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The residents of Boulder City, Nevada, are raging mad at the federal government.
The Trump administration unilaterally approved a data center on a tract of public land within the city’s jurisdiction this summer without giving residents a say in the matter and without conducting an environmental assessment specific to the project.
“Tyranny,” one resident described it in front of the City Council in July.
“I would call it a surprise attack,” said another.
The Boulder City project is part of the Trump administration’s efforts to make the country the “number one superpower in artificial intelligence,” as dictated by President Donald Trump’s slate of executive orders intended to pave the way for quicker data center development and support the AI industry.
Those federal efforts have amounted to opening a handful of public and federal lands to construction, and waiving public review periods and environmental guardrails — changes industry watchers say don’t necessarily address the biggest hurdles to faster development.
What they have done is further fuel one of the few forces powerful enough to actually block the momentum of the AI industry: local anxiety.
Or, in the case of Boulder City, rage.
“We do not have guardrails for artificial intelligence. We do not have Congress implementing rules to try to navigate what happens when these corporations succeed because we have become a nation that is pay-to-play,” Gabriel Cornejo, a Democrat who ran an unsuccessful campaign for Nevada’s 1st Congressional District, said at the City Council meeting. “That concentration of power is going to yield, unfortunately, the pitchforks.”
In recent months, the public has swung 49 percentage points against data centers, according to Heatmap polling from Embold Research. Skepticism of data centers is bipartisan, and doesn’t fall neatly along lines of age or geography.
Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nevada) said she’d been hearing more from Nevada residents about data centers since the Boulder City project was approved.
The Trump administration’s efforts to speed up development have exacerbated local fears around AI infrastructure, she said, especially as so many massive facilities pop up around the country.
“They don’t like data centers, period,” Titus said. “But they certainly don’t like having the choice taken away from them.”
Last year, Trump laid out a sweeping plan to accelerate data center infrastructure. He called for reducing environmental regulations, recommended making federal lands available for construction and directed federal agencies to get rid of rules that hindered the AI industry.
That’s what his administration has done. The Department of Energy and Department of Defense have started partnering with companies to build at federal sites. Earlier this year, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers allowed for data centers developers in need of Clean Water Act permits to skip the public notice period.
The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed allowing data centers to begin construction before facilities receive air permits and eliminating public participation requirements for another environmental permit.
Even the Department of Justice has gotten involved, intervening in a Clean Air Act lawsuit between the NAACP and Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI. Justice officials argue that they have the power to dismiss the case entirely, saying the NAACP’s lawsuit threatens federal policy interests and the “immediate and pressing” need to expand energy infrastructure.
But negotiations over permitting reform in Congress, which has much of the authority to fundamentally reshape the laborious permitting process, have been stuck for years in partisan gridlock. Those talks have become only marginally more fruitful this session. Trump’s interference with clean energy projects and moves weakening environmental protections have threatened possible compromise.
And despite Trump’s best efforts to remove challenges for data centers, building them hasn’t gotten much easier in the last year, industry experts said. Many of the aspects that make building AI infrastructure difficult simply aren’t in the administration’s control.
Local zoning, state and municipal permits, electric grid interconnection and supply chain issues all tend to be more significant constraints than federal permitting, said Ben Schifman, a senior technology fellow at the Institute for Progress.
Under the direction of the Energy Department, federal regulators have stepped in to try to speed up the interconnection process, which can delay projects up to six or seven years. But ultimately, that will require regional grid operators to reform their rules governing how data centers connect to the grid.
“My sense is that there has not been a major change, if any change at all, to the overall permitting landscape for data centers,” Schifman said.
Data centers have broken new computing capacity records every seven months since late 2024, doubling the amount each time — consistent with the boom in construction after OpenAI’s GPT-4 model was released, said Ben Cottier, a senior researcher at Epoch AI.
“It’s possible that without these executive orders, it would have slowed down, but it hasn’t slowed down,” Cottier said. “In terms of our observations of the data, there isn’t a clear acceleration or anything.”
What has accelerated is public opposition to projects, often over the same issues the Trump administration is trying to ease oversight around: water quality, air quality and speed.
“People don’t trust Trump on environmental issues, period,” said Darrell West, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution.
West attributes the backlash over projects across the country in part to distrust over the president’s frequent meetings with Silicon Valley billionaires.
Without local support, projects falter. A data center project challenged by local opposition has roughly a 50% chance of being canceled.
“The Trump administration has failed in really accelerating federal permitting because most of the permits required to build a data center are at the local level,” West said. “And over the last six months, community opposition has accelerated. That has slowed down approvals.”
Even state leaders who back Trump have started to balk at the speed with which data centers are being developed. Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas announced a data center moratorium until state regulators could conduct comprehensive audits of all projects — including data on water consumption and power usage.
People in towns where data centers developers are looking to build have described “reckless” processes and feeling steamrolled.
The Trump administration has, on occasion, acknowledged this pushback as a hurdle. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has noted the anger in rural communities over big projects, but has called concerns about the facilities “overblown.”
“The development of data centers can be almost anywhere,” Wright said in a press briefing during an AI event hosted by his agency. “The challenge has been which communities should host them.”
To counter souring public sentiments, Trump has begun waging a public relations campaign on the behalf of data centers.
At an event announcing additions to the Ratepayer Protection Pledge, invitees included a school superintendent from Richland Parish, Louisiana, and a teacher in his district, who credited Meta’s data center with $50,000 bonuses for educators in the area.
“This isn’t all negative stuff,” Trump said at the event. “You have communities that really want the data centers, and frankly, those are the smart communities because it means tremendous numbers of jobs, very little actual disruption.”
Ultimately, he issued a directive: “You can’t fight it,” he said. “You have to go with it.”
But polling suggests that communities willing to go along with data centers have become fewer and further between since the administration has started pushing for quicker development.
The administration and developers are in alignment on wanting it to be easier to build data centers. But speeding up permitting doesn’t address the main hurdle for builders, Staci Pies, senior vice president of government affairs and policy at INCOMPAS, said.
“What requires more time is being very responsive to the community, and understanding what local benefits the community needs and wants, and striking that bargain,” she said.
People in Boulder City have been more outspoken in their opposition to data centers than they were before federal officials stepped in, said Lisa LaPlante, the city’s communications manager.
“There’s a lot of questions that are now being raised that weren’t being raised before,” LaPlante said.
The city was still working on its approach to AI infrastructure developments when the Bureau of Land Management approved the data center project without any local input.
And even though the site is on public lands, Boulder City will be required to provide emergency services and some utilities. So local officials are gearing up to make their own policies that will govern data center development. In a way, they’re being forced to create those rules, LaPlante said.
In a unanimous decision, the City Council decided to appeal the Bureau of Land Management approval.
A bit over a week later, Rep. Titus sent a letter to Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo, asking him to halt state tax abatements for data centers on federal lands until state lawmakers review the issue.
“It feels like we’re the test for all of this, to see what happens when a data center is basically forced on a city,” LaPlante said.