To Avoid Local Opposition, Data Center Builders Are Getting Personal

When data center developer Applied Digital advanced a 900-acre campus in the 1,000-person town of Ellendale, North Dakota, part of its planning process involved a bowling alley down the street that needed repairs. 

The Pheasant Lanes venue was a center of social life in Ellendale, but it was also a symbol of economic decline in the small town that has suffered from population decreases over the last three decades. The facility’s future was in jeopardy due to a broken pinsetting system — the machines that clear and replace the bowling pins and return balls to customers — with a replacement cost close to $200K. 

Before starting its data center development, Applied Digital partnered with local businesses to help Pheasant Lanes fund a high-tech pinsetter and other improvements to revitalize the bowling alley.

Company and town officials say this decision laid a strong foundation of positive public sentiment among Ellendale residents, and it built support for exactly the kind of data center campus that is generating fierce public opposition in similar small towns across the U.S.

As hostility from local residents derails or delays a growing number of projects, industry leaders speaking at a Bisnow event last month highlighted the Ellendale bowling alley as an example of what effective community engagement now looks like. 

“That won over about half of the town right there. It was just a decent, regular, fine thing to do for people,” ASG Chief Technology Officer Daniel Golding said at Bisnow’s National DICE Construction, Design and Development — East event. “It didn't involve politicians and it didn't involve proffers and it didn't involve building a new road, but it was a heck of a nice pinsetting machine, and that won over an awful lot of people.”

Delivering new data centers now requires more than just selling local politicians on a project — it requires winning over residents directly to avoid grassroots opposition campaigns.

Beyond simply touting general economic benefits, developers need to show up in communities to understand their specific problems and to become partners in their solutions. Even if it is just buying a machine to pick up some bowling pins.

While local pushback to a data center was an uncommon occurrence just five years ago, developers pursuing large-scale projects now anticipate their plans will spark heated battles over whether they are in the best interest of their host communities. 

From suburban Atlanta to rural Wisconsin, the common narrative underpinning pushback against data center development paints it as corporate tech giants industrializing rural or residential towns, raiding their resources, and despoiling their natural beauty and historic character.

In an industry facing skyrocketing demand and where speed to market is essential, executives at Bisnow’s event identified this kind of community pushback as one of the top two challenges facing the sector.

A majority of panelists even listed local opposition ahead of power availability — for years the primary constraint slowing the industry’s growth — as the challenge that is keeping them awake at night. 

“With power, it's a matter of when it's going to come to you, not if it's going to come to you,” Penzance Vice President for Development Faizan Qureshi said at the event, held at the Bethesda North Marriott Hotel & Conference Center in Maryland. 

“With jurisdictional approvals, a lot of times it's very binary — either you get the approval or you don't.”

While there are industrywide efforts underway — from advertising campaigns to expanded lobbying groups — aimed at shifting the national narrative around data centers, there is an emerging body of best practices that developers can employ to improve the chances of success for individual projects.

Rather than just sending lawyers to handle local entitlements and permitting, having senior leadership on-site and letting residents put a face to a project can help soften skepticism, executives said.

Sustained, on-the-ground engagement also allows senior decision-makers to understand a community’s specific concerns and priorities. This creates room for tailored, sometimes unconventional solutions that can help a project move forward.

Framing the economic benefits of a project in broad, intangible terms is a common mistake data center firms make, Qureshi said. 

Instead, wherever possible, developers should look for ways to show how a project will fund specific, concrete benefits that will improve residents’ quality of life and demonstrate that the developer is attuned to the community’s needs. This could come through increased tax revenue or through an agreement between the town and the developer. 

Examples include a developer funding a much-needed sewage treatment plant in one community and another data center firm replacing a small town’s fire engine after it was destroyed in a collision.

While such high-visibility solutions aren’t the norm, Qureshi said developers should try to understand civic needs and study local budgets to identify areas of priority in desperate need of funding. 

“We can come into these early meetings and not just talk about the annual tax revenues but get very surgical,” Qureshi said. “Your capital improvement plan in your 2026 budget calls for these types of upgrades? We can fund those.” 

Another area where successful developers are learning from the industry’s mistakes is around transparency, DICE panelists said. 

The data center sector has long placed a premium on secrecy, both due to security concerns and because Big Tech end users prefer to obscure their infrastructure plans as trade secrets. It is still common practice for developers to demand that local officials sign nondisclosure agreements prohibiting them from sharing details of potential projects with their constituents. 

This is proving to be a red flag in many communities slated for large-scale data center projects. Communities are looking for reasons to be skeptical about data centers, and any indication that a developer is withholding information about plans for a site, how much power a project might use or who an end user will be can quickly turn the tide of public opinion, DBT Data President David Tolson said. 

Conversely, Tolson said a developer’s willingness to be transparent can be a competitive advantage over other firms looking to build in the same area.

He said his firm experienced this as it attempted to build a data center in a community that had rejected five previous applications from developers who refused to share key details about their project. DBT moved forward simply by committing to full transparency with residents and stakeholders. 

“The community was frustrated because owners would just send counsel and would not disclose the entities that were actually doing the construction, so last week, we met with the community and the leadership behind the opposition and told them we would actually give them our plans before we filed,” Tolson said. “It seems that we now have their support simply by engaging, being present and being transparent.”