Local Opposition Stalled $68 Billion of Data Centres in Three Months

Forty-five US data centre projects worth $68 billion were blocked or delayed by local opposition between April and June 2026, according to a report the research group Data Center Watch published on 21 September and provided to Bloomberg News. Those 45 projects represented more than half of all new large-scale developments the group began tracking during the quarter.

The same tracker, a project of the firm 10a Labs, counted 75 disrupted cases worth roughly $130 billion in the first three months of 2026. Taken together the two quarters put close to $200 billion of proposed capacity into delay or cancellation in a single half-year. Data Center Watch also counted 843 opposition groups operating across 49 states, with Hawaii the only exception, and said some 30 statehouses have introduced or adopted rules covering data centre siting, electricity or water.

One petition against a project in Tennessee gathered more than 500,000 signatures on Change.org during the quarter, which Data Center Watch said accounted for more than a third of all signatures collected on that platform in the period.

What Virginia stopped paying for

Governor Abigail Spanberger signed Executive Order 22 in Richmond on 18 September 2026. With immediate effect, the Virginia Economic Development Partnership may no longer assist new data centre projects with anticipated peak electrical demand of 25 MW or more through the Virginia Business Ready Sites Program, expedited permitting or similar discretionary programmes. The order also bars executive-branch agencies from entering into or requiring non-disclosure agreements on data centre projects, directs the Department of Environmental Quality to deliver a study of the cumulative emissions from data centre backup diesel generators by 17 March 2027, and creates a state AI task force covering workforce displacement, privacy and cybersecurity.

The sharper measures are not yet law. Spanberger's wider Data Center Accountability Framework proposes ending by-right approval and requiring local government sign-off for any data centre drawing more than 25 MW, and that requires the General Assembly, which returns in January 2027. The Data Center Coalition, the industry's trade body, said on 18 September that it shares the governor's goals but warned that significant and abrupt policy changes could jeopardise jobs and investment.

Texas widens a pause it already had

Three days later, on Monday 21 September, Governor Greg Abbott ordered the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to halt all data-centre-related permits until ERCOT completes an audit of the waitlist of projects seeking grid connection. Abbott's office had ordered that audit in August alongside a moratorium on new grid approvals; the new directive extends the freeze from electrical approvals to environmental ones. TCEQ is to report on its compliance by 19 October. The August moratorium announcement said Abbott would work with the Legislature next session to eliminate any financial incentives for data centres.

The sums involved are large. Analysts at BloombergNEF found in August 2026 that almost 20% of the 253 GW US data centre pipeline, close to 50 GW, was at risk from the Texas pause, with up to $8 billion in data centre revenue losses by the first quarter of 2027. JLL reported in February 2026 that Texas was on course to overtake Virginia as the world's largest data centre market by the end of the decade. Parallax Nexus has tracked the other end of the same pipe, an ERCOT large-load queue of roughly 470 GW of requests against single-digit gigawatts actually drawing power.

Politics is doing the arithmetic too. A recent NBC News poll cited by CNBC found 64% of Americans would be less likely to vote for a candidate who supports building local data centres. Abbott is running a close race for a fourth term, and in 2025 he described Texas as the coming epicentre of AI development.

The pattern leaves the United States

On Tuesday 22 September the Australian state of Victoria, home to Melbourne, announced that data centres will be banned from residential areas with a mandatory 150 metre buffer from any house. Premier Ben Carroll's rules require operators to match new energy demand with additional generation and to pay for network upgrades, and to cool their sites using only recycled or non-drinking water. Westpac has estimated the Australian data centre spending surge at up to A$225 billion, roughly $160 billion, with most of it in the next three years. Data Center Watch reported on protests outside the United States for the first time in the two years it has run the research, covering campaigns in European countries, Australia and South Africa.

The honest reading is that the binding constraint on AI capacity has moved again. Last year it was chips, then it was interconnection queues and transformers. What Virginia and Texas did in the same week is different in kind: both removed state help that developers had treated as automatic, and neither action requires a single new megawatt of generation to be found or refused. Permitting discretion is cheaper for a governor to withdraw than power is to build, and it takes effect on the day of signature.

What the figures cannot settle is how much of this is opposition and how much is a slower pipeline. Data Center Watch's project values are drawn from developers' own announcements rather than audited filings, and the swing from $130 billion in the first quarter to $68 billion in the second is large enough that fewer proposals, not weaker resistance, could explain much of it. The group does not publish a denominator for the earlier quarter comparable to the one it gives for the second.

Two dates now matter more than the totals. TCEQ owes Abbott's office an update by 19 October, three weeks before the November midterms. Virginia's General Assembly convenes in January, and only then will it be clear whether the 25 MW threshold becomes state law or stays an executive preference that a later governor can reverse.