SemiAnalysis: Just 2.3 GW of US Datacenters Delayed by Moratoriums

More than 300 towns, cities and counties have voted to halt datacenters over the past year and a half. SemiAnalysis puts the actual delay at roughly 2.3 GW, against a projected 38 GW of new US datacenter IT capacity in 2027 and 22 GW already under vertical construction.

The gap between the count and the megawatt impact is definitional. 'A moratorium only matters to our forecast if it applies to a specific project, covers the project's parcel, and blocks an approval,' the authors write. 'If you miss just one of these, the moratorium is irrelevant.' Of the 20 GW of planned capacity sitting inside a restricted boundary, only 1,525 MW is directly delayed at the local level, which the report puts at 7.6%.

New York does most of the rest. The state has stopped issuing environmental permits for datacenters; the executive order touches roughly 1.4 GW of projects, of which SemiAnalysis counts about 0.8 GW as facing meaningful delay. Michigan leads the local count with 45 enacted moratoriums, and Ohio has 40, with 83% of those adopted in 2026. Named sites include an AWS campus in Ohio, STACK's Lithia Springs project in Georgia, a NorthPoint campus in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and a Google-linked project in Michigan.

The politics are worse than the megawatt math. The report cites 46% of voters viewing datacenters unfavorably, 24% very unfavorably, and 29% favorable. Moratoriums, it argues, are an easy way for elected officials 'to demonstrate that they are responding to community concerns' without necessarily blocking a specific parcel.

The piece is bylined Maya Barkin, Reyk Knuhtsen, Jeremie Eliahou Ontiveros, and Dylan Patel. It slots into a long run of AI infrastructure stories we've been tracking, and it was moving through infrastructure analyst circles the day it landed.