The fight over the construction of more data centers continues even as President Donald Trump and other supporters have warned the U.S. cannot lose the AI race to China.
The latest skirmish involves the small village of Ashville, Ohio, home to approximately 4,500 residents, where local leaders approved a proposed data center and natural gas-fired power plant.
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In April, village officials gave the green light to a multimillion-dollar development agreement with EdgeConnex for the approximately 195-acre project, part of a broader wave of data center construction across Ohio.
The project, however, has since encountered a legal setback.
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The Ohio Supreme Court recently ruled that the village must first submit a referendum petition to the local board of elections, allowing residents the opportunity to vote on the development agreement before the project can move forward, The Center Square reports.
Village officials initially approved the data center and power plant agreement as emergency legislation, determining that the projects were “necessary for the preservation of the public peace, health, and safety” of the municipality.
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Under Ohio law, emergency measures generally are not subject to a referendum.
According to the Ohio Supreme Court’s ruling, however, the village’s fiscal office made the determination that the projects qualified as emergency measures.
The designation was challenged by a local advocacy organization, Pickaway Informed Citizens, which opposed the proposed data center and natural gas power plant and argued before the state’s high court that residents should have the opportunity to vote on the agreement through a referendum – despite the fact that residents voted for the city government officials who approved the project.
“The profusion of hundreds of gigantic data centers across Ohio is increasingly pitting residents against their own local governments on issues ranging from zoning to dramatic environmental effects to various public subsidies running from the tens into hundreds of millions of dollars,” the group wrote in its court filing.
“Pickaway County is presently beset with at least two major data center development efforts, one in Asheville and another in Commercial Point, a village about eight miles away,” the filing said.
“There are citizen referendum campaigns in both villages in opposition to data centers.”
“It is the city itself legislating through its voters an exercise by the voters of their traditional right through direct legislation to override the views of their elected representatives as to what serves the public interest,” the group argued.
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The U.S. and the 50 states are not governed as pure democracies, however, they are representative republics. As such, say critics of the lawsuit, voters get their say by voting for their representatives, not through referendums.
Village officials countered by saying they acted correctly in declaring an emergency rather than a referendum petition, arguing that “Article II, Section 1f of the Ohio Constitution reserves the power of referendum only for matters involving legislative actions.”
Approving the data center and associated power plant rapidly due to financial reasons, the village’s filing said.
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“Council adopted it as an emergency for a very specific municipal reason – to approve the term sheet and its summary terms, including funding being directed to the Village,” the village argued.
Data centers have become an increasingly important part of the modern economy, powering cloud computing, streaming services, online commerce, and, more recently, artificial intelligence.
While many state and local governments have welcomed these facilities for the jobs, tax revenue, and technology investment they can bring, opposition has grown rapidly as communities weigh their economic benefits against their environmental and infrastructure impacts.
Much of the recent controversy has been driven by the rapid expansion of AI, which has dramatically increased demand for large-scale data centers.
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These facilities require enormous amounts of electricity and water to operate and cool thousands of computer servers.
In many communities, residents have raised concerns that new projects could increase electricity demand, strain local power grids, consume significant amounts of water, generate noise, and alter the character of nearby neighborhoods.
This article may contain commentary which reflects the author’s opinion.
