Evan Halper

What's happening now is these companies are just building all over the country because they need to build wherever they can find enough power and enough water for their data centers.

They'll talk to development officials, they'll talk to community politicians, but they'll make them sign non-disclosure agreements.

And so people in the community find out that their community leaders have been negotiating in secret with some giant tech company that they don't even know the name of for years leading up to this.

And it's leading to quite a significant backlash across the political divide.

The people in the community told me they only found out about this when suddenly a sign went up on this rural property that's surrounded by ranches and there's really no industrial uses nearby that said there's a proposed rezoning on it and that the city wanted to rezone it from agriculture use to industrial use.

And a lot of people who live around there in that community are livid over this.

They're saying, you know, this was unincorporated land.

We moved out to this part of the county because there's not development here.

The amount of projects that were blocked in, I think it was just one quarter of last year, was like double of everything the two years leading up to it.

Something close to $90 billion of planned data center development was derailed by planning commissions and city officials voting things down because they're just under tremendous pressure from their constituents.

And the industry is still trying to sort this out.