The Invisible Trillion · The Legal Weapons

When the Locals Push Back

Say a community sees it coming anyway, organizes, and persuades its officials to vote the project down. Two things tend to happen next.

The first is that the fight moves to the state capitol. In 2025, West Virginia passed a law cutting local governments’ power to zone and regulate data centers and their microgrids — the legislative equivalent of taking the decision out of the town’s hands entirely. A similar bill in New Hampshire was defeated in May of 2026. These pre-emption bills are the industry’s answer to the one thing that has reliably worked for residents: winning locally. A single company can fund lobbyists and circulate model legislation across many states at once; the residents of one town cannot. The bills are often bundled with provisions that sound good on their own — workforce training, tax-sharing — which makes the pre-emption clause harder to oppose without appearing to oppose the popular parts.

The second thing that happens is the lawsuit. Here the clearest case is Saline Township, Michigan, a community of fewer than three thousand people outside Ann Arbor. In September 2025, after impassioned public comment, the township board voted four to one to reject rezoning 575 acres of farmland for a data center. It was exactly what the residents wanted.

Two days later, the developer sued.

The claim was “exclusionary zoning” — the argument that Saline had unreasonably barred a legitimate use, which under Michigan law a community isn’t allowed to do. It leaned on a technicality: the township had no land zoned for industrial use at all, and a data center, the suit argued, was a “necessary” use that couldn’t simply be excluded everywhere.

The township’s lawyers told the board the hard truth. A drawn-out fight would drain the town’s budget; even if they somehow won, the developer could route around local zoning entirely by partnering with the University of Michigan, which can build on a different legal footing than a private firm. And they pointed to a $50 million judgment another Michigan community had taken in a zoning dispute as a warning of what losing could cost.

So Saline settled. The consent judgment, signed that October, won the residents some real concessions — a 55-decibel noise limit, no water-hungry evaporative cooling, no future expansion, money for farmland preservation. But the data center is being built, and it later emerged that the site would be leased largely to OpenAI and Oracle as part of the federal “Stargate” initiative. Developers filed a similar suit against Chatham County, North Carolina. The lesson other small towns are meant to draw is not subtle: opposition is expensive, and the people on the other side can afford the expense better than you can.

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