Naperville, Illinois killed a 200,000-square-foot data center project in a 6–1 vote after heavy neighborhood pushback.
The site would have anchored more power and cooling capacity in an existing tech corridor, likely attractive for GPU-heavy AI workloads.
Residents prioritized local impacts over promised tax revenue and union construction jobs, signaling that community tolerance is now a hard constraint on data center siting.
The council overrode its own plan commission, which had recommended approval, showing political risk can overturn technically vetted designs.
Karis Critical framed this as a lost “best-in-class” facility, but the core issue was proximity to homes, not the data center’s technical specs.
For AI infrastructure builders, this is another data point that suburban infill near residential areas is becoming politically fragile, regardless of economic upside.
Worth reading in full for how local sentiment and process can derail otherwise standard data center expansion.
Source: Naperville City Council rejects plan for data center after months of debate | WGN-TV
