They are becoming increasingly organised and building an expanding national network linking areas facing similar development issues. The government’s new strategy puts data centres on a par with military installations in terms of regulatory preferential treatment, said Morgan Butler, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center. The strategy “threatens to discourage states and localities from adopting strong ordinances to help limit the development of data centres,” he told Context/Thomson Reuters Foundation. ‘Hyper-local focus’The United States already hosts nearly half of the world’s data centres - about 5,400 - due to a massive build-up in recent years. Actions by residents in northern Virginia have swayed elections, prompting some proposed data centre operations to shrink in scale, she said.