A research group counts $68 billion in stalled data centers

Data Center Watch counted at least 45 US data-center projects worth about $68 billion blocked or delayed by local opposition between April and June, and Pennsylvania has live cases, a new cost rule and a contested power bill.

Key points

• The $68 billion is not data-center spending. It is the combined value of projects that did not go ahead on schedule. Data Center Watch's own Q2 2026 page says at least 45 projects worth roughly $68 billion were blocked or delayed between April and June 2026. The group is a research project from 10a Labs that tracks grassroots opposition and describes its work as objective, fact-based and nonpartisan. The project-level detail behind the number is not free: the Q2 page sells an insights report through a shop link and asks readers to email for pricing on the in-depth version, and the page itself carries no methodology section beyond an April-to-June research timeline. So how a project's value is assigned, and what separates "blocked" from merely "delayed," is not something a reader can check without paying. Treat $68 billion as one research group's estimate, not an audited number.
• Bloomberg's Newley Purnell reported the quarterly figure on Sept. 21 along with two others from the same group: 843 opposition groups spread across 49 states, with Hawaii the only exception, and 30 statehouses that have introduced or adopted rules on data-center siting, electricity and water. The Bloomberg piece is paywalled; it runs in full on Yahoo Finance. The previous quarter was bigger still, though the two totals should not be added together: Data Center Watch's Q1 2026 page counts at least 75 projects worth about $130 billion, which it says roughly matched the scale of all of 2025 in three months, plus more than 300 state data-center bills introduced in the first six weeks of 2026 and statewide moratorium proposals filed in 14 states. Its Q2 page refers to continuing opposition to projects already delayed in Q1 or earlier, so a single stalled project could plausibly appear in both tallies.
• Pennsylvania has one of the more active fights in the country, in Archbald Borough, Lackawanna County. On March 27, borough council voted 5-0 to deny a conditional-use application for "Project Scott," an 18-building campus on more than 400 acres next to Ed Staback Memorial Park, WVIA reported. The denial turned on process rather than merits: the solicitor's written decision found the record incomplete because the applicant had presented only two witnesses and other parties had not been able to put on evidence. A newspaper's failure to publish a legal notice had forced council to decide by March 28 or the application would have been approved automatically under state law.
• That fight is still open, and it moved to court. Archbald I LLC filed a mandamus complaint on May 12 asking the county court to order the borough to treat Project Scott as approved by default because of the botched notice, The Times-Tribune's Frank Lesnefsky reported; residents and the Valley View School District filed challenges of their own. In a ruling reported July 20, Judge Mark Powell held that eight residents have standing to challenge the borough's data-center zoning ordinance even though they live 1,600 to 5,200 feet from the overlay districts. He rejected the Project Scott developers' argument that land-use appeals are limited to owners within 400 to 600 feet, noting that substations, water storage and generator noise reach well past neighboring properties. A separate project is further along: on Sept. 10, council held the ninth and final conditional-use hearing on Wildcat Ridge, a 14-building campus on more than 500 acres proposed by Cornell Realty Management, and rejected the developer's request that members recuse themselves. A written decision is due within 45 days. Neither matter had been resolved as of this writing.
• Pennsylvania's utility regulator has already answered part of the money question. The Public Utility Commission adopted a modified framework at its April 30 public meeting and released the final order on May 13, at Docket M-2025-3054271, setting a model tariff framework for "Large Load Customers," meaning those above 50 megawatts alone or 100 MW in aggregate. Its core principle is cost causation — the idea that whoever creates a cost should pay it — and the order states that large load customers are responsible for the infrastructure and interconnection costs of serving their projects, reducing the risk of shifting those costs onto residential and small-business customers. It also requires deposits and collateral against projects that are abandoned or underperform, sets minimum contract terms and exit provisions, and tells utilities to publish the status of interconnection requests. The load-bearing caveat: the PUC calls this guidance for future utility tariff filings, not a binding rule on every project. Chairman Steve DeFrank called it "one of the most important infrastructure and consumer protection issues facing utility regulators."
• The wholesale power market Pennsylvania sits inside is already repricing. PJM, the grid operator covering the state, said on July 14 that its auction for the 2028/2029 delivery year procured 138,318 MW of capacity at $325 per megawatt-day, for a total auction cost of $16.4 billion, finishing 6,831 MW short of its reliability requirement with a 14.7% reserve margin. The price is a 2.5% decrease from the prior auction, which cleared at its cap of $333.44 — high, but no longer climbing. PJM's own release notes the continued addition of large data-center loads to the demand forecast that sets the reliability requirement, without assigning them a share of the cost.
• Who pays for that is the contested point. PJM's independent market monitor, Monitoring Analytics, attributes $6.3 billion of the $16.4 billion, or 38%, to existing and forecast data-center load, and $29.4 billion of $63.6 billion, or 46%, across the last four auctions, Utility Dive's Ethan Howland reported on July 20. The industry rejects the framing. The Data Center Coalition, the sector's trade association, has its president, Josh Levi, arguing that blanket bans on data-center construction would put good-paying jobs and economic investment at risk while making life less affordable for Americans, and its newsroom promotes NPR coverage making the case that data centers are a scapegoat for the long-term problems of an aging US grid. That is advocacy from an interested party rather than independent analysis, and on the question of who caused the capacity bill it does not engage the monitor's numbers so much as change the subject.
• All of this is happening while the state is courted hard. Spotlight PA's Kate Huangpu reported in January that Amazon Web Services announced $20 billion for two data centers in eastern Pennsylvania and Blackstone more than $25 billion for the state's digital and energy infrastructure, and that an Emerson College poll found 42% of Pennsylvanians do not want one built in or near their community. In the legislature, Senate Bill 1345 from Sen. Jarrett Coleman would amend the Municipalities Planning Code to let a municipality impose an optional temporary moratorium on new high-impact data-center applications; its recorded action history ends at second consideration in the Senate on July 12.

Why it matters

The limit on the AI buildout in Pennsylvania right now is not chips or money. It is a borough council's 45-day clock, a county judge's view of who lives close enough to object, and a commission docket about who pays for a substation. For a student here, the part that reaches your own bill is the cost-allocation fight, and it is genuinely unsettled: the market monitor says data centers account for 38% of the last capacity auction's charges, the trade association says the bills are an aging-grid problem, and the PUC has written down a cost-causation principle that is guidance to utilities rather than a rule binding every project. The things that would settle it are public and dated. Archbald's council owes a written decision on Wildcat Ridge within 45 days of Sept. 10. SB 1345's next action will appear on the General Assembly's own bill page. The next PJM capacity auction will produce a clearing price that either keeps easing off the cap or does not. Those are the documents worth reading, rather than the next quarterly total.

This is an AI-written summary of the sources credited above and linked in the text, read and edited by Nicholas before publishing. The facts and the quote belong to those sources; the wording is ours. The originating report is Bloomberg's, readable without a subscription on Yahoo Finance.