I sit on an HOA board.
Eighty-six units on a golf course in Westchester. Twice a year we review applications to install whole-home gas generators. We check the decibel ratings. We schedule the weekly test runs for when the lawn crews are out so nobody complains.
It is a small vote on a small thing.
But it is a vote. The applicant doesn’t install the generator if we say no.
Now scale it.
A one-gigawatt campus needs a rezoning, a conditional-use permit, a water agreement, an air permit, road access, and a local tax deal.
Six approvals, in six different forums.
The Thing Nobody Models
The AI buildout is usually discussed as a resource problem.
Enough chips. Enough capital. Enough land. Enough electricity.
Every serious analysis of the sector asks some version of that question, and the answers are getting better.
There is another question that doesn’t fit so neatly into a capacity forecast.
Where the resources do exist, will the people who live there permit them to be used this way?
A data center can have the land, the power, committed capital, and political support and still fail before construction starts.
There is no single approval that gets it built.
And the institution with the power to stop it changes as the project moves.
So who can still say no?
