Roughly 30 of Indiana's 92 counties now restrict data centres, up from 12 three weeks earlier, the fastest county-level acceleration this sector has recorded. 1 The most recent baseline was Boone County's one-year moratorium on 15 June, then the twelfth such jurisdiction in the state . In the weeks since, counties have watched their neighbours and acted in turn, with no statehouse behind them.
Indianapolis broke the pattern. Its Metropolitan Development Commission, the body that regulates zoning in the state capital, voted 5-3 on 1 July to advance new siting rules rather than freeze approvals outright. Residents at the hearing had pressed for a full moratorium while those rules were drafted; the split vote shows how contested even the middle path has become.
Thirty counties acting independently is harder for an operator to fight than one state bill, because there is no single defendant to sue and no single veto pen to lobby. A statehouse ban leaves one target; a patchwork of ordinances leaves dozens, each cheap to pass and slow to overturn. That is the structural reason the centre of gravity in this fight keeps sliding downward, from federal curtailment to state tax to county zoning.
