Mary Ellen Klas, Columnist

NIMBYs Are Coming for the Data Centers AI Needs

Elected officials have been punished by voters for greenlighting the massive, energy-hogging facilities.

August 20, 2025 at 11:30 AM UTC

Corrected

August 20, 2025 at 6:39 PM UTC

Mary Ellen Klas is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former capital bureau chief for the Miami Herald, she has covered politics and government for more than three decades.

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The emerging political battle over data centers has a feature unfamiliar to present-day policymaking: The opponents are not divided along partisan lines. Instead, the conflict is between local communities and Big Tech developers, with elected officials caught in the middle.

Politicians — from both parties — who have greenlit these projects without enough guardrails have found their careers finished. Officials who once courted data centers for their economic potential are facing pushback from residents and businesses who’ve been blindsided by the strain on the power grid and water supply, the impact of noise pollution and the potential damage to property values.