Jennifer Wortz, a Republican State Representative from Michigan, has said that she is authoring a bill to impose a state-wide, one-year data center moratorium.

In a January 29 interview with local radio station WTVB, Wortz said that the bill, which is set to be co-authored with Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Leonard, would give the state “more time to do some research and analyze these facilities and the best locations for them.”

Wortz wants to ensure that data centers aren’t “put in places like rural communities like ours where it's going to take more land and infrastructure to do so.

“Let’s keep rural America rural, and reuse some of these brownfields that are sitting empty in cities like Detroit, in Flint, in Benton Harbor, where they’ve had a huge loss of business and industry over the last twenty, thirty years.”

This is one of many data center moratoriums being considered by state legislatures across the US that seek to address opposition to and uncertainty towards data centers.

Although no state currently imposes a state-wide data center moratorium, such proposals are being considered in Oklahoma, Georgia, Maryland, and Virginia.

Many local authorities across the country – such as councils or townships – have introduced some form of data center moratoria, including in Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Kansas, Ohio, Tennessee, Missouri, Idaho, and Pennsylvania.

But the political popularity of the data center issue does not mean that all the proponents of data center moratoria are united in their reasons for opposition.

Independent senator Bernie Sanders, who called for a data center moratorium in December, seemed more concerned about the end goal of building more data centers for AI, citing worries about deepening wealth inequality and job displacement.

Others are more worried about bread-and-butter issues like higher utility rates, which can spike to cover the cost of new transmission capacity for a new data center.

There are also those who are concerned about preserving the character of their neighborhoods. Like State Representative Wortz, they link their opposition to data centers with their opposition to green energy.

“I just think we need to be smart about it… We’ve seen huge fields go to solar arrays, and with that, we have to develop capacity to transfer that energy and battery storage facilities to store that energy, and so it just continues to be an erosion of land use,” said Wortz.

“[This is] land that is good, productive, agricultural farmground.”

In October, Saline Township, which is located some 45 miles (72km) west of downtown Detroit, settled a lawsuit with data center developer Related Digital that allowed its 250-acre project to proceed, provided that the construction of a solar farm was prohibited.