Building data centers is broadly unpopular across the political spectrum, but so far, banning new development is a mostly metropolitan area phenomenon. While more data centers are located in metropolitan areas than nonmetropolitan ones, two-thirds of all new facilities are planned for rural communities. The rural data center boom comes amidst rising backlash to the facilities. Earlier this year, my colleague Sarah Melotte and I…

Better backup power system aids storm recovery

Washington, D.C.’s metropolitan area has long hummed with data centers. The region, which encompasses much of Northern Virginia, has become known as Data Center Alley, home to more data centers than anywhere else in the world. But the data center boom, driven by the rise of AI and the race to build the infrastructure powering it, is changing the geography of these energy-intensive, warehouse-like facilities.

The Illinois General Assembly’s 2026 session wrapped up without advancing the POWER Act, a bill that proposes regulation on data centers. On June 5, 2026, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker announced a pause on new data center tax incentives and directed the General Assembly to revisit the data center issue during their veto session later this year. Data center development has recently ramped up in the state’s…

On a Monday night in late April, nearly 100 people gathered in a public library conference room in Bloomington, Illinois. Sipping on seltzer water and snacking on granola bars, the crowd’s focus was on a projector screen, where a title slide read, “Let’s Talk Data Centers!” A few of the event-goers had brought notebooks, their pens poised to take notes during the presentation.

When central Illinois farmer Steve Hess found out that his community had won a fight against Navigator CO2 Ventures, a Dallas, Texas-based company building a pipeline to transport carbon dioxide across the region for storage underground, he threw a party. “It was exhilarating,” he said, about the 2023 win against the Black Rock-backed pipeline where local opposition “knocked down Goliath.” …

On a crisp afternoon in early April 2026, Richard Davis walked to the end of a boat launch on the Back River, a tidal channel that cuts through Midcoast Maine’s rocky coastline. As the tide swept in, Davis, co-founder of a local group called Protect Wiscasset and an area resident, fixed his attention on the opposite riverbank. There, a 300-acre parcel of land, mostly covered by evergreen trees, is the subject of a decades-long debate that’s sparked questions about land use, energy, and local control in the town of Wiscasset, a community in Maine’s rural Lincoln County with a year-round population of 4,000 residents.

Maine Governor Janet Mills vetoed a bill on Friday, April 24, 2026, to impose an 18-month moratorium on data centers with electricity loads of 20 megawatts or more. If passed, LD 307 would have been the first temporary state-level ban on data centers in the country. Mills’ decision is a departure from her Democratic party colleagues in the state legislature, who…

The Maine Senate took a final vote on April 14, 2026, to enact first-of-its-kind legislation banning large data centers in the state until November 2027. The bill, LD 307, puts a moratorium on data centers with power needs of 20 megawatts or more, stymying proposed developments in several parts of the state, including in the rural mill town of Jay in Western Maine and at the former Loring Air Force Base in rural Limestone, Maine, near the Canadian border.

In the early 2000s, Lori McKiernan worked in a data center outside Denver, Colorado, for a stint during her career with United Airlines. Two decades later, she’s leading an organized effort to pause data center development where she now lives in Sangamon County, Illinois. This new crop of data centers, which are springing up around rural America to power artificial intelligence, is different, McKiernan said.

When local officials in rural Wiscasset, Maine, voted on November 4, 2025, to pause a data center discussion in the community of around 4,000 year-round residents, it may have been a sign of what’s to come. As the nationwide expansion of data centers arrives in New England, questions about electricity prices, grid reliability, and impact on water resources are forcing elected leaders to pump the brakes.

Maine lawmakers are considering a bill requiring oil and gas companies to pay for the recovery costs of climate-related disasters.

In September 2025, my colleague Ilana Newman and I canoed 50 nautical miles down the Hudson River to spend time in and report on the environmental issues faced by the rural communities between Albany, New York, and New York, New York. Our trip was led by journalist and filmmaker Jon Bonfiglio. Jon has canoed down the same stretch of the Hudson River every summer for a decade.