While over 300 towns and cities have implemented moratoriums—temporary legal pauses on new applications—these restrictions currently delay only about 2.3 gigawatts (GW) of planned capacity.
The most significant impacts are limited to a few specific sites, including an AWS campus in Ohio and projects in Pennsylvania and Colorado, rather than the industry at large.
The distinction between projects simply located within restricted areas and those actually delayed is critical for understanding the health of AI infrastructure.
Most moratoriums only freeze new applications and do not revoke existing permits, meaning that roughly 22 GW of capacity already under construction remains unaffected.
Furthermore, many developers are bypassing local grid constraints and policy hurdles by using "behind-the-meter" power, where electricity is generated on-site rather than drawn from the public utility grid.
This shift suggests that local policy is more likely to change where and how facilities are powered rather than stopping the overall buildout.
While local opposition often centers on water consumption and rising electricity costs, SemiAnalysis predicts that U.S.
data center capacity will still more than double by 2027.
Most current restrictions fail to stall projects because they expire before long-term construction begins or because developers utilize legal loopholes, such as "deannexing" land to move it outside a town’s jurisdiction.
For now, these policies function primarily as a way for elected officials to address community concerns without permanently rejecting the tax revenue and investment associated with the cloud computing and AI boom.