SPRING CITY, Pa. (AP) — Tech companies and developers looking to plunge billions of dollars into ever-bigger data centers to power artificial intelligence and cloud computing are increasingly losing fights in communities where people don’t want to live next to them, or even near them.

Communities across the United States are reading about — and learning from — each other’s battles against data center proposals that are fast multiplying in number and size to meet steep demand as developers branch out in search of faster connections to power sources.

In many cases, municipal boards are trying to figure out whether energy- and water-hungry data centers fit into their zoning framework. Some have entertained waivers or tried to write new ordinances. Some don’t have zoning.

But as more people hear about a data center coming to their community, once-sleepy municipal board meetings in farming towns and growing suburbs now feature crowded rooms of angry residents pressuring local officials to reject the requests.

“Would you want this built in your backyard?” Larry Shank asked supervisors last month in Pennsylvania’s East Vincent Township. “Because that’s where it’s literally going, is in my backyard.”

Opposition spreads as data centers fan out

A growing number of proposals are going down in defeat, sounding alarms across the data center constellation of Big Tech firms, real estate developers, electric utilities, labor unions and more.

Andy Cvengros, who helps lead the data center practice at commercial real estate giant JLL, counted seven or eight deals he’d worked on in recent months that saw opponents going door-to-door, handing out shirts or putting signs in people’s yards.

“It’s becoming a huge problem,” Cvengros said.

Data Center Watch, a project of 10a Labs, an AI security consultancy, said it is seeing a sharp escalation in community, political and regulatory disruptions to data center development.

Between April and June alone, its latest reporting period, it counted 20 proposals valued at $98 billion in 11 states that were blocked or delayed amid local opposition and state-level pushback. That amounts to two-thirds of the projects it was tracking.

Some environmental and consumer advocacy groups say they’re fielding calls every day, and are working to educate communities on how to protect themselves.

“I’ve been doing this work for 16 years, worked on hundreds of campaigns I’d guess, and this by far is the biggest kind of local pushback I’ve ever seen here in Indiana,” said Bryce Gustafson of the Indianapolis-based Citizens Action Coalition.

In Indiana alone, Gustafson counted more than a dozen projects that lost rezoning petitions.

Similar concerns across different communities

For some people angry over steep increases in electric bills, their patience is thin for data centers that could bring still-higher increases.

Losing open space, farmland, forest or rural character is a big concern. So is the damage to quality of life, property values or health by on-site diesel generators kicking on or the constant hum of servers. Others worry that wells and aquifers could run dry.

Lawsuits are flying — both ways — over whether local governments violated their own rules.

Big Tech firms Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook — which are collectively spending hundreds of billions of dollars on data centers across the globe — didn’t answer Associated Press questions about the effect of community pushback.

Microsoft, however, has acknowledged the difficulties. In an October securities filing, it listed its operational risks as including “community opposition, local moratoriums, and hyper-local dissent that may impede or delay infrastructure development.”

Even with high-level support from state and federal governments, the pushback is having an impact.

Maxx Kossof, vice president of investment at Chicago-based developer The Missner Group, said developers worried about losing a zoning fight are considering selling properties once they secure a power source — a highly sought-after commodity that makes a proposal far more viable and valuable.

“You might as well take chips off the table,” Kossof said. “The thing is you could have power to a site and it’s futile because you might not get the zoning. You might not get the community support.”

Some in the industry are frustrated, saying opponents are spreading falsehoods about data centers — such as polluting water and air — and are difficult to overcome.

Still, data center allies say they are urging developers to engage with the public earlier in the process, emphasize economic benefits, sow good will by supporting community initiatives and talk up efforts to conserve water and power and protect ratepayers.

“It’s definitely a discussion that the industry is having internally about, ‘Hey, how do we do a better job of community engagement?’” said Dan Diorio of the Data Center Coalition, a trade association that includes Big Tech firms and developers.

Data center opposition dominates local politics

Winning over local officials, however, hasn’t translated to winning over residents.

Developers pulled a project off an October agenda in the Charlotte suburb of Matthews, North Carolina, after Mayor John Higdon said he informed them it faced unanimous defeat.

The project would have funded half the city’s budget and developers promised environmentally friendly features. But town meetings overflowed, and emails, texts and phone calls were overwhelmingly opposed, “999 to one against,” Higdon said.

Had council approved it, “every person that voted for it would no longer be in office,” the mayor said. “That’s for sure.”

In Hermantown, a suburb of Duluth, Minnesota, a proposed data center campus several times larger than the Mall of America is on hold amid challenges over whether the city’s environmental review was adequate.

Residents found each other through social media and, from there, learned to organize, protest, door-knock and get their message out.

They say they felt betrayed and lied to when they discovered that state, county, city and utility officials knew about the proposal for an entire year before the city — responding to a public records request filed by the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy — released internal emails that confirmed it.

“It’s the secrecy. The secrecy just drives people crazy,” said Jonathan Thornton, a realtor who lives across a road from the site.

Documents revealing the extent of the project emerged days before a city rezoning vote in October. Mortenson, which is developing it for a Fortune 50 company that it hasn’t named, says it is considering changes based on public feedback and that “more engagement with the community is appropriate.”

Rebecca Gramdorf found out about it from a Duluth newspaper article, and immediately worried that it would spell the end of her six-acre vegetable farm.

She found other opponents online, ordered 100 yard signs and prepared for a struggle.

“I don’t think this fight is over at all,” Gramdorf said.

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Follow Marc Levy on X at https://x.com/timelywriter.

Families who lost loved ones in the 2022 attack on an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, have sought for nearly four years to hold accountable the police who waited more than an hour to confront the shooter while children and teachers lay dead or wounded in classrooms.

Now one of the first officers on the scene is about to stand trial on multiple charges of child abandonment and endangerment. Former Uvalde schools police officer Adrian Gonzales is accused of ignoring his training in a crisis with deadly consequences. His attorney insists he was focused on helping children escape from the building.

The trial that starts Monday offers potentially one of the last chances to see police answer for the long delay. The families have pinned their hopes on the jury after their gun-control efforts were rejected by lawmakers, and their lawsuits remain unresolved. A few parents ran for political office to seek change, with mixed results.

The proceedings will provide a rare example of an officer being criminally charged with not doing more to stop a crime and protect lives.

Jesse Rizo’s niece was one of 19 children and two teachers killed by the teenage gunman in one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history. Nine-year-old Jackie Cazares still had a pulse when rescuers finally reached her, Rizo said.

“It really bothers us a lot that maybe she could have lived,” he said.

Only two of the 376 officers from local, state and federal agencies on the scene have been charged — a fact that haunts Velma Lisa Duran, whose sister, Irma Garcia, was one of the teachers gunned down.

“What about the other 374?” Duran asked through tears. “They all waited and allowed children and teachers to die.”

The charges reflect the dead and wounded children, but not her sister’s death or that of the other teacher who was killed.

“Where is the justice in that?” Duran asked. “Did she not exist?”

Prosecutors will likely face a high bar to win a conviction. Juries are often reluctant to convict law enforcement officers for inaction, as seen after the Parkland, Florida, school massacre in 2018.

Sheriff’s deputy Scot Peterson was charged with failing to confront the shooter in that attack. It was the first such prosecution in the U.S. for an on-campus shooting, and Peterson was acquitted by a jury in 2023.

The attack, the delay and the indictments

Police and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott initially said swift law enforcement action killed Uvalde gunman Salvador Ramos and saved lives. But that version quickly unraveled as families described begging police to go into the building and 911 calls emerged from students pleading for help.

The reality was that 77 minutes passed from the time officers first arrived until a tactical team breached the classroom and killed Ramos.

Multiple reports from state and federal officials cataloged cascading problems in law enforcement training, communication, leadership and technology, and they questioned whether officers prioritized their own lives over those of the children and teachers.

Gonzales was charged two years later in an indictment that alleged he placed children in “imminent danger” of injury or death by failing to engage, distract or delay the gunman and by not following his active shooter training.

The indictment said he did not advance toward the gunfire despite hearing shots and being told where the shooter was.

The only other officer to be charged is former Uvalde schools Police Chief Pete Arredondo. His trial on similar charges has not yet been set.

Uvalde County District Attorney Christina Mitchell did not respond to requests from The Associated Press for comment on the indictments or whether a grand jury considered charging other officers.

According to a report by state lawmakers, Gonzales was among the first officers in the building. They heard gunfire and retreated without firing a shot after Ramos shot at them.

Gonzales told investigators he later helped break windows to remove students from other classrooms.

“He was focused on getting children out of that building,” said Gonzales’ attorney, Nico LaHood, a former district attorney and prosecutor in San Antonio. “He knows where his heart was and what he tried to do for those children.”

The trial was moved from Uvalde to Corpus Christi, 200 miles away, after defense attorneys and prosecutors agreed a change of venue would be the best way to find an impartial jury.

A divided community

In Uvalde, a city of about 15,000 people, the Robb Elementary building is still standing, but it’s empty. A memorial of 21 white crosses and flowers sits in front of the school sign. Another memorial is displayed at a downtown water fountain plaza. Murals of the victims cover walls on buildings around town.

Craig Garnett, owner and publisher of the Uvalde Leader-News newspaper, said people who were not directly affected by the attack “have found it pretty easy to move forward.”

Garnett also believes getting the trial out of Uvalde was a good move for the city.

“The community was terribly divided in the aftermath,” he said. If the trial were held there, “you would have so many opportunities to inflame things.”

Some victims’ parents sought political office but with little success.

Javier Cazares, Jackie’s father, ran unsuccessfully in 2022 for the Uvalde County Commission as a write-in candidate on a platform that called for more rigorous police training. Kimberly Mata-Rubio, whose daughter Lexi was killed, made a bid for mayor in her memory in 2023 but lost.

Rizo, who won a seat on the school board in 2024, agreed that many Uvalde residents have moved on from May 24, 2022. He finds that maddening.

“I hear, ‘They tried the best they could’ and ‘Do you blame them? Would you have taken a bullet?’” Rizo said. “It angers me and frustrates me.”

Uvalde has a strong tradition of supporting law enforcement. Two of the people killed came from law enforcement families.

Mata-Rubio’s husband was a sheriff’s deputy who went to the school after the attack started. The other teacher killed, Eva Mireles, was married to one of the first officers to enter the building.

Families pursued multiple paths for justice

The families have sought justice through multiple legal paths. Federal and state lawsuits have been filed against law enforcement, a gun manufacturer, a video game company and the Meta social media company over the shooting. Those cases are still pending.

The families reached a $2 million settlement with the city that promised higher standards and better training for police.

Relatives also lobbied state and federal lawmakers for stricter gun control laws that never advanced. But earlier this year, Texas lawmakers passed the Uvalde Strong Act, which sets new requirements for active shooter training and shooting response plans for police and schools.

Duran wants accountability not just for her sister but also for a beloved brother-in-law who died two days after the shooting.

Irma’s husband, Joe, was watching a television report on the shooting when he heard that authorities missed their chance to end the attack quickly. He immediately fell to the floor with an apparent heart attack, Duran said.

The conviction of a single officer out of almost 400 would bring little in the way of justice, Duran said.

“The only justice is going to be when they take their final breath,” she said. “And then God will judge them.”