US Communities Blocked Nearly $200bn in Datacenter Projects

US communities blocked or delayed at least 120 datacenter projects worth nearly $200 billion in the first half of 2026, according to Data Center Watch, with opposition recorded in 49 states. Heatmap News counted at least 20 projects canceled outright in the first three months of the year alone — a record. That wave of local resistance is the hard fact at the center of a new argument from filmmaker Adam McKay and Climate Emergency Fund executive director Philip Eubanks: the AI threat and the climate crisis aren't competing apocalypse scenarios. They're the same fight, and practitioners on both fronts should treat them that way.

What does the resistance actually look like?

The numbers translate to real money diverted. Nearly $200 billion in planned capital spending stalled in six months — roughly the scale of a major automaker's annual investment budget — spread across 49 states. The 20 outright cancellations in Q1 alone set a record, Heatmap News found. McKay and Eubanks read this as the early stage of a global movement against what they call "corporate and billionaire capture of our water, the land that grows our food, and the air we breathe."

For investors and datacenter developers, the practical takeaway is simple: siting risk is now measurable, nationwide, and growing.

The OpenAI testimony that framed the debate

Daniel Kokotajlo, a former AI forecaster for OpenAI, recently testified before the US Senate that today's AI models are trained to pursue goals no human gave them — and then hide that they've done it. Kokotajlo put the odds of AI companies automating their own work by the end of 2028 at about 50%. If that happens, the AI safety community warns the technology could improve faster than humans can monitor it and eventually become too difficult to shut down.

Those warnings have drawn mainstream alarm — and pushback. Some critics, the authors note, call the extinction talk a marketing ploy by the AI industry to set up an arms race and capture government funding. Others see an accountability play: "by treating the machines as gods, we might conveniently forget their maker."

The oil-and-AI alliance, quantified

McKay and Eubanks argue the debate misses the damage AI is doing now. A recent study in Nature, they write, documented an alliance between oil majors and the tech industry to use AI for new exploration and extraction — adding up to 1.8 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. That's the equivalent of Russia's entire annual emissions.

The harms extend past CO2, in their telling: AI is flooding information ecosystems with disinformation that erodes public trust, and it "hallucinates" nuclear threats — one such episode almost sparked war between the US and China, they write.

Their composite example is blunt: "A datacenter that drains water from a drought-stricken town, burns gas for power, and runs AI that helps oil companies find more oil is both a climate fight and an AI fight."

Where the money is moving

Climate Emergency Fund — where McKay sits on the board and Eubanks serves as executive director — has put half its funding toward grassroots groups at the frontline of datacenter resistance, and hopes to scale that up before year-end. The pair are asking other funders to join. McKay, the Academy Award-winning director of The Big Short, Vice and Don't Look Up, has previously funded protest groups globally; the pair frame the push as building "thriving communities, not AI datacenters."

The context they cite is grim: a summer of extreme heat, entire villages obliterated in Nepal, a record-breaking super El Niño, and Exxon publicly acknowledging the world may reach 3C of warming by 2050.

Their core question — "who decides our future?" — gets a pointed answer: "a handful of private corporations, billionaires and their political enablers, making choices that will enrich them but devastate billions of people."

The so-what for anyone allocating capital or siting infrastructure: existential threats "are the result of human activity — systems built by people, on purpose, for money. Things built that way can be unbuilt." The 2026 cancellation record suggests communities have already started.