If you read the headlines, the villagers are on the march. Local opposition blocked or delayed at least 75 data center projects worth about $130 billion in the first quarter of 2026. Another 45 projects worth nearly $68 billion in the second. There are now more than 800 opposition groups in 49 states. Only Hawaii is sitting this one out.
The townspeople have surrounded Dr. Frankenstein’s castle with torches. I don’t expect them to burn it down.
Bernie Sanders is out front, leading the crowd. He was the first member of Congress to call for a national moratorium on data center construction. In March, he and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced a bill to impose one. The torch, naturally, is lit against billionaires: the benefits of technology should go to everyone, “not just the wealthiest.”
The bill is going nowhere. Even Mark Warner, a Democratic senator from Virginia, home of Data Center Alley, called a moratorium “idiocy.”
It’s just a good news story. It has everything an editor wants: David versus Goliath, angry residents at a county hearing, a cornfield about to become a server farm, and a dollar figure with a B in it. “Townspeople stop $10 billion AI project” writes itself. “Project moves two counties over, opens 14 months late” never gets written at all.
What I’m Not Saying
I’m not saying the complaints are made up. Some are concrete and measurable, and I’ll get to the best one below. I’m not saying every project gets built where it was announced. Plenty won’t.
I’m saying the hysteria is not going to change anything that matters. It can move the castle. It can’t stop the castle from being built.
What “Blocked or Delayed” Counts
Read the fine print on those billion-dollar totals. Data Center Watch’s total uses the word “disrupted,” which lumps blocked projects together with delayed ones. It is not a count of projects permanently cancelled.
The dollar figures are the announced price tags. Announced price tags are what developers wave at county commissioners to get tax breaks. They are a sales pitch, not an invoice.
So the scary aggregate is inflated inputs, summed, measuring something closer to friction than defeat. A project that slips a year and moves 40 miles counts the same as one that dies.
Follow the Money
If you want to know what people think will happen, don’t read their press releases. Read their purchase orders.
GE Vernova makes the gas turbines that power plants and, increasingly, data centers run on. Its gas equipment backlog plus slot reservations was 83 gigawatts at the end of 2025. It hit 100 GW in the first quarter and 116 GW in the second. The company expects at least 125 GW by year end.
It is now selling 2031 delivery slots. Siemens Energy is sitting on a 69 GW backlog with lead times of three years or more. Data centers are only about a fifth of what GE Vernova has under contract, but they’re competing with utilities for the same scarce production slots.
Nobody puts down a deposit on a turbine for 2031 because they think the villagers are going to win.
The nuclear deals say the same thing on a longer clock. Google signed for a 500-megawatt fleet of small reactors from Kairos Power, first unit by 2030 and the rest by 2035. Meta has deals for up to 6.6 gigawatts of nuclear power by 2035, including new advanced reactors from Oklo and TerraPower. Amazon invested in X-energy with a target of more than 5 gigawatts of small reactors online by 2039.
Nobody lines up power for 2039 for a building the villagers are going to burn down.
The Castle Moves
The real constraint isn’t the town hall. It’s the grid. A developer asking for a 100-megawatt connection in Northern Virginia can expect to wait about seven years. This year the Department of Energy has issued repeated emergency orders letting PJM, the grid operator for 13 states and D.C., push data centers off the grid and onto their own backup generators to prevent blackouts.
Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Data center developers are building their own power. On-site gas generation lets a data center start running before its grid connection arrives, or skip the grid altogether. Those surveyed by Bloom Energy expect a third of data centers to run fully off-grid by 2030.
A project that loses a vote in one county shows up in another, often one with cheap land, cheap gas and a county board that likes tax revenue. The castle moves. It doesn’t fall.
Where the Villagers Have a Point
The best complaint isn’t about noise, water or the view. It’s the electric bill.
PJM’s market monitor says data center load has added $29.4 billion to capacity market costs across its last four auctions. Residential customers pay part of that. That argument reaches voters who will never see a data center, which is why it’s moving from county hearings to statehouses. Thirty statehouses have introduced or adopted siting, power, water or cost-sharing measures.
It’s also not a partisan fight. A 2025 Data Center Watch review found that of politicians who had publicly opposed data center projects, 55% were Republicans and 45% Democrats.
The likely outcome isn’t a ban. It’s a bill: data centers pay their own way. Special large-load tariffs, full cost of grid upgrades, interruptible service, bring your own power. That’s a fight over who pays, not whether it gets built.
Honest Caveats
A statewide ban is possible. Maine’s legislature passed what would have been the first statewide data center moratorium before the governor vetoed it. Moratorium bills came up in 14 states this year.
Building your own power doesn’t get you out of the county hearing. A gas plant still needs an air permit and a pipeline, and the people fighting the data center will fight the power plant next door to it.
The turbine shortage is a real brake. Only about a fifth of GE Vernova’s backlog is explicitly tied to data centers, so the orders aren’t all bets on AI. But a factory backlog is a supply problem, not a villager problem. It slows the buildout. It doesn’t stop it.
The Sequel Always Gets Made
Here’s a fun fact. In Mary Shelley’s novel, there is no castle and no mob with torches. Hollywood added them in 1931.
And even in the movie, the villagers don’t burn down the castle. They burn down a windmill. The doctor survives.
Four years later, Universal released Bride of Frankenstein. The monster survived the fire, and the doctor built another one.