The residents of Mulberry, Missouri, didn’t want a fight. They got one anyway.
In a vote that has sent ripples through the data center development world, citizens of this small town in Gasconade County rejected a proposed large-scale data center facility, using the ballot box to halt what local officials had initially welcomed as an economic windfall. The margin wasn’t close. And the message was unmistakable: not here.
As Mashable reported, the community organized swiftly after learning the details of the proposed project, which would have transformed a significant portion of the surrounding area into a sprawling campus of servers, cooling infrastructure, and high-voltage electrical equipment. What started as whispered concerns at kitchen tables became a full-throated civic campaign — yard signs, packed town hall meetings, and ultimately a decisive referendum.
This isn’t an isolated incident. It’s a pattern.
Across the United States, the explosive growth of artificial intelligence and cloud computing has created an insatiable demand for data center capacity. Companies like Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are racing to build facilities that consume staggering amounts of electricity and water. The scale is almost incomprehensible. A single hyperscale data center can draw as much power as a small city, and the industry’s total electricity consumption in the U.S. is projected to double or even triple by 2030, according to estimates from the Department of Energy and multiple Wall Street analysts. That growth has to go somewhere. Increasingly, developers are looking at rural communities with cheap land, available water, and proximity to power infrastructure. And increasingly, those communities are pushing back.
Mulberry fits the profile almost perfectly. A quiet agricultural community with a small population, it offered exactly what data center developers prize: open acreage, relatively low land costs, and access to electrical transmission lines. The project’s backers promised jobs, tax revenue, and economic revitalization — the standard pitch that has worked in dozens of other municipalities across the country. But something different happened here. Residents started asking questions that didn’t have satisfying answers.
How much water would the facility consume? What would happen to local well levels? How loud would the cooling systems be at 2 a.m.? What about property values for homes within earshot of industrial-scale HVAC equipment running around the clock? And perhaps most pointedly: who actually benefits?
The jobs argument, which developers lean on heavily, came under particular scrutiny. Modern data centers are heavily automated. A facility that might cover hundreds of acres could employ as few as 30 to 50 full-time workers once construction ends. The construction phase brings temporary employment, sure. But the permanent workforce is slim — and often requires specialized skills that local residents may not possess, meaning workers get imported from elsewhere. Residents of Mulberry saw through the talking points quickly.
According to Mashable, local opposition coalesced around several concrete concerns. Water usage topped the list. Data centers generate enormous amounts of heat, and evaporative cooling systems — the most common and cost-effective method — can consume millions of gallons of water per day. In agricultural communities that depend on aquifers and local water supplies for farming and daily life, that kind of draw represents an existential threat. It’s not theoretical. Communities in Arizona, Oregon, and Virginia have already documented measurable impacts on local water resources after data centers began operations.
Noise was another flashpoint. Industrial cooling fans and backup generators produce persistent low-frequency sound that can travel significant distances, especially in flat, open terrain. For people who chose rural life specifically for its quiet, the prospect of a 24/7 industrial hum was deeply unwelcome.
Then there’s the electrical grid. Data centers don’t just use electricity — they reshape demand patterns in ways that can strain local infrastructure and drive up costs for everyone. Utilities must invest in upgrades to substations, transmission lines, and generation capacity. Those costs often get socialized across the entire rate base. So a farmer three counties away might see her electric bill climb to subsidize cooling for servers she’ll never touch. That math doesn’t sit well with people.
The Mulberry vote reflects a broader national tension that the data center industry has been slow to acknowledge publicly. In Virginia’s Loudoun County — the data center capital of the world, where roughly 70% of global internet traffic passes through at some point — residents have grown increasingly vocal about noise, visual blight, and the transformation of their suburban and rural areas into industrial zones. Prince William County, also in Virginia, saw explosive community opposition to a proposed 2,100-acre data center campus that would have been among the largest in the world. Public hearings drew hundreds of angry residents. The county ultimately moved to restrict data center zoning.
Similar battles have erupted in places you might not expect. Rural Indiana. The outskirts of Columbus, Ohio. Small towns in Georgia and the Carolinas. Even in Texas, where the political environment is generally welcoming to business development, some communities have balked at the scale and impact of proposed facilities.
What makes Mulberry notable is the mechanism of resistance. This wasn’t just a protest or a letter-writing campaign. Residents forced the question onto a ballot and won decisively. That’s a template. And other communities are watching.
The data center industry finds itself in an awkward position. Demand has never been higher. AI workloads — training large language models, running inference at scale, powering the generative AI applications that every major tech company is betting its future on — require compute capacity that dwarfs what was needed even three years ago. OpenAI, Microsoft, and their competitors need facilities built fast. But “fast” collides directly with democratic processes, environmental review, and the entirely reasonable concerns of people who live where the bulldozers want to go.
Some developers are adapting. Microsoft has invested in advanced liquid cooling technology that dramatically reduces water consumption. Google has committed to operating on carbon-free energy around the clock by 2030 at all of its data centers. Amazon Web Services has become one of the largest corporate purchasers of renewable energy on the planet. These are real steps. But they don’t address noise, visual impact, or the fundamental question of whether a community wants an industrial facility in its backyard regardless of how green it claims to be.
Money talks, of course. Tax incentives have been the primary tool for winning community acceptance. States and municipalities compete fiercely for data center investment, offering property tax abatements, sales tax exemptions on equipment, and other sweeteners that can be worth hundreds of millions of dollars over the life of a project. Virginia, for example, has offered some of the most generous incentive packages in the country, and it shows — the state hosts more data center capacity than any other. But the backlash there also shows the limits of financial persuasion when quality of life takes a hit.
Missouri itself has been working to attract data center investment, and the state legislature has considered various incentive proposals in recent sessions. The Mulberry vote complicates that narrative. It suggests that even in a state eager for economic development, local resistance can stop projects cold when residents feel their concerns aren’t being heard.
So what happens next? The developer behind the Mulberry proposal could look elsewhere — and almost certainly will. There’s no shortage of communities willing to accept the trade-offs, at least initially. But the pattern of initial enthusiasm followed by growing regret is well-documented. Loudoun County welcomed its first data centers decades ago. Now residents there regularly complain about the industrial sprawl that followed. The lesson isn’t subtle.
For the tech industry, the Mulberry story is a signal. Not a red light, exactly, but a flashing yellow one. Community engagement can’t be an afterthought or a box-checking exercise. Developers who show up with a finished plan and expect rubber-stamp approval are going to run into more votes like this one. People are paying attention now. They’re Googling water usage statistics and reading engineering reports on noise decibel levels. They’re connecting with residents in other states who’ve been through the process. Information flows freely. Ironic, given that the infrastructure enabling that flow of information is the very thing they’re fighting against.
I grew up in the Midwest. I know these communities. The people in places like Mulberry aren’t anti-technology or anti-progress. They’re practical. They want to understand the deal, and they want the deal to be fair. When it isn’t — when the benefits flow to distant shareholders while the costs land on local doorsteps — they’ll say no. Loudly.
The data center boom isn’t slowing down. If anything, AI is accelerating it beyond what anyone predicted even two years ago. McKinsey estimates that U.S. data center power demand could reach 35 gigawatts by 2030, up from roughly 17 gigawatts today. That’s an enormous amount of new construction. It has to be sited somewhere. And the communities where it gets sited deserve a genuine voice in the process — not just a public comment period that nobody reads, but actual decision-making power.
Mulberry exercised that power. The result was clear.
The question now is whether the industry learns from it — or simply moves down the road to the next small town and tries again, hoping for a different answer. Based on recent history, the smart money is on the latter. But the resistance is growing faster than the server farms. And in a democracy, that matters.
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