The riskiest thing on a data center job may not be the schedule. It may be the county commission meeting.
Local opposition to data centers is hardening across the country, and the contract language is shifting quietly to match. Some owners are now trying to push the consequences of that opposition onto the builder. Contractors can’t stop a moratorium. They can stop signing for one.
The risk actually being transferred
Contractors can’t eliminate the risk of community opposition, but “there are things they can do to avoid becoming the insurer of that risk,” said Mark Carter, a partner at the law firm Buchalter.
That framing is exact. Opposition shows up as permit delays, rezoning fights, water and power conditions attached late in the process, noise limits that reorder the construction sequence, and in the worst case a stop that runs for months. If the contract offers no clear excusable-delay path for any of it, the GC has written an insurance policy against a political outcome it doesn’t control and isn’t being paid to underwrite.
Where it bites
Three clauses are worth reading twice. Force majeure definitions that list weather and labor actions but say nothing about permit revocation or injunction. Liquidated damages that run regardless of what caused the delay. And the schedule baseline itself, when it quietly assumes an entitlement date the owner hasn’t actually secured.
The fix isn’t exotic. Name the events, put them in the excusable-delay column, and tie the notice requirement to something a field team can realistically comply with at 6 a.m. on a Tuesday.
This is not going to get easier
Data centers now drive most of the growth left in private nonresidential construction, and they land in communities that increasingly understand what a large load does to a local grid and a water table. Public hearings draw crowds they didn’t draw three years ago. Referendums happen. Projects are crossing borders partly because of it.
None of that reverses because the AI buildout would prefer it to. Contractors bidding this work should assume opposition is a normal project condition, and price the contract accordingly.