Local government resistance to data center development accelerated this summer, a warning sign for big AI companies such as Anthropic, Google and OpenAI that are pinning their compute ambitions on data center expansion.

In July alone, more than 150 towns and counties passed temporary or permanent bans on data centers, many adopted in emergency meetings. That brings the nationwide total to more than 500 active data center bans at the start of August, according to The Information’s analysis of thousands of legal documents and local news reports. When we first published our tracker of these bans in late June, we had found more than 300.