An attorney for Microsoft has said that “nobody really wants a data center in their backyard.”

The comments were made by Lyndi Stone, principal corporate counsel at Microsoft, who was speaking on a webinar hosted by law firm Norton Rose Fulbright titled “Data centers: Construction, contracts and debt.” (Update: Norton removed the webinar, but the comments are viewable here.)

Stone said that “where data centers used to be built more away from communities, neighborhoods, and more urban areas, as they move into these areas, then you have neighbors that are near you, and nobody really wants a data center in their backyard.

“I don’t want a data center in my backyard,” she added.

Despite representing Microsoft, which is currently pursuing an aggressive expansion of data center capacity across the US and the world, Stone’s comments directly echo the concerns expressed by many rural communities in response to data center projects that, in many cases, are often funded and supported by Microsoft.

These concerns roughly center on a few key points – rising utility bills, the impact on the environment and the neighbourhood's character, as well as procedural issues to do with the signing of NDAs and the speed with which planning proceedings are undertaken – and proposals are often denied outright or withdrawn as a result.

Microsoft has encountered many such setbacks. Just a few weeks ago, the company chose to withdraw an application for a data center in Caledonia, Wisconsin, after being met with community opposition.

CEO Satya Nadella has said that the company expects to increase its AI capacity by more than 80 percent throughout fiscal year 2026, and will “roughly double” its data center footprint over the next two years. The hyperscaler also said that it had stood up around 2GW of data center capacity in 2025 alone, and its recent quarter saw capital expenditure surge by 50 percent quarter-on-quarter to $34.9bn, around $11.1bn of which was spent on data center leases.

Stone also touched on concerns about jobs, saying that “data centers, once they are operational, don’t bring a lot of jobs. They do on the construction side, but not really getting a ton of that community benefit from having a data center really, truly in your backyard.”

Data center developers often list the number of jobs that any given facility will provide, but locals often raise concerns that most of these jobs are temporary, require a great deal of specialization, and will therefore benefit contractors from outside the community.

In response, Shelley Eichenlaub, counsel for Norton Rose Fulbright, said that this was an issue that owners could get in front of, saying that “global supply chain constraints can be remedied with some level of local support where that’s an option.”

“There’s heavily specialized equipment – you can’t go buy a transformer in the town square – and you’re not going to be able to solve that problem. But for the more support-minded features of property construction, you could certainly look more locally for that.”

Stone also spoke to the challenges of building data centers in these communities, saying that “government officials, who are elected by their community, certainly want to make their constituents happy, and you, in turn, have to make your constituents happy so that you can still get your permit and you can still operate there.”

Opposition has become particularly widespread amidst the AI boom. Data center operators seeking fast power connections have shifted their focus from traditional metropolises to smaller rural communities. The nascence of the data center markets in these locales is borne out by the fact that many authorities need to include ‘data centers’ as a land use case in their planning regulations before a site plan can ever be considered.