NIMBY blocks our future

First, an apology: I haven’t published here in several weeks. I’ve been completely swamped, both professionally by a gouvernemental mission and personally with preparing for my Private Pilot License. Let’s get back to Substack.

In Rovaltain, in the Drôme region of France, a group of local residents has just filed an emergency injunction with the Grenoble administrative court to block the construction of the largest AI-dedicated data center in France. It’s symptomatic of a phenomenon that keeps gaining ground. On paper, France could aspire to become an eldorado for hosting data centers, and that ambition is highly desirable. The Rovaltain project is the first building block of a national plan worth €52 billion in investment by 2030. It aligns with the momentum of the Choose France summit a fex weeks ago, which just announced record investment in AI and data centers. The problem is that since February 18, a petition to annul the building permit has been before the administrative court, and the “AssezDC Rovaltain” collective has now added an emergency suspension request to halt the start of construction. This isn’t only a French issue. In the United States, between May 2024 and March 2025, up to $64 billion of data center projects were delayed or blocked by local opposition, and project cancellations quadrupled last year. “Not In My Backyard” (NIMBY) has become a major risk factor for 21st-century infrastructure.

Are the opponents’ arguments baseless? Theirconcerns deserve to be heard but they cannot, on their own, block decisions of national interest. A large data center consumes a great deal of water and electricity; that’s true. These are real constraints that deserve serious technical answers. The International Energy Agency estimates that a single ChatGPT query consumes ten times more energy than a Google search, ok. But the core problem with NIMBY is its asymmetry: the benefits of data centers are vast but diffuse (national competitiveness, digital sovereignty, indirect jobs), while the constraints are intensely local and highly visible. The result: local residents organize their opposition with formidable efficiency, while those who benefit from the infrastructure have no reason to mobilize. It’s a structural failure of local democracy in the face of the general interest.

Is NIMBY specific to data centers or a deeper malaise affecting all of  major infrastructure? It’s a deep malaise, and France and elsewhere in democraties. The NIMBY phenomenon keeps gaining ground in many forms: residents’ committees, petitions, demonstrations, demands for counter-expertise, systematic legal challenges. In France, Notre-Dame-des-Landes airport was the most famous example, but you could also cite offshore wind farms, high-voltage power lines, incinerators, logistics warehouses, reintegration centers, farms, prisons. Every time, the same mechanism: a project in the collective interest, an organized local opposition, legal challenges that drag on for years, and often abandonment. The cost of this paralysis is enormous and rarely measured in delayed investment, in lost competitiveness, in a slowed energy transition. The solution is not to abolish the right to legal recourse. It’s to deeply reform the procedures so they are faster, more transparent, and so the general interest can genuinely weigh against particular interests. Without that, France (and other countries) will keep voting for ambitious transformation plans and letting them die in administrative courts.