On the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, Monterey Park, California, voted 86 percent in favor of a permanent ban on data centers—becoming the first US city to do so through a ballot initiative. What started as neighborhood resistance to one proposed facility became something far larger: a template for communities worldwide resisting the relentless expansion of AI infrastructure into residential areas.
Campaign organizer Steven Kung called it "a landslide victory," and the reasons locals cited cut to the heart of why data centers have become so contentious. The noise pollution, the air pollution, the rising electricity rates—residents watched utility bills climb as tech companies raced to build the compute infrastructure powering the AI boom. "The deal just didn't make sense and it doesn't make sense for most, if not all, cities data centers go to," Kung explained.
What makes Monterey Park's outcome remarkable isn't just the decisive vote, but that it arrived with a clear roadmap. The ballot resolution explicitly named air quality, drinking water, public health, and electricity and water rates as protected concerns. None of those worries are hypothetical; communities adjacent to existing data centers have experienced real damage to their living standards and local resources. By documenting these harms in the ballot language, Monterey Park created a blueprint that other cities facing similar proposals can study and adapt.
Mayor Elizabeth Yang wasted no time signaling broader implications. "A lot of the other cities that are facing data center proposals are going to follow suit," she told Politico, noting that data center companies had earned a "bad reputation across the board, across the country." City councilmember Jose Sanchez echoed that sentiment, telling The Guardian: "We hope that other communities will use the model set by residents here in Monterey Park as inspiration to stop data centers from encroaching in their backyard."
The Monterey Park victory reflects a groundswell of public resistance. A Public First poll released around the same time found that only 26 percent of Americans support building more data centers—the lowest approval rating of any nation surveyed. Globally, the opposition has teeth: according to The Financial Times, dozens of data center projects worth at least $156 billion have been blocked or stalled since 2025 due to local opposition. The backlash has even reached Congress, where Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced a bill earlier this year calling for a nationwide moratorium on AI data center construction until safeguards are established for workers, consumers, communities, and the environment.
What the Monterey Park vote provides, however, is something the opposition elsewhere has lacked: a finished vote, a decisive margin, and a replicable legal framework. As communities from California to New York grapple with proposals for massive data facilities in their neighborhoods, they now have a concrete example of how democratic participation can stop projects that threaten local air, water, and utility costs. The backlash was already underway. Now it has a model—and a 14-point mandate behind it.