How the data center backlash is growing in U.S. statehouses

As AI companies rushed to build the server farms that power their platforms, state lawmakers across the country and across the political spectrum were increasingly racing to limit them. I wanted to measure that race directly rather than anecdotally.

I downloaded every data center bill from LegiScan, then used an LLM to classify each one by what it would actually do — make development easier, restrict it, or neither — and tracked whether it had passed or was still pending.

That turned up at least 375 data center bills introduced in 2026 as of July 15, and showed the balance had tipped hard toward restriction. Restrictive bills outnumbered facilitative ones 277 to 67. As recently as 2023 the facilitative side had led, 31 to 16.

The opposition crossed party lines, driven largely by rising electricity costs and the environmental toll in the communities where these facilities get built. Illinois, Virginia and Pennsylvania were among the states moving toward tighter regulation.