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GAINESVILLE, Va. — On Friday night, dueling candidates for a board of supervisors seat in this suburban county found a cause that united them: banning new data centers.
“I think we should, personally, block all future data centers,” said Patrick Harders, the Republican running for an open seat on the Prince William County board. George Stewart, his Democratic opponent, agreed that “the crushing and overwhelming weight of data centers” was a crisis, with massive companies “having us, as residents, pay for their energy.”
As electricity bills rise, a growing number of US candidates in both parties are pointing to the high energy costs of data centers — booming thanks to tech companies’ AI investments — as the culprit. While the issue isn’t yet a flashpoint in statewide races, it’s already an overwhelming source of debate in local ones, especially in Virginia.
With the space and energy demands of data centers roiling town and county politics, critics in both parties have rebelled against what, in his May veto of a regulatory bill, outgoing GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin called an “immense opportunity for localities across the commonwealth.” There’s now bipartisan support for bills that would slow the centers’ growth.
But the GOP nominee to succeed Youngkin is sticking with him. In this fall’s closely-watched gubernatorial race, Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears has said that the centers are “here to stay” and blamed higher energy costs on liberal policies. Democratic nominee Abigail Spanberger has argued that tech companies should “pay their own way” for electricity.
Neither nominee has gone as far in curbing growth as many suburban DC legislators and activists want. They see some of the world’s wealthiest companies getting plugged into the grid without locals reaping the benefits. Some Virginia elections have turned into battles over which candidate will be toughest on data centers; others elections have already been lost over them.
“My advice to Abigail has been: Look at where the citizens of Virginia are on the data centers,” said state Sen. Danica Roem, a Democrat who represents part of Prince William County in DC’s growing suburbs. “There are a lot of people willing to be single-issue, split-ticket voters based on this.”
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Last week, in their only televised debate, Spanberger and Earle-Sears only briefly touched on the topic of data centers. The Democrat said that they were coming to Virginia one way or another, and “many localities want to welcome them,” but vowed to make developers and users “pay their fair share.”
Earle-Sears sidestepped the question, suggesting that if Virginians saw higher bills, it was because of Democrats’ environmental policies. (The opposing party has controlled the state legislature for the last half of Youngkin’s term.)
“My opponent’s only plan is solar and wind,” said the GOP nominee. “Well, what happens when the sun goes down?”
In other campaigns, data centers are getting a firmer veto. The specter of freeloading corporations using more space, water, and energy for AI processing has defined the race for the 30th House of Delegates district, well outside DC. Republican incumbent Geary Higgins is running on his resistance to unchecked data center construction. Democratic challenger John McAuliff blames Republicans for it.
“We need to ensure that data centers aren’t built where they don’t belong,” Higgins says in one ad. In his own ad, McAuliff accuses Higgins of “selling out” to industry lobbyists, as the camera pans over a data center looming over a suburb: “Do you want more of these in your backyard?”
McAuliff’s campaign characterized Higgins’s support from the energy and tech sector as a reason why he couldn’t be trusted to block new construction. Higgins responded with a rundown of his long local record in opposing data centers.
They came up more than any other issue when he talked to voters, McAuliff said.
“We’re dealing with the biggest companies on the planet,” he said. “So we need to make sure Virginians are benefiting off of what they do here, not just paying for it.”
Faiz Shakir, an adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders and the founder of the progressive group More Perfect Union, said many Democrats were sleeping on an issue that has ignited grassroots activists. More Perfect Union has worked with data center opponents in multiple states, sharing similar stories of worry about energy costs and resource waste; Sanders has begun asking attendees of his “Fighting Oligarchy” meetings about AI and data centers, and has found little political support for them.
“For any Democrat who wants to think politically, what an opportunity,” Shakir said. “The people are way ahead of the politicians.”
Roem and other critics of data center growth see a few obvious goals in Virginia if Spanberger wins — though the would-be governor has not climbed on board with all of them. (The data center boom has been good for electrical workers, whose union endorsed Spanberger.)
She could close a loophole that allows tech companies to be taxed as bank clients. She could resurrect a law that got bipartisan support in Richmond, only to be blocked by Youngkin, that would require more assessments before data centers can be built.
But Elena Schlossberg, a co-founder of the Coalition to Protect Prince William County, said that when she recently attended a Spanberger fundraiser to ask about data centers, it felt to her “like [the candidate] was figuring out a way to answer that question and not say a whole lot.”
Schlossberg said she intends to support Spanberger, seeing no change in the GOP gubernatorial ticket’s data center position. But in Gainesville, she showed up to the candidate forum to support Harders, the Republican — because he had the stronger stance against data centers.
She used a black Sharpie to scrawl “Democrats for” before his name on her campaign shirt.
Room for Disagreement
For a story earlier this year on how “NIMBY” politics were threatening data center expansion, Semafor’s Rachyl Jones talked to Kevin Miller, Amazon Web Services’ vice president of global data centers. Miller contended that the company seeks a dialogue with local officials wherever it builds a new project.
“We connect and listen to residents and local leaders by taking their feedback and incorporating that input directly into our development and operational processes to improve our data center community presence,” Miller said.
David’s view
There’s bipartisan support for building data centers and for granting companies incentives to build them locally. The center-left Abundance movement likes them; you can’t have a progressive future without cheap energy and endless data. The pro-business GOP likes them; every new center counts as an investment in their states.
So it makes sense that the opposition is bipartisan, too. I can see the outlines of a nationwide populist cause here, uniting NIMBYs who don’t want enormous corporate campuses in their communities with AI skeptics who don’t think local economies should depend on the industry.
Virginia’s elections are mostly being fought on lines that both parties are comfortable with: federal government firings for Democrats, and transgender rights for Republicans.
But as energy bills go up, Republicans are trying to blame progressives for trying to phase out fossil fuels. Democrats seeking their own answer are starting to respond with “data centers,” asking whether voters want their costs to go up to help Meta or Amazon.
There’s data to back up the latter argument, and it’s only getting more popular.
Notable
In a report for Good Jobs First, Kasia Tarczynska studied the revenue states were already losing to tax incentives for data centers. “The industry’s high-velocity growth, combined with the virtually automatic structure of the state tax exemptions, is preventing states from making accurate cost projections.”
For Inside Climate News, Deep Vakil and Charles Paullin looked at the reasons why data center regulation had stalled in Virginia. “Nineteen of the 33 bills were primarily sponsored by Democrats, while Republicans were the primary sponsors of the other 14. Geography, rather than politics, helps explain who pushed for change.”