Residents of a New Jersey city mobilized within days to kill a planned data center ¡ª and now activists nationwide want to know how they did it.

Grassroots resistance to these computing fortresses is spreading across the United States, even as Big Tech pours hundreds of billions of dollars a year into artificial intelligence infrastructure, pushing new projects into communities from coast to coast.

Sixty-five kilometers from the New York skyline, rubble still litters a vacant lot in New Brunswick ¡ª bordered by a railway line on one side and homes on the other.