Local Opposition Is Slowing A.I. Data Centers. Wall Street Has Noticed.

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Local Opposition Is Slowing A.I. Data Centers. Wall Street Has Noticed.

Tech companies are running into resistance from neighbors and may not be able to build at the pace they promised investors.

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Construction of a Meta data center in Eagle Mountain, Utah, in 2024. The company is among those that have staked their futures on the use of artificial intelligence.

Credit...

Christie Hemm Klok for The New York Times

By

Lydia DePillis

March 26, 2026,

11:29 a.m. ET

The torrential wave of data center construction for artificial intelligence has seemed unstoppable. Unconstrained by interest rates or labor costs, the biggest tech companies in the world are pouring trillions of dollars into land, electronics and

new power plants

. A.I. spending is now a

meaningful share

of American economic growth and the

wind at the stock market’s back

.

But lately, zoning commissions and county councils across the country have been resisting.

Unnerved

by the data centers’ voracious electricity demands and sprawling footprints, they are denying permits and withdrawing tax breaks at a rate that is forcing companies like Google, Microsoft and Meta to take a different tack.

And Wall Street, which has ridden high on those valuations, is starting to raise some eyebrows.

“A lot of the commitments and the build-out of data centers where it’s easy has kind of been done, so you’re getting marginally more difficult,” said Todd Castagno, a managing director at Morgan Stanley. “From a markets perspective, expectations might be, maybe not reset, but realigned with the fact that it’s hard to put a couple trillion dollars in the ground in a short time.”

About 30 percent of the S&P 500 is made up of just six companies: Apple, Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, Nvidia and Amazon, all of which have staked their futures on the use of artificial intelligence. The building boom has also

lifted equipment makers

like Caterpillar and Siemens, which have enjoyed greater sales to data center projects. Much of the construction is also funded by the investors behind OpenAI and Anthropic, which are privately held.

In all, the top A.I. companies, known as “hyperscalers,” have forecast

spending $710 billion

on data centers across North America in 2026. And to some extent, their lofty valuations depend on their ability to deliver on those promises. But rising skepticism from neighbors, along with the major challenge of supplying gigawatts of new electricity, could put a hitch in those plans.

The calculation that brought local resistance to the attention of investors is compiled by Miquel Vila, a supply chain and political risk researcher with the A.I. safety firm

10a Labs

, which started the

Data Center Watch

project out of curiosity. Mr. Vila, who says he has no vested or ideological interest in the progress of data centers, follows local news, local government meetings and Facebook groups to document and categorize the spread of organized resistance.

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