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Politics

Exclusive: Local Opposition to Data Centers Explodes in 2026

The number of data centers canceled after pushback set a record in the first quarter of the year, new data from Heatmap Pro shows.

Robinson Meyer •
05/06/2026
Peeling off a data center.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Data centers are getting larger and larger. But even so, few are as large as the Sentinel Grove Technology Park, a proposed data center near Port St. Lucie, Florida.

The proposed facility — which became known as Project Jarvis — was set to be built on old agricultural land. It would use up to 1 gigawatt of electricity, enough to power a mid-size city, and bring in up to $13.5 billion in investment to the county.

The project was immediately controversial. But its developers anticipated issues: They would build their own self-contained, self-provided water facilities to service the project, and they agreed to set its 60-foot buildings back far enough from the road so that they couldn’t be seen by drivers.

It wasn’t enough. The project lost a key vote in the planning board in October. And in February, Project Jarvis’s developers withdrew their land use application entirely after Governor Ron DeSantis proposed AI regulation in the statehouse.

The facility was the largest data center project canceled after facing opposition in the first quarter of 2026. But it wasn’t the only one.

At least 20 proposed data center projects were canceled after local pushback during the first three months of 2026, smashing a record set only in the previous quarter, according to a review of press accounts, public records, and project announcements conducted by Heatmap Pro.

These canceled projects accounted for more than $41.7 billion in investment and represented at least 3.5 gigawatts of electricity demand.

The cancellations reveal the rapidly expanding backlash to data center construction has not yet peaked. From Georgia to Pennsylvania, locals have rebelled against newly proposed data centers, even when the planned facilities are not planning to run artificial intelligence models.

If anything, fights over data centers are surging now. Heatmap Pro’s researchers added roughly 100 new data center fights to their database during the first three months of the past year, a new record.

These fights are succeeding in terminating projects. Last year, roughly 25 data center projects were canceled nationwide after facing some type of local opposition, according to Heatmap Pro data. The country is likely to break that record in 2026 over the next few weeks, our data suggests — only five months into the year.

At least $85 billion in data center projects have been canceled over the past three years, according to Heatmap Pro data.

These numbers haven’t been previously reported. Over the past year, researchers at our intelligence platform Heatmap Pro have conducted a comprehensive national survey of local opposition to data center construction. They have regularly called every U.S. county to tally data center cancellations and any new rules limiting data center construction.

This data is normally available to companies and individuals who subscribe to Heatmap Pro, but we periodically publish a high-level summary of this data. We last released our results in January.

Green
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Robinson Meyer

Robinson is the founding executive editor of Heatmap. He was previously a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covered climate change, energy, and technology.

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