Inside One Ravenna Resident’s Fight Against Data Centers

When new data center proposals rapidly bubbled up in Ravenna and other parts of Northeast Ohio in 2026, city resident Will Hollingsworth felt a push to get involved.

“I have moral obligations. I have environmental obligations,” Hollingsworth says. “And as a tech person, I have ethical obligations to where I feel like I need to speak out on this.”

Hollingsworth, who works at Reed Memorial Library, stepped to the podium at a Ravenna City Council meeting in April to share their story with a crowded room of council members and concerned residents. Hollingsworth once worked as a programmer who trained an artificial intelligence program to eventually replace their position at a mattress company. In their speech, they detailed research about data centers’ energy demands on local electrical grids, extensive use of water used to cool servers and environmental concerns around the Great Lakes Basin amid a global rise in artificial intelligence use.

“I am not a cynic when it comes to technology,” Hollingsworth said in their speech. “I believe that a drop of clean water for a Ravenna child is worth more than a billion AI-generated images.”

The speech resonated with viewers online, going viral on Hollingsworth’s TikTok channel with more than 600,000 views. It has circulated in a variety of posts and shares; on X, a video share by user @PicturesFoIder was viewed more than 360,000 times. The video has been cited and covered by national media outlets like Futurism and Yahoo, bringing a national spotlight onto Ravenna’s data center battle.

“It was a stroke of luck. Suddenly, everybody has heard my speech,” Hollingsworth says. “It has proven that this might be one of the very first, in a long time — at least in the last 10 years — actually bipartisan issues where it's more important than party lines. This is more important than supporting a red or a blue candidate. This is about the environment. This is about our health.”

After public comments and discussion, Ravenna City Council voted to approve a temporary moratorium preventing new data centers from being built. It joins a rising number of towns with temporary data center moratoriums in Northeast Ohio, including Lordstown, Painesville, Wellington and Twinsburg. (Hollingsworth also spoke at a Twinsburg City Council meeting ahead of its vote.)

Meanwhile, other parts of Northeast Ohio are navigating controversial data center plans. According to news reports, protesters have packed meetings in both Perry Village and New Russia Township, where data center megasites have been proposed. According to Data Center Map, Ohio currently is home to 205 data centers, mostly clustered around Columbus. The Greater Cleveland area currently has 25 data centers.

A moratorium on data centers is being considered by Cleveland City Council, after proposals to construct or expand data centers in the city’s Slavic Village and Downtown neighborhoods. Council member Charles Slife proposed the moratorium at an April 27 meeting, citing Office of the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel data, which shows that some large data centers can use as much electricity as 100,000 homes. He says that there could be better economic investments in the city's industrial areas.

“There's precedent within this body in establishing moratoriums for uses that have evolved faster than we've been able to update our various municipal regulations,” Slife said at the meeting. “To that end, this ordinance, if passed, would afford Cleveland City Hall an opportunity to analyze land use and establish regulations that are in the common good.”

On a statewide level, Ohio Residents for Responsible Development is gathering signatures to put the data center issue on the November ballot. The proposed amendment would limit the size of new data centers that can be built in Ohio, banning anything larger than 25-watt data centers.

Hollingsworth supports the petition, calling it a compromise that prevents the biggest data centers from settling into Ohio.

“The ones that they're proposing to build, these massive ones, they can go anywhere in the hundreds to the thousands of megawatts. So, 25 megawatts is a real, actual, discernible cap on these things,” Hollingsworth says. “We’re still giving in to progress, but you have to keep them within these certain parameters.”

After two speeches at city councils, Hollingsworth hopes to go on a speaking tour in Northeast Ohio to speak with more communities about concerns around data centers and to help slow down the aggressive speed at which data centers are being built.

“My end goal is not to become a podcast grifter,” Hollingsworth says. “My end goal is to actually evoke some kind of change.”

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