The West is building the backbone of the digital economy. Data centers are rising across Utah, Arizona, Nevada and the wider region because the same things that make the West a good place to generate power — land, ambition, and leaders who want to say yes to growth — make it a good place to house the computing that runs modern life. But a new report from the Bipartisan Policy Center delivers a warning worth heeding: the surest way to slow this build-out is to leave the communities that host it out of the conversation.
Released July 29, the BPC's Key Considerations for Data Center Development is the product of a five-month effort that convened more than 150 participants — local and state officials, developers, hyperscalers, utilities, consumer advocates, agricultural interests, environmental groups and affected residents — across roundtables in Houston, San Francisco, Kansas City and Washington, D.C. It is not a call to slow down. It is a practical blueprint for building fast and keeping public support, which in the long run is the only way to keep building at all.
The stakes: an economic engine meets a trust problem
There is no serious debate about the upside. Republicans, Democrats and business leaders alike treat continued American leadership in artificial intelligence as an economic and national security imperative. The numbers back them up: AI-related investment — data center construction, chips, software and R&D — accounted for an estimated 39% of U.S. GDP growth over the first nine months of 2025, outpacing even the IT boom of the dot-com era.
The problem is that the trust needed to site these facilities is eroding even as the demand for them soars. BPC documents a striking shift in public opinion — strong opposition to a nearby data center more than doubled between August 2025 and May 2026, from 24% to 55%, and a Gallup poll found roughly 70% of Americans opposed to a data center in their area. That sentiment has teeth: 54 local moratoria have been enacted around the country, and incumbents seen as too friendly to unpopular projects have been voted out of office. BPC calls the risk plainly — developers can lose their "social license" to build.
Five considerations, one theme: no surprises
BPC distills its findings into five key considerations for anyone advancing a data center project: transparency and communication; power and water; quality of life; land use and environmental impacts; and economic development. These are not top-down mandates. They are the questions a community and a developer should work through together, early, so that a project's benefits and burdens are on the table before the first permit is filed.
For the West, three of them hit especially close to home. Power and water is the obvious one: in the Permian Basin and across water-stressed Western counties, residents worry that data centers will outcompete farms and households for a scarce resource, and ratepayers worry about footing the bill for new infrastructure. BPC's answer is not to say no — it is to insist that large loads pay their fair share, that costs are allocated to those who cause them, and that well-capitalized developers help fund the grid and efficiency upgrades that aging systems need anyway. On land use, the report favors a "build up, not out" approach that steers projects toward brownfields and previously disturbed land rather than active farmland. And on economic development, it draws the honest line the West already understands from energy: distinguish the temporary construction boom from lasting jobs, and tie tax incentives to verified outcomes — local hiring, real investment milestones — rather than paying out on projections alone.
This is the market-competitive path
None of this is a brake on growth. It is how growth becomes durable. The West has learned this lesson in energy again and again: the projects that get built and stay built are the ones that arrive with a clear account of what the host community gets in return — construction and operations jobs, property tax revenue for rural counties, and infrastructure that outlasts any single facility. The Western Way's own economic impact studies across Arizona, Colorado, Nevada and Utah have documented exactly how that math works for energy development.
Data centers, the largest new load on the grid, are simply the next test of the same principle.
BPC's report lands at the right moment for a region already leading on the underlying fundamentals. The same governors modernizing the grid through WestTEC and PACT, and the same permitting reforms making the West a place where infrastructure can actually get built, are what make responsible data center growth possible in the first place. The next step is making sure the communities that host these projects are partners in them — not afterthoughts. Get that right, and the West doesn't just win the AI race. It wins it in a way that lasts.