The AI industry is building at a pace that has no historical precedent. The five largest US cloud and infrastructure providers have committed to spending nearly $700 billion in capital expenditures this year alone, almost double what they spent in 2025. The Stargate Project, OpenAI's joint venture with SoftBank and Oracle, has pledged $500 billion over four years. And last week, Anthropic announced it would lease the entire Colossus 1 data center from SpaceX, gaining access to more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs and 300 megawatts of compute capacity. Competitors leasing infrastructure from competitors. The ambition is staggering.

But on the ground, the picture looks different. More than 100 communities across the US have enacted data center moratoriums. Over 300 state data center bills were filed in the first six weeks of 2026. In March, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced the AI Data Center Moratorium Act, calling for a full national pause on construction. And $64 billion worth of data center projects have been blocked or delayed by local opposition. The collision between "build everything" and "build nothing here" is playing out in county commission meetings, state legislatures, and Congress. This week, it landed in rural Utah.

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