A proposed $2 billion data center in Shelbyville, Indiana has turned into a public-relations crisis for the city's mayor after Scott Furgeson was caught on camera disparaging residents who oppose the project. Furgeson, gesturing at the 'No Data Center' yard signs spreading across the city, told a constituent on video that he had seen the signs 'all over town, but I only see them in shitty houses,' adding that 'most of them are rentals.' The clip, aired by NBC affiliate WTHR, has reframed a local zoning fight as a story about how city leaders talk about the people who pay the tax base for billion-dollar AI buildouts.
The woman filming pushed back in real time, telling Furgeson the sign-posters were 'working class,' while a second voice off-camera added, 'it doesn't matter whether they're rentals, they're still human beings.' Furgeson did not walk the comment back on the spot. His office later issued a one-line statement saying the mayor 'regrets that his choice of words may have caused offense' — a non-apology that does not address the underlying claim that opposition to the project comes only from low-quality housing stock.
“I've seen a lot of these all over town, but I only see them in shitty houses”— Scott Furgeson, Mayor of Shelbyville, Indiana
The $2 billion price tag puts the Shelbyville proposal in the same weight class as the hyperscale campuses that hyperscalers and developers have been siting across the Midwest over the past 18 months. Indiana has become one of the more active states for data center development, courting projects with property-tax abatements and sales-tax exemptions on server hardware. Shelbyville, a city of roughly 20,000 about 30 miles southeast of Indianapolis, fits the pattern of secondary markets being pitched campuses that would have been steered toward Northern Virginia or Phoenix five years ago.
Key facts
- 01A proposed $2 billion data center in Shelbyville, Indiana has become a political flashpoint.
- 02Mayor Scott Furgeson was caught on camera saying 'No Data Center' signs only appear at 'shitty houses' that are 'most of them rentals'.
- 03Resident Alexas Williams told NBC affiliate WTHR the mayor's comments were 'kind of disrespectful' and 'kind of hurtful'.
- 04The mayor's office issued a statement saying Furgeson 'regrets that his choice of words may have caused offense'.
- 05The episode follows New York's one-year data center moratorium and Kevin O'Leary's forced 50% downsizing of a 40,000-acre Utah project.
Local opposition has organized around the standard concerns associated with hyperscale builds: water draw, grid load, noise from cooling infrastructure, and the question of how much of the promised tax revenue actually flows to schools and municipal services after abatements. The 'No Data Center' signs are the visible end of that organizing. What the WTHR clip captures is the mayor classifying that opposition not by argument but by the property value of the houses where the signs appear.
Resident Alexas Williams told WTHR the mayor's framing was 'kind of disrespectful' and 'kind of hurtful.' Furgeson has declined further comment beyond the spokesperson's statement. The video has circulated widely enough that the project's political viability — separate from its engineering or economic merits — is now in question.
Shelbyville is not an isolated case. New York lawmakers passed a one-year moratorium on new data centers earlier this month, and Kevin O'Leary's Project Stratos in Utah was forced to cut its 40,000-acre footprint roughly in half after public backlash. Both moves followed sustained pressure from residents and local officials who argued the projects were being approved faster than the grid, water rights, and zoning review could handle. The Shelbyville episode adds a third data point: even where a project still has municipal support, the tone of that support can become the story.
“The mayor regrets that his choice of words may have caused offense.”— Mayor's office spokesperson, Spokesperson, Shelbyville Mayor's Office
For the developer behind the Shelbyville campus — not named in the local reporting — the timing is awkward. Approvals for data center projects increasingly depend on demonstrating community benefit, and the standard playbook involves the mayor at the podium next to renderings of the facility. A mayor on camera describing opponents' homes as 'shitty' makes that podium photo harder to arrange. It also gives opposition groups a quotable line that will travel further than any technical objection about megawatt draw or cooling design.
The broader pattern across US data center siting in 2026 is that the political risk has moved faster than the construction timeline. A campus that takes 24 to 36 months to build can be derailed by a 30-second clip in week one of permitting. Developers who treated community engagement as a checkbox in 2022 are discovering that the checkbox now has teeth — moratoriums in New York, downsizing in Utah, and now a credibility problem in Indiana.
The Shelbyville fight is small enough that it will not, on its own, change where the next $2 billion campus gets sited. But it is a useful reminder that the AI infrastructure buildout — the same buildout that underwrites every frontier model release and every hyperscaler capex line — runs through city councils, county commissions, and mayors who can sink a project with a single off-the-cuff remark. For the AI industry, the lesson is that the bottleneck on compute capacity in 2026 is not just chips or power. It is also whether the people living next to the substation feel respected by the people approving it.
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