Residents in Adams and Brown counties near Cincinnati have organised a petition proposing to amend Ohio's constitution to ban datacentres larger than 25 megawatts, preventing giant hyperscale sites from springing up anywhere in the state. The petition, submitted to the Ohio Attorney General's office on Monday, gathered about 1,800 signatures in eight days, exceeding the minimum 1,000 required by state law.
The push stems from frustration over a planned facility in Mount Orab, Brown County, where council members signed non-disclosure agreements that prevented them from sharing details about the project with locals. That lack of transparency has become a focal point of concern. Ohio state representatives Brian Stewart and Adam Bird have proposed legislation prohibiting county, township, and village officials from signing non-disclosure agreements, with Bird stressing he is looking for transparency, not a way for state lawmakers to meddle in local development decisions.
The Ohio initiative reflects a genuine democratic instinct: communities should have a voice in infrastructure decisions that affect them. When developers operate behind closed NDAs, they create suspicion. A transparent process, where locals understand what is being built, why, and what the costs and benefits are, strengthens public confidence in decision-making. The problem is not that datacentres exist, but that residents have been kept in the dark.
However, the constitutional amendment approach raises serious questions about how to govern development fairly. A 25-megawatt limit would effectively block most modern datacentres from being built in Ohio. This is functionally a statewide ban, not a zoning guardrail. Such blunt instruments can create their own problems. Supporters would need to gather about 413,000 valid signatures by July to place the amendment before voters this November. If the effort succeeds, Ohio would be foreclosing an entire industry from its borders permanently.
The calculus matters economically. Datacentres do generate tax revenue and can create jobs. They also consume enormous quantities of electricity and water. The trade-off is real, and different communities may reasonably disagree on whether it is worth accepting. But whether a constitutional ban is the right tool depends on whether Ohio has exhausted more measured alternatives: strict zoning rules, mandatory environmental impact assessments, developer commitments to cap water and power consumption, or binding community benefit agreements.
In cities and townships across Ohio, proposed datacentres are roiling public hearings and raising difficult questions about electricity, water, and noise, with state lawmakers on both sides of the aisle offering measures acting as guardrails or speed bumps for datacenter development. That legislative approach is happening in parallel with the constitutional petition.
The Ohio backlash is not an outlier. A February analysis estimates that 30 to 50 per cent of the datacenter capacity expected to come online in 2026 may not be delivered on schedule, reflecting permitting challenges and increasingly organised local opposition. Communities in at least 14 states have enacted temporary pauses on datacenter development, with the moratorium movement jumping from local town boards to state legislatures in early 2026, threatening to reshape the national permitting landscape.
Opposition to datacenter development cuts across political lines, with Republican officials often raising concerns about tax incentives and energy grid strain, while Democrats tend to focus on environmental impacts and resource consumption; this cross-party resistance marks a rare area of bipartisan alignment in infrastructure politics. That alignment suggests genuine underlying concerns rather than partisan posturing.
A nationwide poll found only 44 per cent of Americans would welcome a datacenter nearby, making them less popular than gas plants, wind farms, or even nuclear facilities. Public anxiety about energy costs is particularly acute. Many of these projects are being negotiated behind closed doors with non-disclosure agreements that prevent the public from knowing how much water or energy a project will use, or what public subsidies are involved.
For Ohio residents, the constitutional amendment route offers certainty: if it passes, large datacentres simply cannot be built. For policymakers, the challenge is to preserve that certainty about community consent while still allowing for development where both local and state interests align. That might mean stronger transparency rules, mandatory public scrutiny before NDAs are signed, and clear caps on resource use. It might mean accepting that Ohio will not host hyperscale datacentres, and that is a choice the state can legitimately make.
What should not happen is development in darkness. Whether Ohio chooses a constitutional ban or tighter regulatory guardrails, the petition has served its purpose: it has forced the issue into the open and demanded that decisions about major infrastructure be made with community consent, not despite it.