The fastest-growing movement in the country is running on almost no institutional money, and it's effectively fighting against some of the world’s most rapacious billionaires.

It is an organic, grassroots movement to stop AI data centers. Data centers not only raise electricity bills, they are draining water often already in short supply, drive pollution and emissions, and are routinely negotiated in secret.

Communities have figured this out faster than local governments, and with stunning success, local groups are winning their campaigns against data center projects all over the country.

Fund the organizers and trainers who can turn 833 local fights into a coherent national and international movement without flattening what makes each one local. And fund fast.

Opponents successfully blocked or delayed at least 75 projects worth roughly $130 billion in the first quarter of 2026, matching all of 2025 in three months. Active opposition groups more than doubled to 833 across 49 states. Legislators filed more than 300 data center bills in the first six weeks of the year.

None of this came from a philanthropic strategy, but rather from neighbors and unlikely allies in church basements and county planning hearings.

Movements at this stage have energy and passion. And they have potential and momentum. But what they don't have is the resources that can sustain a strategic fight. No staff to hold momentum between hearings, no legal defense when developers sue, no trainers to turn a first-time zoning meeting attendee into an organizer, and nothing linking the fight in Prince William County to the ones in Hancock County, South Jersey, Dublin, and Santiago.

The anti-fracking movement and the coalition behind the Inflation Reduction Act were both built in part on early philanthropic bets on local and national organizing. Data center resistance can follow the same pattern, but only if the money shows up while the moment is live.

As the most significant institutional funder of non-violent, disruptive climate activism, Climate Emergency Fund directs resources where grassroots energy, public concern, and campaign opportunity most clearly align. Right now, that is the AI data center resistance. So far in 2026, more than a third of our granted support has gone to groups planning campaigns around data centers and AI. Our venture philanthropy model moves early-stage funding to new groups fast, sometimes before they have a name, and stays close through what we call intensive accompaniment. The data center fight rewards exactly this approach, because the decisive moments are rezoning votes and permit hearings that will not wait for a grant cycle.

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