The public is concerned about rising electricity rates caused by data centers.
Meanwhile, business groups — including the state Chamber of Commerce — and labor unions warned that pausing the tax break put Ohio at risk of losing tech-sector investments to other states. DeWine stressed that he supports data centers — calling them a critical component in today’s economy — and that the roughly $37 billion in data center-related investment in 2024 and 2025 in Ohio has been worthwhile. DeWine’s office cited the rising utilization of the tax break and the state Legislature’s new research undertaking to declare a “pause” in granting it to new applicants.
“It’s time we make the booming data center industry work for the people of our state, rather than the other way around,” she said in her state-of-the-state address. Governors — including some who worked to recruit data centers to their states — are increasingly talking tough. Democrats’ bills in Congress await Republican cosponsors, while lawmakers in a number of states are floating moratoriums on new data centers, drafting rules for regulators to shield regular ratepayers and targeting data center tax breaks and utility profits. Meanwhile, consumer advocates in various states — including Indiana, Georgia and Missouri — are warning that utilities could foist the cost of data center-driven buildouts onto regular ratepayers there.
- The White House said Thursday the pledge has been signed by 23 governors and at least 187 companies, including 55 utilities and 27 data center developers.
- A gravel road stretches through the area where the Stratos Project, a proposed data center, will be built in Box Elder County near Snowville, Utah.
- DeWine’s office cited the rising utilization of the tax break and the state Legislature’s new research undertaking to declare a “pause” in granting it to new applicants.
- The facilities house the servers powering the AI products sold by Big Tech companies and leading AI startups like Anthropic and OpenAI.
- But AI’s increasing ability to perform basic tasks — such as driving, analyzing spreadsheets and writing software — also potentially threatens millions of jobs.
Pushback from lawmakers, governors
But outside of city limits, counties — where a large number of the proposed data centers plan to build — have little power to control where or how projects are built. “All of us met at the water, and that’s what brought us here,” said Randi Finn, who was running a childcare station at the protest for parents who wanted to testify against the center. Inside, residents told council members over an eight-hour meeting to reject the zoning change needed for the project to move forward.
A supporter holds a sign for Democratic candidate for Texas governor Gina Hinojosa while she speaks during a rally, Saturday, July 18, 2026, in Lubbock, Texas. The opposition has spread into the Republican stronghold of rural Texas and led to frustration with Gov. Greg Abbott, who is now among the 23 Republican governors who signed Trump’s nonbinding pledge. Data center companies say their facilities help to generate tax revenues for school districts and reduce property tax burdens for homeowners. Voters are worried about the environmental impact, use of AI in schools and the prospect of data centers making their communities more https://investnews24.net/how-to-choose-a-cloud-service-for-data-storage.html expensive and less livable. The site of a future data center being built near Abernathy, Texas, Saturday, July 18, 2026, in Hale County, Texas. But AI’s increasing ability to perform basic tasks — such as driving, analyzing spreadsheets and writing software — also potentially threatens millions of jobs.
Some states move to ban data centers
Now, an increasing number of local lawmakers are backing them up, issuing restrictions, imposing moratoriums, or outright banning construction. Others, including consumer advocates, warned that it won’t lower electric bills and that PJM should instead pursue a “bring your own generation” requirement for data centers to, in essence, build https://www.inrecognition.org/how-can-businesses-leverage-cloud-computing/ their own power source. The CEO of the Southwest Power Pool, which operates the grid that serves 18 million people primarily in Kansas, Oklahoma and other Great Plains states, said it has no choice but to expand power-reduction programs — likely for the biggest power users — to meet growing demand. A proposal similar to Texas’ has emerged from the nation’s biggest grid operator, PJM Interconnection, which runs the mid-Atlantic grid that serves 65 million people and data-center hotspots in Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania. That’s because grids can’t keep up with the fast-growing number of data center projects unfolding in Texas and perhaps 20 other states as the U.S. competes in a race against China for artificial intelligence superiority.
Capital markets evolution demonstrates sector maturation
- The opposition has spread into the Republican stronghold of rural Texas and led to frustration with Gov. Greg Abbott, who is now among the 23 Republican governors who signed Trump’s nonbinding pledge.
- As the debate over data centers grows in Oklahoma, cities in at least seven other states have taken action to pause or prohibit development amidst concerns about water use and the impact on residents’ electric bills.
- “Fayette County is a suburb, it’s mostly residential, and we don’t have much commercial meters in our system anyway,” she said.
- I don’t get anything out of this.’ And I think people are a little freaked out by AI.
- Major hyperscalers and leading operators have achieved carbon-neutral data center operations through comprehensive renewable energy procurement, demonstrating how sustainability mandates increasingly drive location decisions, facility design and operational strategies.”
In Asia-Pacific data center news, Malaysia’s palm oil companies are setting aside vast tracts of land for new AI data center construction. The 22.5 MW site will channel water using Direct Liquid Cooling technology into the district heating network. Further north, atNorth has reached an agreement with Vestforbrænding to use excess heat from its DEN01 facility for heating over 8,000 homes in Denmark by 2028.
- A study from the University of Michigan found the construction of data centers raises utility rates for nearby residents and small businesses.
- Large datacenters, some the size of small towns, can require up to 5m gallons of water a day, equivalent to the water use of up to 50,000 people, in order to provide cooling to arrays of humming networked computers.
- A Business Insider investigation published last week found 1,416 data centers already built or approved for construction across 45 states and Washington, DC, in 2025.
- Overall, the multiplying datacenters across the US are set to demand as much as 73bn gallons of water a year by 2028, up from about 17bn gallons in 2023.
Some of that cost could be added on top of what researchers found are already rising electric bills for Texas power customers — residential consumers currently pay more of those costs than industrial ones. “That’s what I’m hearing a lot of people are feeling, and some of that’s just because this technology is so new. These unlovely warehouses of supercomputers are the physical infrastructure upon which artificial intelligence is built. Fengqi You, a professor of energy-systems engineering, told me that concerns about energy supply “are not to be dismissed.” But here, too, You stressed, “location really matters.” Plenty https://www.yaldex.com/Bestsoft/Desktop_Enhancements/earthview.htm of places where data centers are being built have more electrical supply than they currently use. And the people who fill them, Bahar told me, tend to be locals, not new residents drawn from afar.