$64 Billion In Data Center Projects Have Already Been Blocked Or Delayed.
TL;DR: $64 billion in U.S. data center projects have been blocked or delayed by a growing wave of local, bipartisan opposition. What was once quiet infrastructure is now a national flashpoint — and communities are pushing back.
Report Objective: This report catalogs and analyzes the rise in local opposition to data center projects across the United States. It focuses on projects blocked or delayed over the past two years amid permitting or regulatory challenges, primarily driven by organized activist groups.
Note: This report highlights political risks and local opposition as frequent factors in data center project delays or cancellations, including community resistance, environmental concerns, and zoning issues. However, attributing delays exclusively to these factors oversimplifies a complex landscape.
Data center projects are influenced by multiple intertwined elements—regulatory compliance, infrastructure readiness, utility availability, economic incentives, and broader market dynamics. Each project’s circumstances must be individually assessed to fully understand the combination of forces causing delays or obstructions.
Research Timeline: May 2024 – March 2025.
If you’re gonna be involved in this issue, or just want to keep up to speed, reading this report is an absolute must.
So. Let’s talk about this Public Meeting on Thursday. Starwood is gonna be there. Starwood is a huge real estate company that contracts with those seeking locations for these data centers. They are not above basically promising local politicos that they’ll get whatever they want in exchange for their support. And delivering. Take Oregon, for example.
When one of the world’s biggest technology companies set up shop in one of Oregon’s smallest counties, it turned to a tiny fiber-optic provider to connect its data centers to the internet.
The obscure nonprofit was founded two decades earlier to hook up Morrow County schools and hospitals to the information superhighway. Suddenly, it found itself providing the same service to Amazon.
Amazon has spent more than $8 billion over the past 10 years building four hulking, windowless server farms along the Columbia River at the Port of Morrow. Civic officials lured Amazon with tax breaks worth nearly $50 million a year, a bonanza for one of the world’s wealthiest companies from a community with just 12,000 residents.
And a bonanza for a few of the public officials, too, as it turned out.
As Amazon solicited elected leaders time and again for tax breaks to fuel multiple expansions, that tiny nonprofit quietly sold its now potentially very lucrative fiber-optic business.
The buyers? Some of the same leaders who had negotiated the tax deals for Amazon – including two of the nonprofit board’s own members.
Some are now crying foul. With new tax breaks, Amazon promises to expand, requiring more fiber-optic services. Some of the very people who negotiated with Amazon now stand to profit from the increased business.
“They set themselves up for a windfall,” said Morrow County Commissioner Jim Doherty. “I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that we would have crafted stauncher deals to begin with had it not been for three or four of these folks who were working these deals, and working these deals behind the scenes.”
Speaker Mimi and Nicole Poore would never sell their public offices any more than they already have…would they? Will they make sure that DNREC and the County, at least, also attend? Or is this just about allowing Starwood to schmooze the public? If you’re going on Thursday, please let us know how this goes. Perhaps DOJ should attend. Because, if for no other reason, here’s what the Oregon DOJ concluded:
The Oregon Department of Justice says officials in Morrow County bought a fiber-optic business from a local nonprofit at a lowball price, improperly capitalizing on Amazon’s booming data center business in the small community and generating a windfall for themselves.
“You have people in this situation who knew that this company was undervalued and sold it to themselves and misled folks for personal gain,” said Attorney General Dan Rayfield.
Tuesday’s litigation follows a three-year investigation by the Department of Justice, which was triggered by a 2022 report by The Oregonian/OregonLive that scrutinized public officials’ dealings in Morrow County.
A Respite From Gloom And Doom. Two excellent, and at least vaguely optimistic, think pieces for those who, you know, think:
As I noted two weeks ago, my late friend Armin Lehmann was there when he gave Hitler the information that the war was lost. He stood outside Hitler’s door when he shot himself. He wrote a book about it, and told me that Hitler wanted Germany destroyed by the Allies because the German people, he believed, had “let him down.”
This is “narcissistic collapse,” which I’ve written about several times over the past dozen or so years. Donald Trump is almost certainly going to hit this state of mind (he’s already close), and many of his “true believer” followers are in the midst of their own personal narcissistic collapses right now.
And that is what makes this a very dangerous moment for America.
Suing Rupert Murdoch, for example, was an extraordinarily reckless and dangerous thing for Trump to do. Newscorp isn’t going to roll over and pay Trump a bribe, in all probability, because he needs them more than they need him.
Murdoch, after all, is the guy who created the cult that Trump has come to dominate: they’re called “Fox News viewers.” He created it long before Donald Trump came along: he and Roger Ailes simply let Donald Trump into it back in 2015 because he was good for ratings and thus increased profits.
It’s a long, but fascinating, piece. I learned something.
Josh Marshall On Trump, Public Opinion, And Elections:
I wanted to take a moment today to highlight something that to me, at least, is behind a certain uncanny quality to the summer of 2025. Two things, which point in two entirely different directions, are happening at the same time. Every day you can find in the news a new example of the president cutting funding (either by legal or extra-legal means) or asserting direct control over funding in order to entrench his direct personal power. This might be defunding universities, ending funding of public broadcasting, or anything in between. He’s now opened criminal probes into numerous public officials. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) continues to expand its war not only against the undocumented and legal residents but also against self-government in major American (blue) cities. I could mention dozens of other examples but the simplest overview is that the president continues to expand and entrench his authoritarian vision of rule, in which the whole machinery of government exists to impose his will and battle his enemies, with courts that are mostly but not always compliant.
At the same time, the public rejection of these policies has grown in jaunty tandem with Trump’s grinding opposition to them. He and his policies are now extraordinarily unpopular, with quality polls now frequently showing disapproval in the high fifties and support in the very low forties.
It’s one of my governing beliefs that you can’t transform a state like the American republic from a civic democracy to an autocracy or competitive authoritarianism if a substantial majority of the population opposes it. And there’s no question that substantial opposition is what we’re seeing.
Perhaps this will reverse what I suspected and what my dental hygienist confirmed yesterday: I’m grinding my teeth again for the first time since Our PAL Val ushered me out of the General Assembly in 2008. I need an optimistic spin every once in a while.
Trump In Deflection Mode. MLK Papers. Restore Football Team’s Racist Monicker. The old switcharoo ain’t workin’ like it used to.
Will Christina School Board’s Man In Pakistan Resign? He promised to, but hasn’t:
In June, Christina School District Board President Donald Patton announced that his fellow embattled board member Naveed Baqir would resign from his position with the district on July 15.
As of July 21, the district has not announced that Baqir, who was elected to a five-year term in 2021 but has been living in Pakistan for the past year and a half, has resigned or whether he even intends to do so. Neither Baqir or Patton responded to questions emailed to them by Spotlight Delaware regarding the announced resignation date.
District officials have also not posted a resignation or vacancy notice to their website. And the district’s new board president, Monica Moriak, said in a statement to Spotlight Delaware that she has not been informed of an official resignation.
Moriak added that she reached out to Baqir about “his intentions,” but did not receive a response as of Monday.
All I can say is: What a scuzzball.
What do you want to talk about?