The Conserve Ohio proposal would set a state constitutional cap so low that 1,000+ MW projects now in Ohio's pipeline would effectively be banned.
Five minutes outside Manchester, Ohio, in a rural stretch of Adams County near the Serpent Mound, Danielle Kinhalt did not think of herself as political. Then a developer began floating a 1.3 gigawatt data center nearby, a facility that would draw more power than most Ohio cities use at peak. Now she circulates petitions, according to a Wednesday writeup of the campaign.
Kinhalt is part of a statewide drive by Conserve Ohio to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot that would cap new data centers at 25 megawatts. Twenty-five megawatts is roughly the load of a small hospital complex. The proposals currently advancing in Ohio, by contrast, regularly run from 1,000 megawatts upward, sizes that consume as much electricity as a mid-size American city. Under the proposed amendment, every project in that pipeline would be effectively barred. The 25 MW threshold is the cap Conserve Ohio lists on its numbers page, and the county-by-county inventory kept by Stop Ohio Data Centers shows how concentrated the proposed build-out is in rural counties including Adams.
The point of that contrast is structural. Organizers are not trying to stop one bad neighbor. They want a line written into the state constitution so that neither county commissioners, utilities, nor out-of-state developers can site facilities at this scale without a vote of the people. The Ohio Attorney General certified the amendment's title and summary in March 2026, clearing the way for signature collection under the state's ballot-access rules. Ballotpedia tracks the proposal) as the Ohio Prohibition of Data Center Construction Amendment.
On Wednesday, Conserve Ohio acknowledged that the campaign will miss the July 1 deadline to qualify for the November 2026 ballot and is now aiming for November 2027. Under Ohio's ballot-access framework, signatures collected within ten weeks of submission do not expire simply because a filing window slips, and the campaign has been canvassing at community events including the Friends of Serpent Mound Summer Solstice Celebration in Adams County in late June. Organizers frame the delay, per the local writeup, as a regrouping rather than a retreat.
The grievances driving volunteers like Kinhalt are not abstract. Cleveland.com reported in April 2026 that Ohio data center deals have been negotiated in unusual secrecy, with tax abatements and exemptions shifting infrastructure costs onto existing ratepayers. Organizers add water draw, often from rural aquifers that double as drinking supply, to the list of concerns the proposed amendment is meant to put in front of voters.
What the amendment asks, in plain terms, is whether Ohio voters should have the final say on siting decisions that local zoning boards and the state legislature have so far declined to block. The 25 megawatt threshold is the constitutional hook. Any facility above it, whether marketed as cloud computing, AI infrastructure, or general-purpose data hosting, would require either a vote of the people or a separate constitutional amendment to proceed. The next operational test is signature math. Conserve Ohio must collect signatures equal to a statutory threshold set by the Ohio Attorney General, distributed across at least half of Ohio's counties. The group's own count frames the gap in volunteer-hours and county coverage rather than raw totals, and whether the 2026 to 2027 slide reflects signature shortfall or strategic timing is something the campaign has not publicly detailed.
For Kinhalt, the stakes are local. The proposed 1.3 gigawatt facility, five minutes from her home, would change the character of Adams County more than any single project in her lifetime, she says. If the constitutional route is the only one left to a small Ohio town, she intends to walk it.