This story was originally published by Reasons to be Cheerful
5 min read
Patty Spillman and her husband farm over 400 acres of corn, soybeans and wheat in central Ohio. Both have lived in the area all their lives; his family has been on the land since 1861. In 2023, a developer proposed a data center on a nearby farm. “[The community] fought them off,” she says. “But I always kind of knew that just because the one data center had left, that didn’t mean it was going to be gone forever. Someone else was going to be right on their heels.”
She was right. Less than two years later, another developer started moving forward with plans for a much larger data center, located across the street from her farm. Headwaters, a Texas-based company, wanted to annex land in Pleasant Township (where Spillman lives) and nearby Jackson Township for a 300-plus acre facility in Grove City.
This is a story playing out in communities across the U.S., where A.I. demands have rapidly accelerated the need for data centers, along with the extraordinary amounts of water and energy that they consume. But residents are pushing back, advocating for more community input, insisting that the data facilities cover the full cost of locating there (such as local grid infrastructure upgrades), and even calling for outright moratoriums.
Crucially, these movements don’t break along party lines: Republicans, Democrats and Independents across the country are mad — and they’re working together to block development. This bipartisan push is particularly notable at a time of intense polarization. There’s not much that people from different political parties can agree on, but according to a recent poll from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, very few people want an A.I. data center in their community. That’s certainly true in Grove City, a Republican-leaning suburb of Columbus, where people of all parties opposed the Headwaters development.
The nature of this coalition isn’t totally unprecedented, says Megan Mullin, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles. “In so many ways, data center battles look like land use battles that have come before,” she says. “Battles over housing developments, wind farms or gas pipelines — we consistently see people come together across party lines to try to keep their community looking the way it’s always looked, and to fight back against what they perceive as harmful draws on community resources.”
Mullin says a big difference now is that all of these hyper-local fights are happening at once. While one or two bipartisan coalitions on a land use debate wouldn’t rise to the level of national news, hundreds of them happening simultaneously around the country does. “That allows these local disputes to be connected to something national, and it also allows concrete movement building.”
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In Ohio, residents of Grove City and the surrounding townships quickly mobilized once they realized that Headwaters wanted to site a data center in their community. “We got organized,” says Jen Belt, one of the four people behind Protect Grove City, which actively opposed the development. “Most people weren’t even aware that this was a thing. We taped flyers to every home within a three-mile radius of the developer’s site. We encouraged people to come to all of the council meetings.”They also worked on gathering signatures to encourage the Grove City city council to pass a moratorium. (Pleasant Township and Jackson Township had already passed moratoriums in the first half of 2026.) Ultimately, Belt says, they gathered more than 4,000 signatures for the online petition.
Their efforts worked. In June, the city council passed a one-year moratorium on data center development. But Belt and her neighbors know it is temporary, and developers will come back once the year is up. So they have put a Community Consent Amendment (CCA) on the upcoming November ballot. If passed, it will require residents’ approval before any large-scale development can break ground. (While it’s geared toward data centers, it’s written to apply to all heavy industry.)
Belt, like Spillman, lives in Pleasant Township, which she calls “suburban rural.” But she scoffs at the idea that the issue doesn’t impact her just because she’s not within city limits. “This is property that will be annexed from my town into Grove City,” says Belt, a registered Democrat. “It’s literally in my backyard. So it does affect us.”
Spillman, a lifelong Republican, agrees: “This is our community. This is our neighborhood, and none of us can vote on any of this, because we don’t live in Grove City proper, but we still consider Grove City our home.”
Data centers have been going up in earnest for the last decade, built to support the rapid growth of the cloud. Opposition has existed nearly as long. But as A.I. usage has exploded in the last several years, the demand for data centers has rapidly accelerated as well.
The post Finally, Something Americans Agree On! appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.
