 facilities, local communities are fighting another 50 projects and have halted at least a dozen in the past year, according to data from Citizens Action Coalition, an Indianapolis-based consumer and environmental advocacy non-profit.
“It’s like a revolt in the heartland,” said Bryce Gustafson, who organizes with the Citizens Action Coalition. “There’s an unbelievable amount of pushback, bipartisan and non-partisan, against these datacenters.”
The datacenter rebellion in the Republican stronghold of Indiana, he said, was built in part on a strong backlash in recent years against solar projects on farmland that many residents felt threatened the state’s rural character. The same concerns over land privatization and tech overreach carried over to the fight against datacenters, as conservatives and environmentalists joined forces to organize town halls, conduct canvassing training and file lawsuits to block developments.
“For many Hoosiers, datacenters have become a physical manifestation of their mistrust of big tech, the elected officials who have embraced them, and the system that allows all this to happen,” Gustafson said.
Local fights against AI infrastructure have even begun to turn the tide at the state and federal levels as the midterms approach. In Virginia – the datacenter capital of the world with more than 600 facilities – the newly elected governor, Abigail Spanberger, campaigned on lowering utility bills by ensuring that AI companies are paying “their fair share” of electricity costs rather than passing them on to consumers. The progressive lawmakers Bernie Sanders and Rashida Tlaib have publicly backed calls for a datacenter moratorium. GOP leaders, including the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, and Missouri senator Josh Hawley, have also introduced bills to regulate AI.
Datacenters’ fate in community hands
In Monterey Park, concerns over the proposed datacenter are primarily about its economic, environmental and public health impact. The facility would employ 14 on-site diesel generators, which researchers said produce “ambient air pollutants”, such as nitrogen oxide, that are linked to a host of respiratory illnesses, including asthma and lung cancer.
Organizer Hrag Balian said No in Data Center Monterey Park took inspiration from other communities’ organizing, including protests in Virginia and Pennsylvania that have stalled projects. “None of us had experience doing this, so seeing patterns and parallels have been tremendously helpful.”
Kung said a core tenet of the group’s organizing strategy was building coalitions with different community organizations in the greater San Gabriel Valley area, such as SGV Progressive Action, Asian Youth Center and Montebello Teachers Association. All these community groups mobilized their own members to show up and testify at the January city council meeting. “It’s a decentralized movement,” Kung said.
Andrew Yip, a community organizer with SGV Progressive Action who helped create flyers and organize rallies, said the campaign succeeded because residents were able to put aside their differences and rally around a single cause: halting a development that would affect their livelihoods.
“This is about community members rising to the occasion to look out for one another,” Yip said.
For Monterey Park organizers, the fight is far from over. Rather than gutting the proposed facility themselves, city council members are considering placing the decision before voters on the November ballot. Kung said the move would put the onus on residents to develop a “long, drawn-out awareness campaign” about datacenters for the remainder of the year. In the meantime, the organizers have continued to engage new neighbors, gather signatures for the petition, and show up at council meetings.
“We won a victory, but there’s still a lot of work to do,” Kung said.
