In towns across America, ordinary residents are rising up against massive data centers proposed by Big Tech companies — and with good reason. In Matthews, a suburb of Charlotte, North Carolina, the mayor himself says local residents were “999 to 1 against” a planned data center, so opposed that if elected officials had approved it, he believes “every person that voted for it would no longer be in office.” That reaction captures a growing grassroots backlash against these projects.
These data centers — backed by tech giants like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook — are being pushed into communities without transparency about their true costs. They gobble up land, electricity, and water, often create only a handful of jobs for locals, and leave residents contending with a constant 65-decibel hum from servers and noisy backup diesel generators.
A central complaint is environmental and resource strain. In Texas — which already faces serious water shortages — data centers require millions of gallons of water daily just to cool their equipment, roughly the same amount a town of 50,000 people would need. With hundreds of existing facilities and hundreds more planned, Texans fear their underground aquifers will be depleted to serve Big Tech’s needs. Electricity is another sore point. Since 2022, residential power costs nationwide have risen more than 10%, while rates for data centers have climbed only about 3%. That means homeowners are subsidizing cheaper energy for corporate giants — a shift many see as unfair and economically unsound. Opposition isn’t limited to North Carolina and Texas. In St. Charles, Missouri, public outcry stopped a data center after residents learned it would use 125 diesel generators, any of which could potentially leak and contaminate the local water supply.
Critics of the opposition are quick to dismiss residents as “NIMBYs” or “Not In My Backyard” — but that same dismissive label gets applied to citizens opposing other local issues, like refugee resettlement. The point isn’t resistance to progress; it’s resistance to having costs and burdens imposed on communities without their consent.
If Big Tech wants data centers in California’s deserts or Washington’s rural regions, let them build there. Don’t lobby Republican officials to bring these resource-intensive projects into heartland towns with residents left in the dark.
Data centers may promise a tech future, but the cost — in water, power, environment, and community autonomy — is too high to ignore. Follow this story and many others at PhyllisSchlafly.com and let us know your opinion! Again that’s PhyllisSchlafly.com, and join us again for the Phyllis Schlafly Report.
