Twinsburg, Ohio passed a unanimous one-year data-centre construction ban this week. Ypsilanti, Michigan's utility authority instructed water and sewage staff to refuse new connections for industrial data-centre projects for 12 months, a separate legal mechanism from a zoning moratorium and one without an established challenge pathway, because the authority is not granting or refusing a planning permit; it is simply declining to extend a service. Good Jobs First counts at least 12 US states with active moratorium bills filed in the 2026 session, and dozens of municipalities now moving local construction pauses on the same template language. Vermont's S.205 would freeze AI data centres until July 2030, the longest moratorium proposed in any US state.
The template repetition matters. Good Jobs First's tracker shows shared bill text appearing across at least a dozen state filings, which suggests coordinated drafting by a community-rights network rather than uncorrelated local opposition. Capstone DC's late-2025 client notes had flagged this jurisdictional fragmentation risk and forecast state-bill failure rates above 75 per cent, on the working assumption that governors would consistently kill the statewide versions. Mills's Maine veto held that pattern, and the muni-tier filings document the consequence rather than a substitute.
Ypsilanti's utility-authority pathway carries the heaviest weight of the three. A planning moratorium can be challenged at the state Land Use Court or its equivalent; a service-denial decision sits inside utility law and faces only the much narrower test of whether the authority acted within its enabling statute. If Ypsilanti's denial survives the first legal challenge, the model spreads to every municipal water board, sewer commission, and electric co-op in the country that is sitting on a pending data-centre interconnection request. That is several thousand decision-makers, none of whom face an executive-veto pen.
