Data Center Watch Q2 2026: $68B of Projects Disrupted

Data Center Watch describes itself as a research project from 10a Labs that tracks grassroots opposition to data center development across the United States. Its Q2 2026 update, covering April through June 2026 and drawing national coverage on September 21, says at least 45 projects worth $68 billion were disrupted by local opposition in the quarter, which the firm describes as sustaining the elevated level of disruption it recorded in Q1. The update makes three further claims. Communities imposed moratoriums on data center development, often preemptively, before developers expressed interest or filed permit applications. Thirty statehouses introduced, and many adopted, legislation, resolutions or executive actions on data center siting, electricity and water constraints, and infrastructure cost sharing. And opposition became more local and project specific, increasingly targeting permitting, infrastructure and individual policy decisions, as regulatory scrutiny expanded across 49 states.

The firm’s earlier pages supply the comparison. Its Q1 2026 update says at least 75 projects worth approximately $130 billion were blocked or delayed from January through March, which it called the largest single-quarter concentration on record and roughly the scale of all of 2025. It also says more than 300 state data center bills were filed in the first six weeks of 2026, statewide moratorium proposals were introduced in 14 states, and the number of active opposition groups more than doubled from the end of Q4 2025. Its Q3 and Q4 2025 update puts projects with publicly disclosed values totaling at least $156 billion blocked or delayed across 2025, and its Q2 2025 update estimated $98 billion in that quarter alone. These are the firm’s counts and characterizations, not PSV findings. The project-level dataset behind them is sold separately, and PSV has not reviewed it.

Read on the firm’s own figures, Q2 was a lighter quarter than Q1, not a heavier one. The project count computes to 40 percent lower and the disrupted value to about 48 percent lower, and $68 billion is also below the $98 billion the firm estimated for Q2 2025. The cumulative picture points the other way. Q1 and Q2 together compute to at least 120 projects and about $198 billion, already above the $156 billion counted for all of 2025. That is PSV arithmetic on the firm’s published totals, and the periods may not be strictly comparable, because the tracker says its database is continuously updated and some figures are estimates that may change. The honest summary is a plateau at a high level, not an acceleration, and the firm’s word for it, sustained, fits.

The number matters less than where the risk now sits. A delay that arrives at rezoning costs carry. A moratorium that arrives before anyone files, which is what the Q2 update describes, costs the site itself, and it lands on land bought or optioned on the assumption of data center use. State action is compounding the local kind. PSV has covered the named examples as they happened: New York’s Executive Order 62, signed July 14, 2026, just after this report’s window closed, pauses state environmental permits for new data centers of 50 megawatts or more for up to one year, and Loudoun County’s board voted on September 15 to draft a pause of up to 12 months on new data center applications. For owners of operating, energized campuses the same dynamic works in their favor, since every blocked project is capacity that does not compete with them.

The artifact is one row per candidate or owned data center site. Inputs: the county or municipal zoning code and any pending text amendment; council, board and planning commission agendas and minutes for the last 24 months; any adopted or proposed moratorium, with its scope, megawatt threshold and sunset date; state bills and executive orders on siting, water and large-load cost sharing that reach the jurisdiction; the utility’s large-load tariff and interconnection queue position; and public comment records, petitions and recall or election filings tied to data center votes. Output, per site: entitlement status in plain terms (by right, special exception pending, approved, grandfathered), every live pause or moratorium that could reach it with its threshold and expiry, the next scheduled public vote, and a column separating adopted instruments from proposals.

The reviewer is the development lead with land use counsel, and the approval gate is simple: no land deposit goes hard, and no option is exercised, until the site’s row names every pending local and state action that could reach it and counsel has confirmed whether the site is inside or outside each one. An assistant is well suited to the monitoring and extraction, watching agendas, pulling moratorium thresholds and sunset dates out of ordinances and executive orders, and flagging when a new pause is proposed in a jurisdiction on the list. It should not score how likely a council is to approve an application or predict how a community will vote.