The Map Nobody's Reading

Real Estate Insights. Success Mindset. One Step at a Time.

Issue #51 | May 17, 2026

🧠 Market Insights

The Map Nobody's Reading

Gallup published a poll this week on Americans' feelings about data center development.

Seven in ten Americans oppose a data center being built in their local area. 48% strongly oppose it. The opposition is bipartisan. 75% of Democrats. 74% of independents. 63% of Republicans.

Energy journalist Robert Bryce, who has tracked land use conflicts for nearly 40 years, put the acceleration in plain terms: there were 49 rejections or restrictions of data centers across the entire United States in all of 2025. There have already been 79 in the first four months and one week of 2026.

Most people in this industry are reading that as a crisis.

The Dirt Dawg is reading it as a land valuation signal.

Here's the logic. Demand for AI compute infrastructure hasn't slowed. It's accelerating. The Big Four hyperscalers committed somewhere between $630 billion and $725 billion in capital expenditures for 2026 alone. That's nearly double what they spent in 2025. That capital needs somewhere to land.

But the communities willing to host these facilities are now self-selecting at a rapid pace. Every moratorium, every rejection, every planning commission fight narrows the list of sites that can actually get built.

Fewer approvable sites plus unchanged demand equals higher value for the sites that qualify.

That's not a soft observation. That's basic supply-and-demand applied to a specific, growing scarcity.

Charlotte, North Carolina, already one of the more data center-friendly jurisdictions in the Southeast, is moving toward a 150-day moratorium. Charlotte had already done the work. Defined data centers in its zoning code. Created by-right approvals in eight districts. The council is pumping the brakes anyway. Across North Carolina alone, Durham, Apex, and Chatham County have all put in moratoriums in recent months.

The communities that will say yes are specific. They tend to have already lost something. A factory. A major employer. A tax base that walked out the door a decade ago. Those communities hear the economic argument differently than a thriving suburb that doesn't need the jobs and doesn't want the noise.

Identifying those communities before the site plan gets drawn is now a core competency in data center site selection. It wasn't three years ago.

The sites that can thread this needle are in a different pricing tier than they were twelve months ago. And most of the market hasn't caught up to that yet.

Dirt Dawg Take: The Gallup poll isn't a warning for the data center industry. It's a map. The developers and land investors who learn to read community sentiment as a site selection variable, not a PR problem, are going to find opportunities the rest of the market is walking past. The dirt didn't get harder to find. The list of communities willing to host it just got shorter. That's the play.

✨ The Alpha Effect

Opposition Is a Filter. Filters Make What Passes Through More Valuable.

Most investors see a moratorium and think: obstacle.

The better frame: the market just handed you a shorter list.

This is how scarcity gets manufactured without anyone planning it. Local governments are not coordinating with each other. They're reacting to their own constituents, their own news cycles, their own concerns about power costs, water, and noise. But the cumulative effect of all those independent decisions is the same. The pool of viable sites contracts. And the sites that survive that contraction become structurally more valuable, whether a developer is sitting across from you yet or not.

There's a version of this pattern in every market cycle. Regulatory complexity showed up first as an inconvenience. Then it became a filter. Then the people who understood it built a moat.

Community opposition is doing the same thing right now, in real time, at an accelerating pace.

The second-order question is worth sitting with. If a community is willing to say yes, what does that tell you about the community? They're usually not fighting population growth or chasing trophy tenants. They're practical. They need tax revenue. They need jobs. They have something to offer, and they know it. That combination, local willingness plus infrastructure, is the rarest thing in this market right now.

The investors who identify those communities before the hyperscalers' site selection teams do are not getting lucky.

They're doing the homework that turns a public opinion poll into a land valuation signal.

Community sentiment isn't soft data. In this market, it's one of the hardest variables to underwrite.

🚀 One Step at a Time

Action Steps This Week

1. Read the Opposition Map in Your Target Markets

Pull up recent planning commission agendas and county board minutes in your target counties. Search for "data center" or "moratorium." Communities that haven't acted yet are visible. Communities that are debating it are even more visible. The ones quietly moving toward approval are your signal. This research takes less than an hour, and most of it is public record. I’ve created a Dirt Dawg Data Center Heat Map App that will do all the heavy lifting for you. Link in the comments.

2. Identify the Communities With Something to Gain

Make a short list of towns or counties in your region that have experienced a major employer departure in the last ten to fifteen years. A mill closure. A distribution center that moved. A factory that went offshore. Those communities have elected officials who need a win. They also tend to have underutilized infrastructure and a planning staff that is capable of handling large projects. That combination is what makes a site actually buildable.

3. Price the Scarcity Premium Into Your Thinking

If you're underwriting land in a data center corridor, the moratorium map is now a valuation input. Sites in jurisdictions that have said yes, or have a clear path to yes, deserve a different price conversation than raw land banking on future approvals. Start thinking about that spread. It exists. And it's growing.

Small steps compound. The map is public. Most people aren't reading it.

Here's to building your success, one step at a time...

from the dirt up.

Kris "Dirt Dawg" McGee 🐾

The Dirt Dawg Den