The rooms are full. The question is whether they exist.

Two independent trackers, using different methods, count the same direction: organized opposition at a scale that did not exist two years ago, bipartisan by the officials involved — 55% Republican, 45% Democratic in one count. The opposition is not a fringe and not one party’s. Where a noticed hearing exists and residents learn of a project in time, they come.

So the honest question is no longer whether people will show up. It is whether there is anywhere to show up to, and whether anyone tells them in time.

That splits into three situations, and everything on this page sorts into one of them: pathways where no hearing exists, projects whose identity is hidden until the decisions are over, and venues that work, sometimes decisively. There is also a fourth, harder category: hearings that happened, at scale, and still did not decide the outcome.

By-right approval is the industry’s default, not its exception. Virginia’s own legislative audit found that most data centers in the largest data center market in the world were approved by-right: the land was already zoned industrial, so the project needed a building permit and staff sign-off, and no hearing was ever legally required. In Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a data center moving into an existing building required nothing but a building permit; a neighbor learned about the project after the approval was complete, and the city is now writing the ordinance it turned out not to have.

Preemption removes the venue by statute. West Virginia’s 2025 law exempts certified data centers from county and municipal zoning, noise, viewshed, lighting, and land-use rules — all of them. In Tucker County, most residents learned of a planned 1.6 GW gas-powered facility in March 2025; before opposition could organize, the legislature had removed every local lever. A representative of the developer later said in public that the company wrote the law. The same statute handed data centers a FOIA exemption.

And where hearings survive, the microphone can shrink. After contentious data center meetings, Pine Island, Minnesota adopted rules limiting speakers to two minutes, twenty minutes total, with no return to topics already discussed. Other councils have adjourned before reaching the data center item or cut post-vote comment to one minute. Each instance is small, local, and legal. The direction is the point.

Roughly 80% of Virginia localities with proposed or existing data centers are under nondisclosure agreements, by Public Citizen’s count of the reporting. Projects arrive code-named, held by shell companies: an Indiana county rezoned 640 acres for “Razor5 LLC” before anyone officially knew Amazon was behind an $11B project. Pima County supervisors reviewed “Project Blue” under an NDA that kept them from naming the end user; public-records work by local journalists identified AWS after the county’s approvals were done.

The pattern reaches upward. In August 2026 Louisiana’s Public Service Commission killed an administrative law judge’s ruling that would have required Meta to disclose the job and power figures for its $50B project. A disclosure requirement existed, briefly, on the record, and the venue above removed it.

The countertrend is real and worth equal weight: NDA-ban bills are moving in at least ten states, Pennsylvania’s governor barred agencies he controls from signing them, and NPR made the practice a national story the day before this guide was verified. Secrecy of this kind survives attention badly.

Fredericksburg, Virginia: denied 7–0 after a past-midnight hearing, August 2026. Hoffman Estates, Illinois: a 185-acre rezoning withdrawn after a packed three-hour hearing spilled into hallways. Tucson: a unanimous council vote ended annexation talks for Project Blue after weeks of pressure over water and secrecy. Google withdrew a $1B rezoning in Indianapolis; a developer withdrew in Mooresville, North Carolina; councils said no in Pataskala, Ohio and Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. In Cascade Locks, Oregon, voters recalled two port officials over a project and the new board cancelled it.

The moratorium is the procedural version of the same turnout: roughly 225 local pauses across 30 states, with statewide bills following. North Carolina’s own list — Chatham, Surry, Charlotte, Durham, Orange, Hillsborough, Apex, Wendell — is covered in the North Carolina case study, along with the polling behind it: by July 2026, 53% of North Carolinians opposed a data center in their own community and 20% supported one. Five months earlier the same poll had it at 44% opposed and 24% in support, and the pollster attributes the swing to the land-use fights themselves.

Honesty about the wins requires one asterisk, and Tucson carries it: after the city’s no, the project moved to unincorporated county land and advanced with a commission-approved power deal. A city’s no is not a region’s no, and opposition that wins in one venue can lose in the next one over.