In Ahwatukee, homeowners are holding meetings every two weeks to organize against a planned data center near 48th Street and Chandler Boulevard. One resident said the project was “in the wrong place” and would affect the neighborhood day to day.

Opposition has also surfaced in Flagstaff, where a speaker told officials that the proposed land use was not compatible with the city. At a separate gathering, one critic summed up the sentiment: “People over profits.” A data center near Luke Air Force Base in Glendale was approved despite community opposition, according to local reporting.

Data centers are large buildings, or groups of buildings, that house servers and other computing equipment. Kevin Hamlen, a computer science professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, said they support both data storage and computing tasks. A video call, for example, may rely on data center servers to record and process it.

Companies centralize computing because they expect it to be more efficient as demand grows, Hamlen said. But he cautioned that the benefits have not been sufficiently studied. “We’re doing a lot of guessing right now,” he said, calling for standards and rigorous research.

As more projects are proposed, residents are raising questions about the scale and suitability of the facilities in their communities. Hamlen said those questions are important and that more research is needed to answer them.