The collision between AI infrastructure development and community opposition has become one of the defining data center stories of 2026.
Developers are pursuing larger campuses, more power and compressed delivery schedules as AI accelerates demand for computing capacity. Meanwhile, local planning boards, elected officials and residents are increasingly being asked to make decisions about facilities whose scale, energy requirements and technological purpose may be unlike anything previously contemplated in their comprehensive plans.
That gap is where Ilissa Miller believes much of the conflict begins. Miller, founder and CEO of iMiller Public Relations and a board member of the Open Infrastructure Exchange (OIX), joined the Data Center Frontier Show to discuss the OIX Digital Infrastructure Framework, an effort designed to give municipalities a more systematic way to think about data centers and other digital infrastructure before an individual development application lands in front of them.
The idea is straightforward: communities routinely create long-range plans defining where homes, commercial development, industry and other land uses should go. Digital infrastructure should be part of that process as well.
“Our vision for the framework was to help solve the problem by empowering communities to think about digital infrastructure,” Miller said, so municipalities can incorporate it into their comprehensive master plans and maintain control over how land is ultimately used.
That distinction is key. The framework is not intended to convince communities to approve data centers. Nor does it prescribe what a town or county should decide.
Instead, Miller said, it is meant to help public officials ask the right questions early enough to make those decisions deliberately.
The Data Center May Not Be in the Plan
One of the industry’s recurring problems is deceptively basic: many municipalities never anticipated data centers when writing their zoning codes and comprehensive plans.
A parcel might already be designated for industrial development and still lack data centers as an explicitly permitted use.
Miller offered the example of a former paper mill site. A community’s existing rules may clearly allow certain industrial operations there — potentially even uses considerably less benign than a modern data center — while remaining silent on digital infrastructure.
That can force developers through a conditional-use process before detailed project review has even begun. “You first have to be able to develop what you’re proposing,” Miller said. “And then you have to go through the planning and the review process from there.”
To industry participants accustomed to development timelines, those steps may appear obvious. To residents encountering a proposed data center for the first time, they may not be.
Miller argues that this procedural gap contributes substantially to distrust. An early zoning or conditional-use hearing can be interpreted as approval of a finished project when it may instead be one stage in a longer process involving design review, utility questions, engineering changes and additional public oversight.
The OIX framework is intended in part to make that decision-making environment more legible. It also encourages local officials to distinguish between the questions directly within their jurisdiction and those requiring engagement with utilities, counties or other entities.
Land use may be a municipal responsibility. Power allocation or water supply may involve a separate authority. Local leaders, Miller said, should nevertheless be able to obtain that information and use it to inform their decisions. The goal is not fewer questions. It is better-directed ones.
When Opposition to AI Becomes Opposition to Data Centers
That distinction becomes especially important as AI enters the debate. Miller said community resistance increasingly extends beyond concerns traditionally associated with data center development — land, water, electrical demand, noise, construction and taxes — into broader anxiety over artificial intelligence itself.
“Most opposition is about more than the data center itself,” she said.
In many public debates, the two have effectively become synonymous: data center means AI, and opposition to aspects of AI becomes opposition to the physical infrastructure enabling it.
Miller does not dismiss those concerns. She acknowledged significant unresolved questions surrounding AI and the guardrails governing its deployment.
But she argues that debates over AI governance and debates over local land use should not be treated as the same thing.
AI policy may ultimately be shaped substantially at the state and federal levels. A planning board considering whether an industrial parcel is suitable for a data center is confronting a different question.
The confusion is understandable. AI companies themselves have sent conflicting messages about automation, employment and the technology’s broader societal effects. Meanwhile, consumers increasingly interact with AI through cloud services, search engines, productivity tools and social platforms without necessarily seeing the digital infrastructure behind those applications.
For communities, that makes the physical data center an unusually visible proxy for a much larger technological transformation. And it puts additional responsibility on both developers and public officials to explain what is actually being proposed.
Community Engagement Has to Begin Before the Application
For developers, Miller sees an equally important lesson: engagement cannot begin once the project is effectively finished.
The OIX framework itself is designed for municipalities and elected officials. Through iMiller Public Relations, however, Miller also works with developers on community engagement, and she argues that the process should begin before an application for conditional use is submitted.
That means learning who actually lives and works in a community, understanding its business base, studying the history of the site and identifying the concerns of elected and planning officials.
It also means meeting people before asking them to approve anything. Listening sessions, open houses, Chamber of Commerce meetings, business forums and community webinars can all play a role.
But Miller emphasized that the important word is listening. “You cannot go to those events with a final design that is ready for publication or application,” she said.
If engagement occurs only after the design, customer commitments and benefits package have already been settled, the exercise can look less like consultation than presentation.
Miller contends that developers need to allow community feedback to change the project. That may require showing stakeholders specifically what was heard, explaining what changed as a result and repeatedly mapping where the project sits in the approval process.
It also means avoiding generic community-benefit packages.
A developer cannot assume, for example, that every municipality wants a new park. One community may prioritize workforce development. Another may need educational investment. Another may care more about road improvements, tax structure or preservation of particular land.
“All of those listening sessions do result into outcomes that are clear indicators of what that community needs,” Miller said.
That is a markedly different approach from treating community engagement as a communications campaign designed primarily to overcome resistance.
Social License Is Also a Project-Execution Problem
There are limits to communications. Residents concerned about electrical rates, water availability, construction impacts or the economic value of a project will eventually expect evidence rather than messaging.
Miller acknowledged that reality. Developers, she said, must enter markets with a clear understanding of their political and social risk and then build trust throughout the project lifecycle.
That includes providing increasingly detailed information as project specifications mature, explaining how power, water and noise issues will be addressed, and showing how community concerns are reflected in revised plans.
It also requires discipline about where projects are proposed in the first place. “Not all data center developments should be built,” Miller said.
That may be one of the more consequential observations in the conversation. Miller said her firm will decline work from developers seeking help rezoning certain properties for data center use.
Agricultural land or other sites requiring major land-use conversion may simply be inappropriate when existing industrial and redevelopment properties are available.
By contrast, previously industrial land, heavy commercial areas where permitted and brownfield sites can provide opportunities to repurpose land already devoted to intensive economic activity.
For an industry increasingly concerned with earning social license, this shifts the conversation upstream.
Community acceptance does not begin with the message explaining a project. It begins with whether the project belongs on that parcel in the first place.
AI Is Moving Faster Than Municipal Government
Even communities and developers that follow those principles face a deeper structural problem: the clocks are running at different speeds.
The AI infrastructure market is attempting to respond to semiconductor roadmaps and compute demand measured in months. Municipal comprehensive plans, zoning rules and major development decisions were built around considerably longer cycles.
Miller described a technology market in which chip platforms can turn over in periods ranging from months to a couple of years, placing pressure on an infrastructure industry already struggling to digest each generation of hardware.
Data center investment and development cycles historically operated on a much longer horizon. AI is compressing that relationship.
“That’s also putting pressure in the entire development lifecycle,” Miller said. “And I don’t think that we can keep up with that.”
There may be no clean solution. Developers cannot simply ask communities to abandon responsible review because accelerator roadmaps are moving quickly.
Communities, meanwhile, risk writing policies for a technology and infrastructure landscape that may have changed materially by the time those policies take effect. That makes advance planning more important.
A municipality that has already determined where digital infrastructure may be appropriate, what questions developers will need to answer and what infrastructure its own businesses require is in a better position than one beginning that conversation after a 200-MW or 500-MW campus has already been proposed.
What an Infrastructure-Ready Community Looks Like
Miller’s longer-term vision is for digital infrastructure to become a normal part of comprehensive planning rather than an exceptional land-use category addressed only when a developer arrives. Five years from now, she argues, communities should have already identified where different types of digital infrastructure belong — and whether certain types belong there at all.
A community with sufficient land, transmission infrastructure and other resources may choose to designate areas capable of supporting large AI campuses. Another municipality may determine that hyperscale development is inappropriate but still plan for colocation, carrier hotels, edge infrastructure or smaller facilities supporting local demand.
Inference could add another dimension. As AI workloads move beyond centralized model training toward applications serving businesses and users, the infrastructure requirements may diversify.
Miller believes communities should therefore be thinking not only about today’s hyperscale AI factories but about the smaller facilities that could eventually support more distributed AI services. That planning should also extend beyond land use. Municipalities should be asking local hospitals, manufacturers, employers and other institutions how they expect to use digital systems in the future.
The question becomes not simply whether residents want a data center nearby, but what digital infrastructure the community’s own economy may eventually require.
Miller warned that communities rejecting infrastructure without understanding those requirements could create competitive consequences for local businesses that depend on connectivity, cloud infrastructure and increasingly AI-enabled services.
That does not mean every city needs a hyperscale campus. It means every community needs to understand its place in the digital infrastructure system.
Planning Before the Pressure Arrives
The data center industry’s community challenge is sometimes framed as a communications problem. Miller’s argument is more demanding.
Some of the problem is education. Some is AI anxiety. Some comes from confusion around the development process. But some opposition reflects questions developers genuinely need to answer — about land, water, power, construction, community value and whether a project belongs where it has been proposed.
Frameworks cannot eliminate those conflicts. What they can potentially do is move the conversation earlier. A community that has already debated where digital infrastructure fits into its long-term vision is less likely to confront those fundamental questions for the first time at a packed public hearing over a specific development. A developer that knows those expectations before acquiring land or finalizing plans is less likely to discover them after millions of dollars and months of work have already been committed.
The pace mismatch between AI and municipal planning will remain. Semiconductor development will not slow down to match zoning calendars, and responsible public decision-making cannot simply accelerate to match a GPU release schedule.
The more practical answer may be preparation. For communities, that means understanding digital infrastructure before the project arrives. For developers, it means understanding the community before the application does.
