Pushback of the Week, May 31, 2026

Data Center Opponents Exploit a Loophole

With data centers multiplying like flies—and making burdensome claims on local residents’ energy, water, and health—opponents have learned that they need persistence and ingenuity to stop the installations.

Texas is one of the states experiencing a data center onslaught in rural unincorporated counties unhampered by zoning restrictions. In one such county, a local commissioner just helped pass a one-year moratorium on new data center construction, but he warns, “The data center folks have found a sweet spot in [Texas] that has limited regulations, limited enforcement, limited code, and they’re coming faster than we can keep up with.”

Rancher Clayton Tucker—currently running for Texas Agriculture Commissioner on a pro-family-farm platform—is acutely aware of the data center stampede (which he describes as “of, by, and for Wall Street”) and the threat it poses to farmland and water. (Texans can sign his “Stop AI Data Centers” petition here.)

In a speech that has made the rounds on social media, Tucker describes a Texas county (he does not specify which one) that was able to stop a data center by invoking the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which forbids national-security-related construction projects from using components from China. Tucker explains, “All data centers have components from China. That’s how the supply chains work. So they were able to sue them and got them stopped for that reason.”

Last July, President Trump signed an executive order (“Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure”) that explicitly linked AI data centers—“and the infrastructure that powers them”—to national security. The EO did not acknowledge the critical fact noted in Tucker’s speech—that China is indeed the world’s largest producer of the electrical components (such as transformers, switchgear, and batteries) that are a sine qua non of new data centers. Everyone agrees that U.S. manufacturing capacity is not up to the challenge.

For its part, China is taking “aggressive steps … to eliminate foreign technology from its critical infrastructure.” Last November, the Chinese government announced that its data center projects must use only domestically made AI chips. Any projects less than 30% complete must “remove all installed foreign chips, or cancel plans to purchase them.”

At any rate, the good news is that U.S. data center moratoriums are gaining traction at the local, state, and national levels, and analysts predict more to come!