The United States is home to more than 5,000 active data centers — more than any country in the world — and thousands more are in various stages of planning and construction. They are quiet, they don’t smoke, and they pour tax revenue into local coffers. For years, that was enough to make them welcome almost anywhere.
That welcome is wearing thin.
“The backlash has really cropped up, especially in the last 12 months or so,” says David Rubenstein, an attorney at Polsinelli, where his practice concentrates on commercial real estate with a specialized focus on data center development. “Before that, communities were generally pretty happy to have data centers enter nearby because they’re usually pretty quiet, low impact, they don’t produce a lot of pollution like other industrial uses, and they tend to bring a lot of tax revenue to the community.”
What changed, Rubenstein says, is visibility. Communities began looking at places such as Northern Vir
