Florida’s Palm Beach County, home base of President Donald Trump, and Atlanta have joined a growing list of areas where large data centers are drawing significant community pushback.
The Atlanta City Council’s zoning committee this week declared it would study potential impacts and tabled proposed legislation that would allow developer Digital Realty to build a $500 million data center. The project is planned for the site of a polluted and underused film production facility, but has drawn opposition from nearby residents.
“Over the past year, we have met with residents, neighborhood organizations, elected officials and other stakeholders to listen, answer questions, and strengthen the proposal based on community feedback,” Digital Realty said in a statement. “We remain committed to that process and believe taking additional time is the right approach.”
In South Florida’s Palm Beach County, home to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, county commissioners voted 5-1 to reject a proposed expansion of a data center campus after several months of public pushback, according to regional media reports. Known as Project Tango, the $26 billion project by PBA Holdings was rejected “without prejudice,” meaning the developer can revise and resubmit the plan.
PBA Holdings did not immediately respond to phone and email requests from CoStar News to comment. Its original project, spanning about 1.5 million square feet, was authorized for use as a data center roughly a decade ago when the site, about 35 miles west of Mar-a-Lago, was rezoned.
These events occurred after at least 75 U.S. data center projects valued at about $130 billion were blocked or delayed by communities in the first quarter of this year, according to industry tracking site Data Center Watch. That matched the total volume of blocked or delayed developments in all of 2025.
Technology investment firm Interconnected Capital tracked more than 150 U.S. cities, towns and counties considering their own data center restrictions. And New York recently became the first state to place a one-year moratorium on large new data center developments, with at least 14 others considering similar measures.
That includes Georgia and nearby South Carolina, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Trump this week criticized New York’s moratorium, calling it a “terrible decision” and defending data centers as major drivers of future jobs. “They are big, strong, bold, and Money Machines for the State in which they are built,” Trump said in a July 15 post on his Truth Social site.
The president’s February State of the Union address called on data center operators to pay the costs of needed electric grid upgrades to support the resource-intensive facilities. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has since directed utility operators to bolster grids and restructure fees to enable that shift.
Atlanta is frequently cited by analysts as being among the nation’s 10 most active regions and the most active in the Southeast for planned facilities tied to the growing use of artificial intelligence. It’s in the top five for computing capacity at existing data centers.
Data firm Cleanview reported around 100 projects are now planned across Georgia, representing more than 11 gigawatts of capacity at full build-out. A single gigawatt amounts to enough electricity to power around 1 million homes continuously.
Projects are less prevalent in Palm Beach County, where no other data centers are in the pipeline, according to regional media reports. South Florida overall has four data centers in various planning stages, and there are more than 1,500 being planned nationwide, according to the Pew Research Center.
Northern Virginia, Phoenix and Dallas frequently top analysts’ rankings of the most active U.S. regions for planned new data center development. Lists vary depending on factors being ranked, such as number of projects, square footage and planned power capacity.