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In February 2020, the people of Cerrillos, a district of Santiago, were asked a plain question. Should a large data centre be built next to them? They held a local vote, and they said no.
Chile was deep into a long drought. The plant's cooling would have drawn water by the second from ground the neighbourhood relied on. A court later reopened the permit and sent it back. The operator returned with a redesigned, air-cooled plan. The community had moved the build before a single foundation was poured.
I have spent four editions on the signature at the end of a project. The engineer who signs the permit to operate. The reviewer no model can replace. There is an earlier permission I left out, and it sits upstream of every expert. Before anyone certifies that a facility is fit to run, someone has to agree it can exist at all. The town. The watershed. The grid. That permission is being withheld now, more and more, across the world.
The vote nobody scheduled
For years the local politics of a data centre were a formality. Line up land, power and tax breaks, and build. That is over.
In the United States, more than 300 cities, counties and towns have paused or banned new data centre development since 2023. Most of those measures passed this year. One tracker, Data Center Watch, put the value of US projects blocked or delayed by local opposition at £47bn ($64bn, €55bn). It counted active opposition groups more than doubling, to over 800 across almost every state.
Opinion has turned with them. A Gallup survey in March 2026 found seven in ten Americans would oppose a data centre near them. Nine months earlier, opinion had been split roughly evenly. It also crosses party lines. Proposals to pause data centres have come from the left, while conservative groups organise against the same builds. When both ends of politics agree on something, it is not a passing mood.
The bill arrives as water and power
Ask people why, and the same two answers come back. Water and power.
A large data centre can draw five million litres of water a day, about what a small town uses. In the Netherlands, in a drought year, a Microsoft data centre was found to have taken eighty-four million litres of drinking water. The Cerrillos site I opened with would have used seven billion litres a year, enough for eighty thousand people. Water is the concern people raise first.
Power is the other half. When a campus arrives, residential electricity bills often rise. The grid upgrades it triggers are paid for across everyone on the network, while the tax revenue stays local. Households near the largest campuses have watched their bills climb sharply, sometimes close to doubling. The benefit stays local. The cost spreads to everyone. That is what drives the anger.
A community does not need expert knowledge to feel this. It arrives as a hosepipe ban and a higher bill.
In the desert, the water has to be made
Nowhere is the arithmetic starker than the Gulf.
The region is building AI infrastructure fast, on some of the most water-scarce land on earth. Its data centres are projected to need around 426 billion litres of water a year by 2030. Little of that water falls from the sky. It is desalinated, which takes a great deal of energy. By one reading of International Energy Agency figures, Gulf states may have to double their electricity generation by 2030 to power both the AI and the desalination that cools it.
And the water itself is exposed. Analysts have spent the past year warning how vulnerable Gulf desalination is to regional conflict. Water, energy and security, joined at one site. Here the permission problem is not a town vote. It is a question of national resilience.
The way past “no”
None of this makes the infrastructure the enemy. A data centre brings real things. Investment a region rarely sees. A wider tax base. And the compute the modern economy now runs on. Some bring water and grid upgrades a town could never fund alone. The problem is hardly ever the building. It is the terms.
There is a tempo problem under all of this. A data hall can be built in months. Trust cannot. A community that feels overruled does not grant permission faster when the diggers arrive. The speed that makes AI infrastructure a race is the same speed that loses the room.
So the build meets a wall of refusal, from a Santiago suburb to a Gulf capital. The easy reading is that this is where the story ends. It is not.
Look at the places that got past no. Singapore froze new data centres from 2019, when they already used about seven per cent of the country's power. It did not reopen the door by giving up. It reopened it behind a standard. New facilities must meet a strict efficiency bar, measured as power usage effectiveness, or PUE. Ireland, where data centres already draw more than a tenth of the national grid, ended its Dublin connection freeze with a condition that new sites help supply power, not only consume it.
Both reopened growth, on terms the public could see. That is the part most of the coverage misses. Consent is not won by building anyway. It is not won by outlasting the objectors. It is won by governing the thing that frightens people, in the open, against a standard they can check.
But a standard alone does not earn a yes. People have to feel carried along, not managed. The benefit has to be real, local and lasting, not a glossy figure offered to clear a planning meeting. When the only thing on the table is distant capital chasing distant returns, a community can see it, and it says no. A fair standard and a real shared benefit are two halves of the same thing. One without the other fails.
The grievance is water and power. The answer is governance, and a deal the community can see is real. That is slower than building anyway. It is the only thing that lasts.
Permission before the permit?
A model cannot do this part. Good intelligence can map the aquifer and price the grid long before a shovel moves. Used well, it shows the town the same facts as the boardroom. One picture everyone can check, not capital's private one. But it cannot stand in a room and earn a town's trust, and it cannot answer for the consequences. Those are human acts, and they stay human.
So the gap I keep writing about starts earlier than I first drew it. Before a facility works, before it is even built, before the expert signs, a community has to grant the first permit. The second pen, the one I traced last time, is never lifted if that first permission is refused.
Permission before the permit. For the people building, that is not a hurdle to clear. It is the work. Carry the community, make the benefit real, and govern it in the open, and the permission holds. Treat it as a box to tick with someone else's promises, and the most advanced facility in the world is a planning application that never clears.
The facility stays dark until people say otherwise. There are two sets of people now, not one.
What comes next
Still Dark returns when an argument demands the page. The podcast carries the rest. Permit to Operate is where the people who live in this gap speak in their own voices, and the guest conversations begin shortly.
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This newsletter lives in the gap between digital delivery complete and permit to operate. That gap is where value dies, and where it can be recovered.
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