City council meetings are bursting into conflict as local residents try to keep AI data centers out of their backyards. As the Wall Street Journal reports, Amazon exploited 45-year-old zoning laws in Gilroy, California, to start construction on a data center without any residents knowing for five entire years. A single city staffer, the community’s development director, greenlit Amazon’s 438,500-square-foot data center, which spans 56 acres of former farmland. However, frustrated residents weren’t mollified, demanding to at least be made aware of big unfolding projects like the data center. More on data centers: AI Data Centers Are Causing Unfathomable Amounts of Air Pollution, and It Gets Worse With Each New One They Build