Rural America is turning on the AI data center boom. Pew Research Center finds 67% of planned US data centers are now slated for rural areas, a sharp inversion of the 87% of existing capacity sitting in cities and towns. More than 160 AI-focused data centers have been built across the country in the past three years, a roughly 70% increase in the national total, according to Bloomberg.
The economic stakes are large enough that the Trump administration cannot ignore the backlash. Data centers drove 80% of US private sector growth in the first half of 2025, S&P Global estimates, propping up GDP figures and underwriting tax breaks at the state and federal level. They have also become flashpoints in counties that swung Republican: 78% of US counties dependent on agriculture voted for Donald Trump in 2024, per Investigate Midwest's analysis of election data.
In Tazewell County, Illinois, farmer Michael Deppert helped kill a Western Hospitality Partners project roughly eight miles from his land after residents packed council meetings and circulated petitions. Deppert, who runs the local farm bureau, worried the site would tap the same aquifer he uses to irrigate corn, soybeans and pumpkins. "You just can't lay down and let everybody do whatever they wish," he said.
Key facts
- 01Pew Research Center finds 67% of planned US data centers are in rural areas, versus 87% of existing capacity in urban ones.
- 02More than 160 AI-focused data centers have been built across the US in the past three years, a roughly 70% jump in the total, per Bloomberg.
- 03Data centers accounted for 80% of US private sector growth in the first half of 2025, according to S&P Global.
- 04Meta's DeKalb, Illinois site is permitted for 1.2 million gallons of water per day; meter data shows it averages around 40,000 gallons.
- 05Roughly two-fifths of US data centers sit in areas of high water stress, S&P Global says, and 78% of farm-dependent counties voted for Trump in 2024.
Similar fights are breaking out from West Virginia to Indiana, where shots were fired at a state lawmaker's home alongside a note reading "no data centers." Miquel Vila, lead analyst at Data Center Watch, a research project run by AI security firm 10a Labs, said "rural communities have become a target." Even in Texas, agriculture commissioner Sid Miller has warned that "the unchecked spread of data centers onto prime farm and ranch land is a real and growing threat to our food supply."
“Data centers drove 80% of US private sector growth in the first half of 2025, even as 67% of planned builds shift to rural areas where 87% of existing capacity used to sit in cities.”— Jaeden Schafer
The land-market math is rearranging rural economics. Jason Bell of JLL said parcels with grid capacity, such as in parts of New Jersey, can fetch five to 10 times more than comparable land without power access. Curt Covington of AgAmerica said developers are "bidding up the price" for farmland, and that farmers in development corridors will often sell once offers hit roughly 1.5 times property value.
For some growers, that premium is the whole point. Outside DeKalb, Illinois, Jamie Walters has leased hundreds of acres for solar panels and contracted to supply renewable power to nearby data centers, including a half-built Meta campus visible from his fields. An acre of corn nets about $100 in a good year, he said; an acre under solar generates thousands. The Walters family has farmed the same ground for five generations.
Walters also runs a whiskey distillery, which makes water quality a live concern, but said he is "cautiously optimistic" after a second developer, Edged, committed to a closed-loop cooling system. "It's change," he said. "But I'd rather be inside the process than standing on the outside saying no." Other farmers see only loss. In Yorkville, near Chicago, Bob Stewart said it is "sad to see" the region's black soils "get turned into development," and worries inflated land prices will block his children from expanding the farm.
Water is the other pressure point. Roughly two-fifths of US data centers sit in areas of high water stress, per S&P Global, and Heather Cooley of the Pacific Institute notes that data center and agricultural demand both peak in summer. "Adding another large load at peak capacity puts a lot of strain on the system and adds cost," she said. DeKalb itself, a city of about 40,000 people, uses just over 3 million gallons of water a day on average and as much as 4.5 million at peak — roughly the draw of a single large AI campus.
Meta's DeKalb facility is permitted for 1.2 million gallons per day, but meter data shared with the Financial Times shows it averages closer to 40,000 gallons. Mayor Cohen Barnes likened the load to "a dormitory when the university is in session," arguing the consumption is lower than nearby Northern Illinois University's student housing. Environmental groups counter that disclosure has been thin. The Sierra Club's West Virginia chapter is tracking four projects, none of which have published detailed water plans, and most of which intend to build their own gas-fired plants.
Jim Kotcon, who chairs the chapter's conservation committee, said he is "not opposed to data centers per se" but insists they must be "done right." Otherwise, he warned, counties risk depleted aquifers, new air pollution and stranded assets if the AI buildout slows and developers walk away. Those concerns are converging with political ones: Republican strategists are watching the same farm-belt counties that delivered Trump's 2024 majority and weighing whether AI infrastructure becomes a midterm liability.
The split has the makings of the next durable fight in US AI policy. Hyperscalers need rural land and rural power to train and serve frontier models, and equity valuations from Meta to the broader cloud cohort assume that pipeline lands on schedule. The economics for individual landowners are good enough that the buildout will not stop — Walters and others will keep signing leases — but the permit-by-permit grind is getting slower, more expensive and more political.
That points to a more fragmented map than the one Big Tech has been pricing in. Expect more closed-loop cooling commitments, more behind-the-meter gas plants drawing Sierra Club lawsuits, and more state legislatures writing rules that look nothing like the open-arms posture of 2023. The AI infrastructure thesis still holds, but the cost curve gets steeper the deeper it pushes into farm country, and the companies that learn to negotiate with the Michael Depperts of the world will build faster than the ones that do not.
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