Hi everyone, we're Julia and Anuj, co-founders of Spark AI.

TL;DR

See who decides your permit, and how they'll vote, before you break ground

Every data center in America has to get through a local zoning board before it gets built. We mapped and tracked every jurisdiction, project, and land use regulation in the country, and we just launched Stakeholder Intelligence, a tool that tells you who's deciding your permit, their voting history, and what's likely to happen next. If you're developing (or powering) data centers, or know someone who is, we want to talk.

❌ The Problem

Data centers land next to real communities: people who didn't ask for a giant, humming building showing up in their backyard. A lot of them fight it.

That fight runs entirely through local politics: county boards, township councils, zoning authorities. Real people with real voting histories, some of whom love solar and hate data centers, some the reverse, and it shifts constantly.

• Data centers are having the roughest time of any large-scale asset class right now. 42% of gigawatt-scale data center projects announced in 2025 have already run into a local moratorium, suspension, legal challenge, or permit denial. That's not an edge case anymore, it's closer to a 50/50 bet.
• And it's accelerating. Within six months of announcement, ~24% hit that same wall in 2025, nearly triple 2024's rate (8%) and more than triple 2023's (7%).

Federal and state policy get all the coverage. But the actual bottleneck on AI compute buildout sits in a Tuesday night meeting in a county most people can't find on a map, and almost nobody tracks it systematically. Developers either fly someone out to sit through hours of public comment, or they pay consultants a lot of money to tell them what already happened last month.

✅ How Spark Works: Stakeholder Intelligence

Stakeholder intelligence surfaces every board member, commissioner, officer’s past decisions, meetings and votes from our databases and web search agents running across the country.

https://youtu.be/-YclcbrBUh8

We watch the game tape for you. For every authority in the US, you get the meeting video, the transcript, the decision, and our summary of what actually mattered. Topics covered, who said what, what got decided. What used to take someone three hours of watching public comment now takes about thirty seconds of reading.

NIMBY tracking. We score every county in the country on data center permitting posture: moratoriums, zoning rules, sentiment grounded in local news coverage, and utility interconnection posture. That rolls into a tier and a score, so you know before you sign a lease whether you're walking into a fight.

Alerts. Ordinances change, moratoriums get proposed, projects move. We tell you when it happens instead of you finding out from a headline.

Backstory

Julia grew up in and around factories, in the supply chain corridor between Asia and Latin America, before building data and search infrastructure for Apple's Siri team. Anuj spent a decade financing and building energy infrastructure, at the Department of Energy, SunEdison, and EVgo, before founding his last company, Dataherald (YC W21).

Who We Work With

Alphabet (Intersect), NextEra, DE Shaw Renewables, Nodiac, and a set of world class developers and Fortune 500s carrying over 200GW of pipeline between them.

How You Can Help

If you or anyone in your network is developing data centers, large or small, we want the intro. We're especially trying to connect with people close to Terawulf, Vantage, Equinix, CyrusOne, and Digital Realty.

Reach us at founders@sparkhq.ai. Or happy to jump on a call: calendar link.