With Labor Day behind us and general election voting weeks away, the data center fight is entering a new phase. Over the past year, the most visible opposition-driven conflicts have played out locally: before county commissions, city councils, planning boards, and zoning authorities, where individual projects are proposed, permitted, delayed, or stopped.

While statehouses have made some noise this year, we expect 2027 to be the more consequential state-policy cycle, not because the issue will leave local government, but because legislators will return with a fuller record of local disputes and lessons from the first wave of 2026 bills. However, local opposition and local permitting fights will continue, and, in some markets, intensify, as additional projects move from announcement into the approval process.

  • County activity, already high, is the ongoing threat. Three hundred twenty nine  counties now have restrictions on the books. That is roughly one in ten nationally. Another 1,001 counties sit adjacent to one that has passed restrictions or moratoriums, and in 180 of those cases the adjacent county is just across a state line. Contagion is the mechanism to watch; it moves by ordinance template and neighboring-jurisdiction example, not by statute. You can see this in real time in central North Carolina, where Cary, Durham, Durham County, Apex, Wendell and Chatham County have all adopted pauses within months of one another, and in Palm Beach County’s (Florida) unanimous first vote on a one-year moratorium set for final action September 24, 2026.  That follows several other Florida counties that have already enacted pauses or moratoria.
  • States are talking far more than they are acting. We tracked 84 bills that would restrict data centers, and only eight have become law. Of the 84, 42 have finished their run; most died quietly at sine die, lost on the floor, or were vetoed. Even the marquee wins came hard: Maine’s first-in-the-nation statewide moratorium was passed and then vetoed by Gov. Mills, and New York’s one-year permitting pause was a negotiated compromise, not the original bill. High introduction volume is a leading indicator, not an outcome.
  • When opponents engage legislation, they mostly want rules, not a single “no.” Of roughly 1,000 tracked actions, 56 percent push for county- or town-wide rules, moratoria, zoning limits, study requirements, and only 41 percent target a specific development. This is a durable, structural risk. A moratorium adopted to “study impacts” outlives the project that triggered it, and it frequently gets extended, as Solon Township, Michigan just did in stretching six months to a full year.

Expect 2027 to be the heavy year at the state level. Sponsors are already prefiling, a Nashville Democrat has announced a three-year freeze on data center tax exemptions for Tennessee’s 2027 session, and legislators are returning with committee-vetted language, interim study findings, and a year of local ordinances to copy from.

And as states get serious, it follows. The House Energy and Commerce Committee advanced the Ratepayer Protection Act 52-0 and has continued to hold hearings on data center water use and system upgrades. The flank bills tell you where this is heading: Rep. Barrett’s Protecting Local Control of Data Centers Act would bar federal preemption of local siting authority, and Sen. Sanders has filed a national AI data center moratorium.

The practical takeaway for siting and risk management: screen at the county level and at the county-adjacent level, treat rule-making campaigns as more consequential than project-specific groups, and build a 2027 statehouse plan now rather than in January.

Please let us know if Hawthorn can provide data-based intelligence on your projects or investments, state or county-level restriction and adjacency screens, opposition mapping, or a full-service public affairs programs at the state and local level.  You can respond to this email or call me at 703-299-4499.

Best,
Jefferson Freeman
VP of Research, Hawthorn Group