The data center fight is going global | Waging Nonviolence
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At a march organized by Pause AI and Pull the Plug, hundreds protest artificial intelligence outside of Google Deepmind’s offices in London on Feb. 28, 2026. (Getty/Justin Tallis)
At a march organized by Pause AI and Pull the Plug, hundreds protest artificial intelligence outside of Google Deepmind’s offices in London on Feb. 28, 2026. (Getty/Justin Tallis)
Earlier this year, Gallup asked a national sample of Americans whether they would support an AI data center being built in their local area. Seventy-one percent opposed it, 48 percent of them strongly. Opposition to living near a nuclear power plant was markedly lower, at 53 percent. Republicans, Democrats and independents all rejected data centers. Asked why, respondents most often pointed to environmental concerns: water, energy, land use, noise and air pollution — and the lack of community consent.
At Social Change Lab we recently ran a randomized controlled trial with 3,467 participants to answer a question the AI accountability movement has been wrestling with: Which of AI’s many harms actually move people from concern to action? We tested 11 different arguments, from environmental effects to job losses and the harms of algorithmic bias; from AI enabling more pervasive surveillance to the risk of superintelligent AI leading to human extinction.
The results showed that AI’s environmental impacts were the strongest predictor of willingness to act. Job displacement — the issue people mention most unprompted, ranked much lower. Extinction risk came last. And the emotion most strongly associated with action was not fear or anxiety, but anger.
Previous Coverage<br>The data center backlash that’s uniting America
These findings should concentrate the minds of climate organizers and funders alike. Data centers have become a focal point for public anger not just over AI but over climate policy around the world. Unlike abstract metrics such as “CO2 parts per million,” every data center is tangible; it requires a planning application, a zoning decision, a water permit and elected officials willing to approve — or reject — it. These local decisions create concrete opportunities for organizing.
In the United States, the movement to halt data centers has grown with remarkable speed: The New York State Assembly recently passed what could become the country’s first statewide moratorium; Seattle became the largest American city to adopt one after residents generated more than 96,000 emails to the city council; and more than 500 organizations from 47 states have joined the Stop Data Centers Coalition.
"Concerns about data centers are agitating even people who have never taken a public stand on any issue before,” Deeda Seed of the Center for Biological Diversity told Waging Nonviolence in June. “They’re willing to take a stand on this.”
But the movement is growing far beyond the United States. In fact, one of the clearest victories so far came in a Dutch town that few people outside the Netherlands had heard of before 2021.
The case of Zeewolde
In February 2021, Meta proposed building a 200-megawatt hyperscale data center on 410 acres of reclaimed farmland outside Zeewolde, a town of just over 22,000 people. It would have consumed at least twice as much electricity as the town itself. Residents, farmers and Extinction Rebellion campaigners objected not just to the scale of the project, but to the secrecy surrounding it. Officials had spent two years negotiating with Meta while keeping the company’s identity out of the public record, and many residents felt scarce renewable energy was being handed to a foreign corporation for little local benefit.
The campaign worked on two fronts at once. Locally, they plastered posters on the town hall, organized a residents’ petition and waged nonviolent direct action. Days before the December vote, 20 Extinction Rebellion activists occupied the council building’s public hall with banners reading "We want Greta, not Meta," until police cleared them out. Nationally, allies in The Hague were pressing a different lever. Part of the land Meta needed belonged to the state, and motions in both chambers of parliament urged ministers to use that leverage.
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Campaigners lost the first vote when the council approved the project in December 2021. But they won almost everything that followed. Within months the Dutch government imposed a moratorium on new hyperscale developments; local elections delivered a council majority to the anti-data center Leefbaar Zeewolde Party; the Dutch Senate blocked the sale of the government-owned land Meta needed; and by July 2022 the company had abandoned the project. The Netherlands subsequently restricted hyperscale facilities over 70 megawatts to just two designated sites.
In Zeewolde the fight was against a single project. In Ireland...