EVEN IF THEY'RE SHOOTING IN JAIL, WHY DO PEOPLE IN SMALL TOWNS IN THE U.S. OBJECT TO THE AID?

On 7 April, voters in the municipality of Festus, Missouri, removed four of the eight city councillors in one instance. The reason for this is that the city council passed a $6 billion AI data centre project at the end of March in six to two. The project is led by the data centre development department of Clayco, CRG, which occupies 360 acres, and the end-user is an undisclosed wealth 100 firm (named Project Cumulus)。

The municipal council signed without a public hearing, and the local population organization Wake Up JeffCo subsequently sued the municipality and CRG at the San Luis County Court, and the dismissal of the mayor was initiated. According to a summary by Tom's Hardware, at the same time, Ron Gibson, a member of the Indianapolis municipal council, was shot at by a dozen bullets at his house at the end of 2025, leaving a note by No Data Centers at the door。

Festus is not alone. Shortly before, Ron Gibson, a member of the Indianapolis council, was shot 13 times in the middle of the night by gunmen and his 8-year-old son was woken by gunfire. There was a handwritten note at the door, "No data centres allowed." The FBI has been involved in the investigation. Jordyn Abrams, a researcher at George Washington University's Extremism Research Project, noted that data centres were becoming targets of anti-technology, anti-government extremists。

Ron Gibson, shooting scene

In the 2025 Q2 report, the advocacy organization Data Center Watch updated the number of organized opposition groups from 142 (24 states) a year ago to 188 (40 states). The amount of projects called for suspension or extension increased from $64 billion to $162 billion. On April 1, 2026, Port Washington, Wisconsin, by means of the first United States-wide referendum on data centres, 66 per cent of voters voted for a mandatory referendum threshold for more than $10 million of TIF subsidies。

THESE EVENTS, TAKEN TOGETHER, ANSWERED THE SAME QUESTION: WHETHER THE REAL BOTTLENECKS IN THE EXPANSION OF PRODUCTION CAPACITY IN AI WILL BE CONTAINED IN THE BALLOT PAPERS AT THE COUNTY AND MUNICIPAL LEVELS。

Reveal in pieces

Put the events of the past 23 months on the United States map and see a rebound at both levels. One is at the state level, where eight states have submitted or passed a data centre moratorium, including Maine (adopted by the House of Representatives in 82-62, which lasted until 2027), Vermont (suspended until July 2030), Virginia (submitted by Democratic Representative Irene Shin, suspended until 2028), Georgia, Maryland, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Minnesota. This level is legislative action, with the greatest impact but slowest progress。

The other is at the municipal and district levels, where the rebound is more intense and intense. In December 2025, the Chandler City Council of Arizona unanimously rejected the $2.5 billion project of Active Industries (the lobby was former Federal Senator Kyrsten Sinema). The data centre planning restrictions were under consideration by the municipal council of Tucson, the same state, in April 2026, and a call for public opinion reached the end of the month. Hays County/ San Marcos rejected $1.5 billion in projects with 5-2. Cascade Locks, Indiana Chesterton, Catlett State, Missouri, Lansing. According to Data Center Watch, at least 10 states have experienced direct municipal vetoes or withdrawals by developers。

More than half of the high-level incidents of conflict were concentrated in the west and south-central regions. This area is where the remaining capacity of the United States grid has been relatively abundant over the past 10 years, and it is also the hotspot for the downfallers of the previous data centre. Now the rebound is concentrated in the same area, and in another way, the supply side is coming from the "excessive state of the power plant" and reaching the most sensitive level of local politics。

$6 billion, not on a scale Let's go

Festus’s financial size determined that $6 billion could never be absorbed by the city council. According to myleaderpaper in the local newspaper, Festus FY2025 General Fund plus Public Security Operating Budget is US$17.64 million, FY2024 total municipal expenditure is US$37.41 million, and FY2025 projected reserve funds of US$28.09 million at the end of the year。

The $6 billion data centre project, approximately 340 times the annual operating budget, was converted to a city-wide population of 1.32 million dollars per person. In relative measure, it is not a local development project that can be discussed, but a small town that is connected to a capital pipeline that has nothing to do with itself。

Compared to the median annual income per capita of the population of Festus, the non-Main District of Missouri is about US$ 35 million, which is more visible. Any decimal point in a data centre contract is greater than the disposable income of the entire community. Local officials are faced with such figures without procedural checks and balances. The decision of the Festus City Council was referred to by public opinion as “the absence of a public hearing”, at the technical level because such projects usually follow commercial secrecy clauses (the identity of the developer and the end customer is not disclosed), and the normal proceedings of the Municipal Council cannot consider confidential contracts. This is a structural loophole, not an oversight by individual municipal councillors。

It is precisely because of the volume gap that the data centre contract has been broken down into a measure that the local council can handle. That is why, over the past 12 months, the rebound path has not been resolved within the proceedings, but with the three types of external weapons: recall, litigation and referendum. Four municipal councillors in Festus were dismissed, the District Court of St. Louis received complaints from both population groups, and the mayor ' s dismissal was initiated, which is a rare case of three routes that were triggered simultaneously。

A data centre, eating a small town

AI Data Centre power consumption is best felt in contrast to small United States cities. An AI data centre with a load of 200 MW at 86% load rate consumes approximately 1,500 GWh annually. One 100,000 American small city residents consume about 420 GWh per year (converted to 10.5 MWh per household per household per 2.5 person in the average annual residential use of the US Energy Information Agency EIA). Data centres are 3.6 times more accessible to people in small towns. It's just electricity, not cooling and associated water。

The water contrasts in turn, but it is more intuitive. Based on the typical value of water use (100 gallons per capita per day) for residents of the United States Geological Survey, a small city of 100,000 inhabitants uses about 36.50 billion gallons per year. A mega-scale data centre in AI uses 500 million gallons of water per year in Google Concil Bluffs. In absolute terms, data centres account for 13.7 per cent of small towns, but at one scale it is equivalent to 14 million people drinking water throughout the year, falling into a small town with a resident population of 10,000 to 50,000, giving a significant proportion of urban water systems to one user. According to Lawrence Berkeley Lab's 2024 data centre energy consumption report, direct cooling of water 17 billion gallons in 2023, indirect water use (power generation) 211 billion gallons, is expected to double to four times the direct water use in 2028。

The most popular protest was "our wells will dry." It's not an emotional expression in numbers. In 2023, the data centre in Virginia (Loudoun County, the most densely populated county in the U.S. data centre) had 899 million gallons of potential water, accounting for about 10 per cent of the total water use in the county, and local hydro data cited by Sierra Club and Grist. This is still the case at the district level, where the figures are only more extreme。

Planned capacity, entering the rebound window

U.S. data centres are really operational, according to FERC and Wood Mackenzie 2025 Q4, about 50 GW. Planning pipelines totalling 241 GW, 33% of which are active in development (approximately 80 GW) and 67% (approximately 161 GW) have not yet started. Bloomberg NEF, Bloomberg Energy Finance, predicts that by 2025 and 2030 the United States will have added 97 GW capacity to a peak of 106 GW in 2035 for the data centre. All these figures point together to the fact that the vast majority of the capacity is still on the planned drawings and falls。

According to Sightline Climate data disclosed through TechRadar, 30 to 50 per cent of the 16 GWs originally scheduled for production in 2026 are expected to be cancelled or postponed. At the same time, Data Center Watch data show that in the 10 months from May 2024 to March 2025, organizational opposition prevented or postponed the $64 billion data centre project. The figure for the 2025 Q2 single season was $98 billion, corresponding to 20 projects. The single-season block has exceeded the cumulative amount of the previous 10 months。

This constitutes a temporal error. Capital has committed itself to doubling the United States data centre capacity several times over the next five years, but the additional capacity will have to pass through the county and city levels. The more planning capacity there is, the larger the face that can be pulled back. Festus, for example, was able to move from voting in municipal councils to dismissal and litigation within one month, not because of its special nature, but because the number of opposition organizations increased by 46 a year (according to Data Center Watch 2025 Q2 report) and because of the sharing of templateed legal tools across the state, including TIF subsidy referendums, district planning suits, and parliamentary dismissals. The long-term power contracts signed by the front-line laboratories will not be honoured, depending on the counties where they are located and on which district councils are being watched。

AI'S CAPACITY EXPANSION BOTTLENECKS, WHICH FOR THE FIRST TIME JUMPED OUT OF THE POWER CONTRACT NEGOTIATION TABLE, APPEARED ON THE STRIKE VOTE OF 132,000 PEOPLE。