Where the world is building data centers, and pushing back

After hundreds protested a proposed data center near McMaster University, Hamilton's city council voted in June 2026 to advance a one-year construction moratorium, in what a councillor described as the first such municipal pause in Canada.

Citing grid constraints, Quebec restricted new power procurement for large data center projects beginning in 2024, effectively halting new large-scale development as Hydro-Quebec reported little spare transmission capacity at its high-demand industrial sites.

Residents and environmentalists in Queretaro have organized to defend springs and farmland from data center water demands. The state says household supply is protected, while noting that water allocation falls under federal jurisdiction.

Five months after the historic 2024 flood that put roughly 80 percent of Eldorado do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul under water, Scala Data Centers announced Scala AI City, billed as Latin America's first data center district, on a 7 million square meter flood-free tract beside the BR-290 highway. The initial phase is about R$ 3 billion at 54 MW, with potential to scale toward thousands of megawatts. In December 2024 the city council passed a law that widened the urban perimeter and fast-tracked licensing, with no public consultation or published impact studies. Investigations by Intercept Brasil and the Pulitzer Center found most residents were unaware of the project; the state prosecutor began demanding environmental and neighborhood impact studies in early 2026, and a state legislative subcommittee opened a review citing the complex's projected power draw.

The Anace Indigenous community in Ceara occupied the state environmental agency in August 2025 and filed a federal complaint to halt an $8.7 billion TikTok and Casa dos Ventos data center on land they claim, arguing they were never consulted and that the project, sited in a drought-prone region, would drain scarce water and power. It is described as the first pushback of its kind in Brazil.

Residents of Cerrillos in Santiago fought Google's roughly $200 million second data center for years over its draw on the strained Central Santiago aquifer during Chile's long drought; a 2020 referendum and court pressure first pushed Google toward air cooling. In February 2026 a Chilean environmental court partially reversed Google's 2020 permit, ordering it to re-evaluate the water component for the effects of climate change. In March 2026 Google paused the project and said the permitting process would restart from scratch with a redesigned, less water-intensive cooling system, keeping the same site but giving no new timeline.

Microsoft's planned Quilicura data center near Santiago faced community opposition and permitting delays over water in a drought-stricken area. Microsoft later committed not to draw water from nearby sources, winning approval from most local bodies.

As Uruguay endured its worst drought in 74 years and Montevideo declared a water emergency, thousands marched against Google's planned data center under the slogan 'it is not drought, it is pillage,' and activists sued to force disclosure of its water use. The project, first designed to draw millions of liters of drinking water a day, was approved only after Google agreed to switch to air cooling.

In March 2026 Denmark's state-owned grid operator Energinet imposed a temporary pause on new large-load grid connection agreements after requests to the grid swelled to roughly 60 GW, nearly nine times the country's 7 GW peak demand. Data centers were the main driver, accounting for about 14 GW of the queue, as hyperscalers targeted Denmark's clean, cheap power. The pause, initially set at three months, remained in effect past its window while Energinet built a prioritization framework, and the energy minister floated putting data centers at the back of the queue behind Danish customers. A major project in Aalborg was abandoned for lack of grid capacity.

In Marseille, La Quadrature du Net opposes data centers taking over urban buildings, arguing energy should go to public transport instead. Digital Realty's MRS5 project is under public consultation.

Marseille, France's biggest internet landing point with around 18 submarine cables, has drawn a dozen data centers and a growing revolt. The collective Le nuage etait sous nos pieds, formed with La Quadrature du Net, fights new projects over water drawn from the public supply and returned hot to the Mediterranean, and over electricity that pits data centers against electrifying the port, buses, and hospitals. Campaigners demand a national moratorium, and in 2026 residents filed a legal challenge against a data center permit in the Drome.

EdgeConneX's roughly 1 billion euro data center plan for Maintal, just east of Frankfurt, stalled in 2026 after residents and local politicians fought the company's proposal to run it on a dedicated on-site gas-fired power plant chosen to skip long grid-connection waits. Protests over the plant's emissions forced a halt to construction work on it; the local SPD said a data center was acceptable but a gas plant was not. EdgeConneX said it had not abandoned the data center and was weighing alternative power options, leaving the project in limbo. A separate AWS data center planned nearby drew its own complaints over how the land was sold.

On February 3, 2026 the town council of Gross-Gerau, about 30 km south of Frankfurt, voted 18 to 14 to reject Vantage Data Centers' planned 174 MW campus (project FRA5), a roughly 2.5 billion euro development of up to five four-story buildings on a 14-hectare site in the Lausboehl industrial park. Members from the SPD, Greens, FDP, Free Voters and Left cited the scale and look of the buildings, weak job creation, doubts that promised trade-tax revenue would stay local, and security concerns. Vantage said it would review the decision before deciding its next steps.

Frankfurt adopted planning rules confining new data centers to designated zones and requiring waste-heat reuse, citing land and grid pressure; environmental group BUND has opposed several local projects. Industry warns the limits could push investment elsewhere.

Ireland's data-center pause was never a political decision, which is why it did not survive as one. In 2021 the grid operator EirGrid effectively stopped issuing new connections around Dublin, not on a vote but on an engineering judgement that the capital could not carry the load without risking blackouts. Nobody had campaigned for it and nobody owned it, so when it lapsed in December 2025 there was no political win to defend -- it simply expired. Friends of the Irish Environment, Friends of the Earth Ireland and ClientEarth are now in court seeking to overturn the rules that replaced it. The numbers behind the case: data centers consumed 23 percent of all Irish electricity last year, up from about 5 percent a decade earlier, and are forecast to reach 31 percent by 2034, which would make them the country's single largest electricity consumer. Set this against Zeewolde in the Netherlands, where a grassroots campaign converted a local fight into national law that has held. Ireland shows the opposite lesson: a restriction handed down as a technical finding, with no constituency underneath it, disappears the moment the technical finding changes.

South Dublin County Council refused Google's plans for another data center on the edge of the capital because the grid does not have enough energy to support it, a milestone for Ireland's data center opposition.

After grid operator EirGrid warned that surging data center demand around Dublin risked blackouts, regulators effectively froze new grid connections from 2021. In a December 2025 decision the Commission for Regulation of Utilities lifted the freeze but replaced it with strict conditions: large new data centers must supply their own on-site or battery generation matching full demand, site in unconstrained grid locations, and meet 80 percent of annual demand from new Irish renewables. Industry groups call the rules burdensome while regulators cite security of supply.

Across Italy's heavily urbanized Lombardy region, the rapid spread of data centers onto farmland and green space has hardened into organized opposition. As the regional government pushed a data center bill (progetto di legge 150) that critics called industry-friendly, opposition parties, environmental committees, and residents from the Milan metropolitan area held a presidio outside the regional council building (the Pirellone) on May 12, 2026, and about fifty mayors from the south Milan and Pavia areas pressed to delay the vote, forcing a postponement. Local committees such as Sentinelle del Territorio in Bornasco have organized against specific sites.

Residents of Certosa di Pavia, south of Milan, formed the Comitato per la Tutela del Territorio Certosino, a non-partisan grassroots committee, to fight a proposed 60,000 square meter data center, about the size of twelve soccer fields and up to 15 meters tall, planned on farmland next to their homes. The committee launched a petition demanding that officials reject the zoning change, citing harm to the environment, public health, and quality of life. The project remained under contest as of early 2026.

A Dutch court denied developer Goodman's bid to force grid operator TenneT to provide a 70-megawatt connection for a data center in Haarlemmermeer, near Amsterdam. The court ruled TenneT could place the project on a waiting list because of grid congestion, and that the public interest outweighed the developer's purely financial interest. Goodman has appealed.

The Netherlands caps hyperscale data centers to two designated national locations under its 2022 rules, and Amsterdam has gone further -- a one-year moratorium in 2019, then in April 2025 a bar on new data centers or expansions in the municipality until at least 2030. But a threshold is a number, and a number can be designed around: in January 2026 Microsoft won approval for a project split into three separate towers, each individually below the size threshold that would have triggered the hyperscale restriction. The buildings are separate; the computing capacity is not. This is worth watching wherever a jurisdiction on this map writes its limit as a megawatt or square-metre figure rather than as a test of total campus capacity, because the same split is available everywhere the rule is drafted that way.

Local opposition, farmers, and nitrogen-permit challenges, together with a Dutch Senate motion against handing over farmland, derailed Meta's planned Zeewolde hyperscale data center campus, one of Europe's largest proposed builds.

In the Wieringermeer polder, farmers and the Dutch agriculture organization LTO appealed Microsoft's environmental permits for the Agriport A7 data centers after they consumed 84 million liters of water in the 2021 drought, far above official projections.

The collective Tu Nube Seca Mi Rio (Your Cloud Dries My River) campaigns against data centers in drought-prone Aragon over their heavy water use, after journalists uncovered the full scale of Amazon Web Services water and power demands buried in planning files.

Activist Aurora Gomez and residents are fighting Meta's data center expansion in Talavera de la Reina, a town of 83,000 west of Madrid, over water and energy demands settled in regional deals without local consultation.

In a country where 75 percent of the land risks desertification, campaigners under the banner 'your cloud is drying my river' have fought a wave of data centers. Meta's billion-euro Talavera de la Reina project, slated to draw hundreds of millions of liters a year from the drought-hit Tagus basin, was forced to cut its planned water use, Amazon's Aragon expansion drew farmer and NGO objections, and in 2025 the city of Lleida banned data centers outright.

After Microsoft finished a data center in Staffanstorp, which it had permitted as a warehouse, residents and local officials fought its plan to add 70 megawatts of diesel backup generators and pushed to revoke the existing permits. In 2022 Microsoft withdrew the expansion application and went looking for another site in southern Sweden, later replacing diesel units with batteries.

In early February 2026 the City of Edinburgh Council's development management sub-committee unanimously refused planning permission for a roughly 210 MW data center proposed by Shelborn Asset Management on the former Royal Bank of Scotland headquarters site at South Gyle. Planning officers had recommended approval, but councillors rejected the project's 'green' framing, pointing to unproven renewable sourcing and heat reuse, diesel backup generators, and projected emissions near 200,000 tonnes a year, about a tenth of the city's total. Shelborn appealed, and the refusal pushed Edinburgh councillors to call for a Scotland-wide pause and a clear national definition of a green data center.

The UK government reversed its own approval of a roughly 1 billion pound data center in Iver, Buckinghamshire. Ministers had overruled the local authority's objections -- raised over the scheme's energy demands -- to grant consent, but the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government later acknowledged its decision had contained a serious logical error, and the approval was quashed.

Friends of the Earth Havering opposes a large hyperscale data center in a semi-rural Green Belt area of east London, citing eight to ten years of construction disruption and huge power use, part of UK-wide days of action in February 2026.

Buckinghamshire Council twice refused a hyperscale data center on green-belt land near London, but the central government overturned the refusals on appeal. Campaign groups Foxglove and Global Action Plan won permission for a judicial review, and ministers were forced to admit a serious logical error in approving the project without guaranteeing its power supply or assessing its full water and electricity demands. It is the first UK legal challenge aimed at a data center's environmental impact.

In a city scarred by the 2018 Day Zero drought, the Housing Assembly, which represents more than twenty Western Cape communities, joined Foxglove and the Legal Resources Centre to formally object to a rezoning for two new Equinix data centers near Cape Town airport, arguing officials lacked basic information on their water, electricity, diesel, and pollution impacts. Four planned data centers would together draw about 34 percent of the city's current electricity supply.

Rights groups and residents in Visakhapatnam (Vizag), Andhra Pradesh are fighting a Google-Adani hyperscale data center park built by Google subsidiary Raiden Infotech across more than 600 acres at three sites, including one at Adavivaram barely 120 meters from the Mudasarlova drinking-water reservoir and amid the Kailasagiri-Kambalakonda hill and forest landscape. The Human Rights Forum and others petitioned for a halt to site work, public hearings, MOU disclosure, and a cumulative environmental review, charging that clearances were rushed and split into pieces under political pressure. In late May 2026 Instagram, Facebook, and X restricted or were asked to restrict posts publicizing the opposition petition under India's IT Act, drawing free-speech objections.

On Batam, an Indonesian island near Singapore that depends almost entirely on rainwater, residents have protested a fast-growing cluster of data centers over their heavy water use. In September 2024 a local protest demanded officials address how the facilities were cutting into community water supplies, and in December 2024 residents of the Teluk Mata Ikan fishing village gathered outside data centers at Nongsa Digital Park, contrasting the steady flow to the tech complex with their own shortages. Roughly 18 data centers are built or planned across the island, and researchers estimate the existing and planned sites could draw about 8 percent of Batam's water.

Residents of Inzai, a fast-growing data center cluster in Chiba prefecture east of Tokyo, sued to stop a large facility known as Inzai 5, part of a wave of local pushback as data centers spread into populated areas. Records obtained by residents showed city officials met repeatedly with the developers in 2024 and 2025, asked them to reconsider or move the site over expected conflict with neighbors, and were rebuffed; the developers stressed the project's role in powering AI and hinted at an investor lawsuit if it were delayed. In December the mayor said the city had no legal power to halt a private development on private land under existing rules, leaving residents to press their case in court over how data centers should be classified.

Johor rejected close to 30 percent of data center applications to protect local resources, then raised water tariffs and required reclaimed-water cooling. Officials frame it as maturing from growth at any cost to sustainable growth.

Singapore paused new data centers from 2019 to 2022 over power, water, and land limits, then reopened with a competitive scheme admitting only highly efficient, low-emission facilities. The government frames it as sustainable growth; some operators shifted projects to Malaysia and elsewhere in the region.

Resident opposition has become the biggest obstacle to data centers around Seoul. Of 33 permitted projects in the capital region across 2024 and 2025, 17 were delayed or scrapped after community campaigns, including a Digital Realty site in Gimpo suspended indefinitely and a Hyosung center in Anyang cancelled after permits were issued. Residents cite electromagnetic fields, noise, and heat, even though a 2025 government study measured emissions at about 1 percent of the safety limit.

In June 2026 a developer withdrew plans for a data center at North Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, after strong opposition from residents and the local council. The Blue Mountains mayor called the withdrawal a win for council and community activism. The developer, MAK Urban Group, said it had listened to local residents and community groups while maintaining that data centers can benefit regional areas.

In Melbourne, organized community opposition has targeted several data center projects. Maribyrnong City Council formally opposed NextDC's expansion of its M3 campus, which awaits planning approval from the Victorian government, with residents raising noise, power draw, and proximity-to-schools concerns. Separately, residents launched a petition against a proposed data center on the historic Broadmeadows Ford factory site, citing air and noise pollution, water use, and health risks.

As New South Wales fast-tracks data centers as state significant developments that bypass council approval, Western Sydney communities have pushed back hard. The state quietly approved the southern hemisphere's largest data center at Marsden Park, under 100 meters from homes, while AirTrunk's planned 1.2-gigawatt Kemps Creek campus with 846 diesel generators near schools drew objections from Penrith Council, residents, and the environment regulator. Campaigners are demanding a statewide moratorium and a parliamentary inquiry is underway.

GreenSquare withdrew its application for a roughly $1.1 billion, three-story, 15,000 square meter data center at Hazelmere, about 15 km east of Perth, in 2026 after the local council recommended rejection over noise from its 88 diesel backup generators and nearly 1,900 public submissions, most of them opposed. Objectors cited environmental impact and the site's proximity to a river, a conservation wetland, two Aboriginal heritage sites, and a primary school.