How politicians who once championed data centers, including Greg Abbott and Josh Shapiro, are now slowing their development as the issue becomes a liability
in person, over text, in my comment section — helped inform the Executive Order I signed this week that will block bad projects if the local community doesn't want them...Robinson Meyer /@robinsonmeyer:We've got exclusive new polling on local data center development at @heatmap_news. Over the past year, we've asked Americans whether they would support or oppose a data center being built near where they live. We haven't changed the wording. When we first polled the questionCongresswoman Rashida T
Context & Ripple Effects
The politics of data center siting have flipped in under two years. In May 2024, [[a:864202|state legislatures in Arizona and Georgia were passing laws to restrain an industry they had courted]], and by late 2025 the Washington Post was documenting town-by-town opposition over water and electricity use. Texas crossed a new threshold this spring when [[a:1169065|Hill County passed what may be the state's first county-wide, one-year ban after eight projects targeted it]].
Now the pivot has reached the top of state government. Greg Abbott is publicly criticizing operators that enter communities without securing local buy-in, while Josh Shapiro signed an executive order requiring local approval for new projects — a reversal for a governor who previously welcomed Pennsylvania's build-out. Heatmap's unchanged-wording polling showing eroding support near where people live gives both men a measurable reason: what was an economic-development talking point is now a liability.
First-order effects
- Shapiro's executive order hands Pennsylvania municipalities veto leverage over data center projects, directly slowing deals that previously needed only state-level welcome.
- Operators courting Texas and Pennsylvania now face governors demanding demonstrated community support up front, adding a political approval gate before permitting even begins.
Second-order effects
- Developers will shift toward sites where local officials pre-commit support, concentrating projects in cooperative jurisdictions and repricing land and power access in those areas relative to resistant ones.
- Rival states still marketing cheap power and fast approvals gain a recruiting pitch against Abbott's and Shapiro's states — though their own residents are exposed to the same polling dynamic.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, data center siting converges on a formal social-license model — local consent codified into executive orders and county ordinances like Hill County's ban — making community approval a structural input to AI capacity planning rather than a public-relations step.
- State executives who once competed to attract the industry becoming its gatekeepers points toward patchwork, locally negotiated build-outs replacing the uniform pro-data-center posture of 2023-24 era incentive races.
The trend: AI infrastructure's binding constraint is shifting from capital and grid access to local political consent, as governors who once recruited data centers begin regulating them.