AI data-center restrictions pass 500 towns

U.S. local restrictions on new data centers passed 500 in July, up from roughly 300 in late June, according to Tom’s Hardware’s summary of The Information’s local-records analysis. A separate report documents officials facing threats and closing or moving public meetings, making community consent a capacity constraint alongside power and memory; developers should add permitting risk to the build schedule, not just the chip bill, as the archive’s $3 trillion data-center forecast makes clear.