Will Parker

A similar bill in South Dakota though already failed.

So many of those bills probably won't go anywhere.

The expectation in the industry though, is that some of them do end up passing in some form.

And we've seen local governments like counties and towns enact their own

temporary suspensions of data center construction.

And we'll probably continue to see more of that.

As data center developers look across the country for new areas to expand, these kind of rules proposed or real and swelling community opposition kind of shrinks the map of where they are likely to try to go and do business.

So it's a mounting concern for data center developers.

If this snowballs and starts to affect bigger states, I think you'll see much more of a response to that.

I think it might.

I think it shows momentum.

You know, the polling on voter opinions of data centers and AI is increasingly negative.

And I think you're likely to see more politicians try to respond to that with various legislative proposals for the time being.

The big data center hotspots in the U.S.

are Northern Virginia, but also Georgia, especially areas south of Atlanta, and Texas around the greater Dallas area, and the Midwest is also a big area.

Illinois has a big boom in data center construction.

So it's only in a handful of places where it's super, super active, but in those places, it's the dominant form of development right now.

I think it'd be difficult to draw any direct connection to housing prices, but when you think about the housing supply, it's clear that in some of these areas that we're talking about, where you're seeing land that was either zoned for residential, flipping over to data centers, or it's the kind of land that would be attractive to a housing developer if they could buy it and rezone it for housing.

to the extent that those instead become data centers, that limits the future pipeline of supply of homes and means that the future supply is lower than it might be otherwise.

The scale at which that is becoming a problem is not something we have a good sense of, but we do know that more and more land is turning over from residential to data center use.