More than 70% of residents spanning both political parties say they oppose AI data centers, and policies to restrict or regulate them are rapidly increasing, according to Lauren Bridges, an assistant media studies professor at the University of Virginia. At the local level, “moratoriums have started to spread like wildfire across the United States,” Bridges said during a National League of Cities and American Association for the Advancement of Science webinar this month. “We’ve seen a shift from an incentive paradigm to a more restrictive mode of data center governance.” While cities are moving quickly to address data centers’ impact, they don’t have to choose between welcoming them and protecting their communities — but they do need to be proactive, the panelists said. “There’s a lot of money being put into this particular industry, and municipalities can see a benefit as well,” said Aurora, Illinois, Sustainability Director Alison Lindburg. “You have to think about the economic impact of data centers, and I think that’s one of the things municipalities are struggling with.” Get ahead of data center development Even though several data centers had already been built in the city, Aurora hadn’t defined what a data center was until this year. That was a problem, Lindburg said. “All of our data centers were being treated as warehouses, and they essentially don’t have the exact same uses and definitely not the same impacts,” she said. The data centers that had been built were not meeting state requirements and were raising resident concerns, so last year the city put a six-month moratorium on new ones. This gave city staff time to conduct research and hold a robust stakeholder engagement process, draft a policy and get regulations passed by the city council, Lindburg said. In Anchorage, Alaska, data centers were not addressed as