On April 7, voters in Festus, Missouri, removed 4 out of 8 city council members in a single recall election. The reason was that the city council approved a $6 billion AI data center project at the end of March by a vote of 6 to 2. This project, led by CRG, the data center development division of Clayco, spans 360 acres and has an undisclosed Fortune 100 company as its end client (code-named Project Cumulus).

The city council signed off without holding a public hearing, prompting local residents to organize Wake Up JeffCo, which subsequently sued the city government and CRG in St. Louis County court, initiating a recall petition against the mayor as well. According to a summary from Tom's Hardware, during the same period, the home of Indianapolis City Council member Ron Gibson was shot at with over a dozen bullets at the end of 2025, leaving a note on his doorstep that read "No Data Centers."

Festus is not an isolated case. Recently, Indianapolis City Council member Ron Gibson's house was shot at 13 times by a gunman in the middle of the night, waking his 8-year-old son. A handwritten note was left at his doorstep stating, "No Data Centers." The FBI has since intervened to investigate. Jordyn Abrams, a researcher at George Washington University's Extremism Research Project, noted that data centers are becoming a target for anti-tech, anti-government extremists.

The scene of the Ron Gibson shooting

The advocacy group Data Center Watch reported in its Q2 2025 survey that the number of organized opposition groups has increased from 142 a year ago (across 24 states) to 188 (across 40 states). The dollar amount of halted or delayed projects has surged from $64 billion to $162 billion. On April 1, 2026, Port Washington, Wisconsin, became the first in the nation to pass a referendum specifically targeting data centers, where 66% of voters supported a mandatory referendum threshold for projects receiving over $10 million in TIF subsidies.

These events cumulatively answer the same question: Is the true bottleneck of AI capacity expansion getting stuck on county and city ballots?

A Widespread Backlash

Mapping the events of the past 23 months onto the United States reveals two levels of backlash. One is at the state level, with 8 states having submitted or passed data center moratorium bills, including Maine (passed by the House 82-62, lasting until 2027), Vermont (suspended until July 2030), Virginia (submitted by Democratic Delegate Irene Shin, suspended until 2028), Georgia, Maryland, South Dakota, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. This level involves legislative actions, which have the largest impact but slow progress.

The other level is the municipal and county level, where the backlash is more concentrated and intense. In December 2025, the Chandler City Council in Arizona unanimously voted down Active Infrastructure's $2.5 billion project with a vote of 7-0 (the lobbying was led by former federal senator Kyrsten Sinema). The Tucson City Council in the same state is currently deliberating planning restrictions on data centers, gathering public opinions until the end of the month. Hays County/San Marcos in Texas rejected a $1.5 billion project with a vote of 5-2. Other locations include Cascade Locks in Oregon, Chesterton in Indiana, Catlett Station in Virginia, Peculiar in Missouri, and Lansing in Michigan. According to Data Center Watch, at least 10 states have experienced direct rejections at the municipal level or developers withdrawing.

More than half of the high-conflict incidents are concentrated in the Midwest and South. This area has been home to relatively abundant remaining capacity on the U.S. power grid over the past decade and was also a hotspot for the last wave of data center investment. Now, the backlash is centered in the same region, viewed from another angle, as the supply side has come from "states with surplus power plants" and encountered the most politically sensitive local levels.

$6 Billion, Not in the Same League

The financial scale of Festus means that the $6 billion figure is entirely beyond what the city council could normally digest. According to municipal budget documents cited by the local newspaper myleaderpaper, the general fund and public safety operating budget for Festus in FY2025 is $17.64 million, and the total municipal expenditure for FY2024 is $37.41 million, with an expected reserve of $28.09 million by the end of FY2025.

The $6 billion data center project is about 340 times this year's operational budget, translating to approximately $450,000 per person for the city's 13,200 residents. In relative terms, this is not a locally discussable development project but a small town being connected to a capital pipeline that has nothing to do with it.

In comparison to the median annual income per capita of residents in Festus, which is about $35,000 in rural Missouri, the problem becomes clearer. Any decimal point in the data center contract is greater than the entire community's lifetime per capita disposable income. When local officials face such numbers, they lack experiential checks and balances in procedure. The city council resolution of Festus is criticized in public opinion for "not holding a public hearing," and technically, that is because such projects usually operate under commercial confidentiality clauses (the identities of the developer and end client are not disclosed), making the normal city council deliberation process unable to review confidential contracts. This is a structural flaw, not just the negligence of individual council members.

Because of the magnitude difference, breaking down the data center contracts into scales that local councils can handle is fundamentally infeasible. This is why, over the past 12 months, the backlash has not been resolved internally in the deliberation process, but through external mechanisms like recalls, lawsuits, and referendums. The recall of 4 city council members in Festus, simultaneous acceptance of a lawsuit by residents in St. Louis County, and the launch of the mayor's recall petition is a rare case triggered by all three paths at once.

A Data Center, Consuming a Small Town

The electricity consumption of AI data centers can be best understood in comparison to a small American town. A fully loaded 200 MW AI data center consumes approximately 1,500 GWh annually, assuming an 86% load factor. A town of 100,000 residents uses about 420 GWh of electricity annually (based on the U.S. Energy Information Administration's average annual residential electricity of 10.5 MWh per household, calculated at 2.5 persons per household). This means data centers use 3.6 times more electricity than the residents of a small town. This is just the electricity figure and does not account for cooling and associated water usage.

The water comparison is inversely, but more intuitively. Based on the typical value of 100 gallons per person per day cited by the U.S. Geological Survey, a town of 100,000 residents uses about 3.65 billion gallons of water annually. A hyperscale AI data center, according to Google’s Council Bluffs (the largest Google data center in the U.S.), consumes about 500 million gallons of water annually. In absolute terms, this equates to 13.7% of the town’s total water usage, but viewed from another scale, it represents the water consumption for 14,000 people for a whole year, which in a town with a permanent population between 10,000 and 50,000 would mean allocating a significant part of the city’s water supply system to a single user. According to Lawrence Berkeley Lab’s 2024 Data Center Energy Consumption Report, U.S. data centers consumed 17 billion gallons of direct cooling water in 2023, and 211 billion gallons of indirect water (from power generation), with predictions indicating direct water usage will double to quadruple by 2028.

The most heard protest is "Our well water will run dry." From the numbers, this is not an emotional expression. In Loudoun County, Virginia (the most data center dense county in the U.S.), potential water usage by data centers in 2023 was 899 million gallons, constituting about 10% of the county's total water consumption, according to local water data cited by Sierra Club and Grist. If the county level is already like this, the numbers at the town level would only be more extreme.

Planned Capacity Entering the Backlash Window

According to data from FERC and Wood Mackenzie Q4 2025, the actual capacity of data centers in the U.S. that has come online is about 50 GW. There’s a planned pipeline totaling 241 GW, with 33% in active development (approximately 80 GW), and the remaining 67% (about 161 GW) not yet started. Bloomberg New Energy Finance predicts that the U.S. will add 97 GW of capacity between 2025 and 2030, and by 2035, the peak electricity demand from data centers will reach 106 GW. All these numbers point to one fact: the vast majority of capacity still remains on paper and has not materialized.

Data revealed by Sightline Climate through TechRadar indicates that of the 16 GW planned for 2026, 30% to 50% are expected to be canceled or delayed. Additionally, Data Center Watch's figures show that organized opposition has blocked or delayed $64 billion worth of data center projects over a 10-month period from May 2024 to March 2025. In Q2 2025 alone, this figure reached $98 billion, corresponding to 20 projects. The amount blocked in one quarter has already exceeded the cumulative total for the previous 10 months.

This creates a temporal mismatch. Capital has committed to expanding U.S. data center capacity several times over in the next five years, but newly added capacity must pass through county and city approvals one hurdle at a time. The more planned capacity there is, the larger the surface area for backlash becomes. The reason why a case like Festus could escalate from a city council vote to recalls and lawsuits within a month is not due to it being unique, but because the number of opposition organizations increased by 46 over the past year (according to Data Center Watch Q2 2025 report), and they are sharing templated legal tools across states, including TIF subsidy referendums, zoning planning lawsuits, and council member recall petitions. Whether the long-term power contracts signed by frontier labs will be honored depends on which counties those contracts land in and what types of residents are watching their councils closely.

The bottlenecks in AI capacity expansion have, for the first time, popped out of the electricity contract negotiation table and surfaced in the recall votes of 13,200 residents.

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