Five Data Centers Got Voted Down. Not One by a County Board.

Here is a short list worth keeping.

• Provo, Utah — the city council denied the rezoning (Daily Herald, 11 March 2026)
• East Vincent Township, Chester County, Pennsylvania — the Pennhurst data center rejected (Philadelphia Inquirer, 22 May 2026)
• Naperville, DuPage County, Illinois — the city council denied the Karis plan for the old Lucent campus (ABC7 Chicago)
• San Marcos, Hays County, Texas — the city council blocked the proposal (Texas Public Radio, 18 February 2026)
• Rochelle, Ogle County, Illinois — the city council rejected it unanimously (WIFR, 28 April 2026)

Four city councils and one township. Not one county board.

The refusal and the restriction are different jobs

The industry has spent two years learning to read county posture, and it was the right thing to learn: the county is where moratoria get adopted, where setbacks and acreage caps get written, where a whole jurisdiction closes at once. That work is not wasted.

But a county pause and a municipal refusal do different things to a project, and only one of them is aimed at you specifically.

A moratorium is a policy. It applies to a category, it runs for a stated term, and it is aimed at nobody — which is exactly why boards find them easy to pass and why they so often arrive before any application does. A refusal is a decision. It happens after somebody has filed, spent money, hired counsel, sat through a hearing and lost, and it happens in the room where the land actually is.

If you are screening at county resolution, every place on that list looks like open country.

Look again at where the five sit. DuPage County has no county-level data-center restriction. Neither does Ogle, nor Hays, nor Utah County, nor Chester. Screen those five counties on posture and they come back clean. Every one of them contains a municipality that voted a data center down.

Why counting refusals is the wrong instrument

There is a tempting shortcut here — count the refusals, divide by the applications, call it a rejection rate — and it produces a number that means almost nothing.

A denial is the one outcome in the whole siting process that reliably leaves a document behind. Minutes, a roll call, usually a local news story. Almost nothing else does. A developer who reads the room at a pre-application meeting and never files leaves nothing. A rezoning that dies in committee leaves an agenda item that goes quiet. An option that expires unexercised leaves a private contract nobody publishes. And a county that adopts a moratorium stops an unknown number of projects that were never announced in the first place — the pause is the only trace they ever had.

So the projects that get recorded as refused are the ones that got far enough to be killed in public. That is a narrow and unrepresentative slice of everything that gets stopped, and any rate built on it is measuring disclosure, not risk.

What to do with this instead

Screen at municipal resolution inside metro counties. County posture is the right unit for rural greenfield, where the county is the zoning authority that matters. It is the wrong unit inside a metro boundary, where the city or the township holds the pen — and metro is where the sites with fibre and substation capacity are.

Treat the moratorium map as the stop signal. Counties with a pause on the books tell you far more about where projects are being prevented than any count of refusals, because the pause is what prevents the application that would have become the refusal.

Assume you are seeing the survivors. The five above lost in public. The ones that never filed, or withdrew before a vote, or quietly let an option lapse, left nothing for anyone to find. Price the process accordingly: the visible failure rate is the floor.

Read the room the refusals came from. Provo, Naperville, San Marcos, Rochelle — four councils in four states with nothing in common except that a data center asked, and the answer was no. That is not a regional pattern. It is a national mood arriving one council chamber at a time.