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When The Data Center Wolf Is At Your Door, Organize & Resist

When The Data Center Wolf Is At Your Door, Organize & Resist

Last updated on: July 29, 2026 at 11:54 am by Leah D. Schade

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When The Data Center Wolf Is At Your Door, Organize & Resist 2026-07-29T11:54:15-04:00 Leah D. Schade

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Data centers are reshaping towns nationwide, promising jobs but delivering pollution and rising costs. Here’s why communities must organize now.

No Data Centers

No Data Centers. Image created by Leah D. Schade using photo by Geoffrey Moffett on Unsplash

Data Centers Targeting Sacrifice Zones

More than 1,200 data centers are currently operating in the United States, and that number could more than double once planned projects come online. In Lexington, Kentucky, where I live and teach, developers have set their sights on our city, and historically Black neighborhoods could bear the burden. The current draft Zoning Ordinance Text Amendment, or ZOTA, would prohibit major data centers anywhere in Fayette County, but it would still allow smaller centers in historically Black and economically underfunded areas.

In effect, the ZOTA risks creating sacrifice zones. And it’s the same trade-off communities everywhere are being offered: protection for some neighborhoods, exposure for others.

Pressure and False Promises

This isn’t just a Lexington story. It’s playing out in Loudoun County, Virginia. In Memphis, Tennessee. In small towns across Pennsylvania, Georgia, Texas, and Arizona. Wherever there’s cheap land, cheap power, and a local government hungry for tax revenue, the data center industry is showing up. They’re pressuring municipalities to hand over their air, their water, and their peaceful community in exchange for jobs that too often never materialize. What’s happening in Lexington is a case study in a pattern repeating itself, city by city, all over the country.

The Reality of Data Centers

Data center facilities are often presented as neutral infrastructure, but communities living near them report noise, air, and light pollution, along with pressure on local water and electricity supplies. Ask around Data Center Alley in Virginia, or the neighborhoods near Memphis’s new AI facilities, and you’ll hear the same complaints.

When the data corporations come knocking, you should be asking some important questions.

Is this the kind of community we want to be? Is this how we care for each other and for our most vulnerable neighbors? By throwing them to the data center wolves?

In Lexington, an IT firm called DartPoints bought the former Lexmark building in early June. Yet there are currently no state or local regulations protecting Lexington residents from data center development — and in most of the towns facing this same rush, the regulations haven’t caught up either. Lexington citizens are organizing through a movement called “No AI in KY” to demand a ban on data centers in Fayette County.

As an ordained minister charged with caring for “the least of these” and a seminary professor who teaches students to oppose predatory forces that harm people and God’s Creation, I support this movement.

And I know they are not alone. Grassroots groups are forming in county after county to push back against data centers, because no one else is standing up for them.

Organize, Resist, Reclaim Your Voice

This is a call to every one of those communities: organize, resist, and reclaim your voice. And it’s a call for clergy to help with these efforts to resist data centers. Show up to the planning meetings. Ask the uncomfortable questions before the vote, not after the groundbreaking. Find the neighbors already doing this work and add your name to the list.

The industry is betting that most towns and cities won’t notice until it’s too late, or won’t organize fast enough to matter. Prove that bet wrong.

A Pattern We’ve Seen Before

In Lexington, we’re calling on Mayor Linda Gorton, members of the LFUCG Council, Lexington Planning staff, and the Planning Commission to protect Lexington from the negative impacts of data centers. The surest way to do that is to ban them from Fayette County. Every community facing this same decision should be making the same demand of their own elected officials.

This process is being rushed — in Lexington and nearly everywhere else it’s unfolding — without sufficient time to study impacts, craft strict zoning laws, or solicit meaningful public comment. That should raise red flags. Hollow promises, feigned urgency, and devastated communities are the same pattern I saw with fracking companies when I served as a pastor in Pennsylvania. It is also the pattern we saw leading up to the Great Recession in 2008: a rush to exploit poor and middle-class people, deceptive marketing, and a collapse that decimated communities.

Corruption and fraud were widespread, while government officials responsible for regulating industries and protecting citizens failed in their duties.

Learn from the Past; Make Better Choices

Here in Lexington, and in every town weighing the same choice, we have a chance to do something different. We can learn from the past and recognize the signs of the data center bubble in the making. It’s a bubble that will burst, leaving communities to clean up a mess they could have avoided. And by then, the companies that built it will have moved on, counting the money they extracted.

I urge every community to think carefully about who they are and who they want to be. We can invest in projects that create sustainable, meaningful jobs and improve quality of life. What we don’t need are data centers that produce short-term profit for corporations and long-term problems for the people who actually live there. Banning data centers isn’t just the right thing to do — it’s the smart thing to do, whether you’re in Lexington, Loudoun County, or a town that hasn’t had this fight yet but will soon.

Let’s build a future that works for everyone, not just tech billionaires. Organize. Resist. Reclaim your voice — before the next data center is already under construction in your backyard.

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Rev. Dr. Leah D. Schade

The Rev. Dr. Leah D. Schade is a seminary professor, ordained minister, and co-founder of the Clergy Emergency League. Her opinions are her own.

Leah is the author of Preaching and Social Issues: Tools and Tactics for Empowering Your Prophetic Voice (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024), Preaching in the Purple Zone: Ministry in the Red-Blue Divide (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019) and Creation-Crisis Preaching: Ecology, Theology, and the Pulpit (Chalice Press, 2015). She is the co-editor of Rooted and Rising: Voices of Courage in a Time of Climate Crisis (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). Her book, Introduction to Preaching: Scripture, Theology, and Sermon Preparation, was co-authored with Jerry L. Sumney and Emily Askew (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023).

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