How much impact can a nonbinding referendum have?

The data center industry may be about to find out.

While much of the election buzz in Chicago has centered on the crucial mayoral election in February, across the state, the November election cycle will give voters in several municipalities another tool to potentially stymie data center development in Illinois.

Although these measures are advisory in nature and aren’t technically enforceable if they pass — these are not formal moratoriums, and politicians could still choose to dismiss public opinion and permit data center development anyway — they are indicative of the increasingly tangled web of regulation, power concerns and rising opposition beginning to encircle commercial real estate’s cash cow in Illinois.

Community pushback is scuttling projects in Illinois and across the country. At least 45 data center projects were scrapped nationwide in the second quarter alone after residents protested — more than half of all proposed developments.

“We have a pretty good sense just on looking at polling from across the country as to what these numbers will look like, and I think it'll give us a sense, too, about where we need to do some work,” said Brad Tietz, the director of government affairs-Midwest for the Data Center Coalition.

Some of the communities with data center referendums aren’t even places developers want to build, he said.

Voters in four cities in Madison County have an advisory vote on the construction and operation of data centers on the ballot in November: Chouteau, Granite City, Nameoki and Venice. Joliet residents and voters in Morgan County face similarly worded advisory questions.

In Bloomington, about an hour north of the state capital in Springfield, voters will weigh whether to impose a moratorium on large-scale data centers in the city. The measure doesn’t specify the length of a potential moratorium, according to WGLT.org.

Data centers have been at the heart of election campaigns across the country, with candidates and outside groups spending $86.5M on advertisements mentioning data centers — almost always negatively — between July and early October. Some Illinois politicians, including Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, have vocalized opposition to the asset class.

A spring poll of 800 likely 2026 voters from the Illinois Clean Jobs Coalition revealed that 68% of respondents backed regulations on data centers and 11% were undecided. More than half of the 21% of those opposed to regulations said it was because they would want to see no new data centers built at all.

Zoning entitlements are influenced by public pushback and are a “massive component” of site selection for data center developments right now, said Andy Cvengros, JLL executive managing director and co-lead of the company’s U.S. data center markets team. A large swath of the buyers Cvengros works with won’t even consider sites where zoning is uncertain, he said.

“Sites that have really no path and no local support for the data center, you see a lot of the reputable groups just kind of pass on it, unless there's a serious power story to it that makes sense,” Cvengros said.

Illinois is already significantly lagging other states in data center investment.

The state added more than 647 megawatts of capacity between the first half of 2021 and the first half of 2026, an implied investment of about $16B, according to JLL. In comparison, Virginia added more than 6,068 MW of capacity in the period, an investment of $151B, and Texas’ more than 7,512 MW equals an investment of about $188B.

Cvengros said data center investment has shifted to neighboring states as hyperscalers have balked at regulatory legislation brewing in Springfield and a longstanding Illinois privacy law that exposes them to a significant amount of potential liability.

“You see a ton of investment interest into northern Indiana, from east to west, a whole bunch of projects going on there that are legitimate and real, hyperscaler-backed. You see the same thing in southeast Wisconsin,” Cvengros said. “Illinois seems to be kind of a ‘unless you need to be here’ type of thing. It's difficult to really continue growing at a large scale.”

Illinois legislators have been working on the Power Act, a bill that would require data center companies to pay for their own energy and track and report water usage, though the legislation has yet to pass. The state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act, commonly referred to as BIPA, has been on the books for nearly two decades, but its strict requirements over data collection and ensuing lawsuits have spooked several data center hyperscalers, Cvengros and Tietz said.

The BIPA law drove at least two major hyperscalers to other states and killed their planned expansions in Illinois, Cvengros said.

Nearly a dozen states, including Illinois, have paused or retracted their data center incentives since April. Earlier this summer, Gov. JB Pritzker paused a 2019 program aimed at incentivizing data center development through tax breaks, an abatement Cvengros said can make a difference in site selection to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

The combined forces of public referendums, energy readiness questions, BIPA and a likely omnibus package to come aimed at regulating the industry are weakening an already shaky Illinois data center sector, Tietz said.

He said the DCC is trying to make sure the statewide framework that is eventually passed doesn’t deter the industry and continue sending it to other states.

“The rhetoric, the opposition, layered on top of an existing very challenging regulatory environment in Illinois, the companies are choosing with their feet, and they’re building in neighboring states,” Tietz said.