In the last decade, Eve & Co has had a front-row seat to two moments that, on the surface, seem unrelated: the 2019 collapse of Amazon’s proposed second headquarters in Long Island City and the growing backlash communities are expressing today toward data centers and digital infrastructure.

They are, in fact, deeply connected.

When Amazon launched its search for a second headquarters, it was framed as a triumph of innovation and economic promise. Cities across the country competed publicly and enthusiastically. States assembled bids. Leaders lined up. The process was breathless, data-driven, and in retrospect remarkably confident.

And yet, despite extraordinary resources, political support, and technical sophistication, the project unraveled. Not because the idea lacked merit, but because the process overlooked something far less quantifiable: community legitimacy.

The lesson from Long Island City was not that growth is unwelcome or that technology companies should retreat from cities. It was that scale and certainty can become liabilities when they replace listening. When decision makers assume outcomes are inevitable, they often stop asking the most important questions, not about tax incentives or square footage, but about lived experience.

Today, we are watching a similar dynamic emerge around data centers. Data centers are essential. They underpin modern healthcare, finance, transportation, and the digital economy itself. Few people dispute their necessity. What communities are reacting to is not the infrastructure, but the way it is arriving, rapidly, opaquely, and often without meaningful local engagement.

What feels familiar is the assumption that necessity equals acceptance. It does not. In the Amazon HQ2 process, there was an implicit belief that political alignment and economic logic would carry the day. Governors, mayors, unions, and editorial boards were on board. Community voices came late, if at all. When opposition surfaced, it was treated as noise rather than a signal. That was the mistake.

The same risk exists now. As data centers move closer to urban areas, driven by latency requirements, energy efficiency, and proximity to users, they are intersecting with communities that are already stretched. Residents are asking practical questions. What does this mean for water, energy, housing, noise, and land use. Who benefits locally. Who absorbs the disruption. When those questions go unanswered, frustration fills the gap.

And the costs of getting this wrong are no longer hypothetical. Recent tracking of canceled and delayed projects suggests that nearly 100 billion dollars in planned data center investment has already stalled or collapsed, often because permitting, local opposition, or breakdowns in trust were addressed too late in the process.

What makes this moment especially fragile is that data centers often offer fewer visible benefits than past infrastructure projects. They generate enormous value, but relatively few jobs. That mismatch heightens skepticism and raises the bar for engagement, not lowers it.

History shows us that public backlash rarely comes from ignorance. More often, it comes from exclusion.

The failure of the Long Island City headquarters was not inevitable. It was the result of a process that moved too fast, listened too little, and assumed consensus rather than building it. That experience should have been instructive. Instead, we risk repeating it at a larger scale, across more communities, with higher stakes.

This is not an argument against ambition or investment. It is an argument for humility. Infrastructure that succeeds does so because communities see themselves in it, not as obstacles, but as partners.

Technology moves quickly. Trust does not. When the two fall out of sync, history has a way of intervening.

We have seen this movie before. We would be wise not to pretend it has a different ending.