What a Data Center Is, and Why Towns Across America Are Fighting Them

On the evening of August 6, 2025, the Tucson City Council voted 7 to 0 to walk away from a data center. The project had a code name, Project Blue, and a footprint of roughly 290 acres. Residents packed the chamber. When the vote landed, the crowd cheered.

That scene has repeated, with local variations, in county boardrooms and school gymnasiums across the country. A large computing site is proposed on the edge of town. Neighbors show up. They ask how much power it will draw, how much water it will use, how loud it will be, and what the town gets in return. Sometimes the project is approved. Sometimes it is paused. Sometimes it is voted down.

This post explains the thing at the center of those meetings. What a data center is. Why so many are being built right now. Why they need so much electricity and water. And what a town actually decides when one shows up. It takes no side. It reports what has happened and attributes each fact to a public source.

What a Data Center Actually Is

A data center is a building full of computers. Not the kind you use at a desk. These are servers, which are computers built to run all day for other people over the internet. When you stream a show, send an email, back up a photo, or ask an AI chatbot a question, a server in a data center somewhere does the work and sends the answer back.

The building exists to keep those servers running and cool. Rows of servers sit in racks. Power comes in from the electric grid, the network of wires and substations that carry electricity. Cooling systems pull the heat away, because a room full of hard-working computers gets hot fast. Backup generators and batteries stand by in case the grid drops. That is the whole idea: a warehouse for computing, kept powered and kept cold.

Most data centers used to be modest. The recent ones are not.

Why the AI Boom Made Them Multiply

The reason so many are being built at once is demand for computing, and lately that means artificial intelligence. Training and running AI systems takes enormous amounts of computing, which takes enormous amounts of electricity.

The scale is measurable. A 2024 report by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a US Department of Energy lab, found that data centers used about 4.4 percent of all US electricity in 2023. The same report projected that share could reach somewhere between 6.7 and 12 percent by 2028. In raw terms, data center power use rose from 58 terawatt-hours in 2014 to 176 in 2023, and the report projected it could climb to between 325 and 580 by 2028. A terawatt-hour is a billion kilowatt-hours, the unit on your home electric bill. The report tied much of the jump to AI, noting that data center power demand more than doubled between 2017 and 2023, largely because of the growth in AI servers.

More demand means more buildings, and bigger ones.

What "Hyperscale" Means, in Plain Words

You will hear the word hyperscale in these fights. It describes the largest class of data center, the kind the big cloud and AI companies build.

There is no single legal definition, but the industry generally uses it for sites that draw at least 100 megawatts of power. A megawatt is a unit of electrical demand. One megawatt is roughly the electricity use of several hundred typical US homes at once, so 100 megawatts is closer to the draw of a small city. By the research firm Synergy Research Group, the number of large data centers run by hyperscale operators reached 1,136 at the end of 2024, having doubled over five years, with 137 new ones coming online in that year alone.

When neighbors say a proposed site is the size of a small town, they often mean it literally, in the amount of power it will pull.

Why They Need So Much Electricity and Water

Two resources drive most of the local objection: power and water.

Power is the obvious one. A hyperscale campus can ask a utility for as much electricity as a small city. That draw has to come from somewhere, which can mean new power lines, new substations, or new generation. In Leavenworth County, Kansas, opponents of a proposed site said the regional utility could not supply enough power until the 2030s, which raised the prospect of on-site gas turbines in the meantime, according to KCTV5. The concern residents raise most often is who pays for the new power infrastructure, the company or the households on the same grid.

Water is the second. Many data centers use water to cool their servers, either directly through evaporative cooling or indirectly through the power plants that supply them. The Berkeley Lab report estimated that US data centers directly consumed about 17 billion gallons of water for cooling in 2023, and projected that direct figure could roughly double or more by 2028. In dry regions, that number lands hard. In Tucson, in the Sonoran Desert, water was the objection council members named first.

Newer designs can cut water use. After Tucson's vote, the developer behind Project Blue said it would switch to a closed-loop air cooling system, which recirculates coolant instead of consuming fresh water, according to local reporting. How much water a given project will use is a project-by-project question, and it is usually the first one a town asks.

Noise, Land, and Tax Breaks

Three more objections come up again and again.

Noise. The cooling equipment on a large data center runs constantly. Residents near proposed sites describe a low, steady hum. In Leavenworth County, one opponent described a "tonal noise" that residents said they feel more than hear, according to KCTV5.

Land. A hyperscale campus can cover hundreds or more than a thousand acres. The Kansas project, called Project Bluestem, was described as spanning more than 1,100 acres south of the town of Tonganoxie. That is a large change to a rural or suburban landscape, and land use is squarely a local decision.

Tax breaks. Many data centers are courted with tax abatements, which are temporary reductions or waivers of local property taxes meant to attract investment. Supporters say the projects bring construction spending and long-term tax revenue. Opponents ask whether a facility that employs relatively few full-time people, once built, is worth giving up years of tax income. Where a specific deal is on the table, the numbers are public, and the debate is usually about whether the trade is worth it.

Why They Cluster in Certain Places

Data centers do not spread evenly. They pool in a handful of regions, and the biggest is Northern Virginia.

Loudoun County, Virginia, west of Washington, became the largest single concentration of data centers on earth, a corridor known as Data Center Alley. Local and industry accounts have long said that a large share of global internet traffic passes through it. Loudoun's own government has promoted its role as a hub, and the region's growth traces back to a surge in construction between roughly 2007 and 2016.

Clusters form for a few practical reasons. Cheap and reliable electricity. Thick bundles of fiber-optic cable already in the ground, which move data fast. Flat, buildable land near major internet routes. And local tax and zoning policies that welcome the industry. Once a hub exists, more projects follow the power lines and fiber already there. That is also why the fights have spread: as the established hubs fill up and strain their grids, developers look at new towns that never expected to host one.

What a Town Actually Decides

In most of these fights, the town is not deciding whether data centers are good or bad in the abstract. It is making specific, bounded decisions. Knowing which one is on the table explains what the meeting is really about.

Zoning and rezoning. Zoning is the local rulebook for what can be built where. A data center often needs land rezoned, meaning reclassified for a use it does not currently allow, before it can be built. That vote goes through a planning commission or a county board, in public.

Moratoriums. A moratorium is a temporary pause. A council votes to stop accepting or approving new data center applications for a set period, often 90 days, so staff can study the impacts and write rules. On August 11, 2026, the Fort Worth, Texas, City Council voted unanimously to take the first step toward a 90-day moratorium, with the stated goal of evaluating noise, water supply, and land-use compatibility before more projects move ahead. A moratorium does not kill a project. It buys time.

Tax and utility terms. Separately, a town or county may vote on a tax abatement, and a utility regulator may rule on how a project gets its power. In Tucson, the council rejected the annexation that would have given Project Blue access to city water. The developer then said it would proceed on county land, and a state utility body later approved an electricity plan for the project, according to local reporting. A project rejected by one body can still move forward through another. That is why residents often follow these fights across several meetings.

The pattern in the reporting is consistent. A project is proposed, neighbors raise power, water, noise, land, and tax questions, and a local body decides a narrow question in public. The outcome varies town to town.

The Bottom Line

A data center is a warehouse of computers that has to be powered and cooled, and the current wave of them is larger and more numerous because of the demand for computing that AI has created. The fights over them are local and specific: how much power, how much water, how much noise, how much land, and what the town gets in return. Each one is decided in public, in a zoning vote, a moratorium, or a tax and utility ruling, and the answers are not the same from one town to the next. If a data center is proposed near you, the useful first questions are the same ones neighbors are already asking in these meetings.