Take This Data Center and Shove It

[Celerity]

Americans ain’t puttin’ up with these things no more. Welcome to Virginia, ground zero for data center defiance.

https://prospect.org/2026/06/02/jun-2026-take-this-data-center-and-shove-it/


Loudoun County has one of Virginia’s highest concentrations of data centers. Credit: Ted Shaffrey/AP Photo

In mid-April, a week before Virginia voters narrowly passed new congressional maps in response to Republican gerrymandering, groups of landowners and land preservationists in Northern Virginia quietly won a state appeals court battle against a deep-pocketed consortium of developers. They had sued the county over failing to follow state regulations about posting public notices involving a data center project. Between the redistricting vote, Virginia’s legislative budget impasse over data center taxation, and state and federal lawmakers caterwauling from Washington to Richmond and back again, it’s not surprising that a suburban county court case didn’t really penetrate the dystopian news cycle.

But a screwup that derails what would have been the world’s largest data center is worth unpacking. Zoning applications and hearings are some of the most combative, tedious, yet vital happenings in cities and towns. They are also relentlessly ignored by most residents, who never read those public notices, much less know where to look for the clues about parcels of land being sold or new builds that affect their lives and property. Some real estate developers often count on this disinterest. But something as simple as failing to adhere to regulations about posting a public notice can upend an entire project.

That’s what happened in Prince William County, Virginia, a Washington suburb, when the Board of Supervisors, the county’s policymaking body, mishandled public announcements for what at the time would have been a huge campus, the equivalent of about 12 dozen Walmart superstores. That was a surprising but welcome development for county residents, who have been incensed that more harms might be foisted on their communities. In just the past couple of years, support for data centers has plummeted in the state and beyond. Northern Virginia is the country’s largest data center market, and it’s become ground zero for an upsurge of defiance, especially against the next-generation infrastructure that supports artificial intelligence.

In an era of poisonous politics, Democrats, Republicans, and independents have found common cause over the value of tax breaks worth billions to Big Tech companies worth trillions. What residents see in exchange are higher electricity and water rates, a paltry number of new permanent jobs, and a host of unsavory environmental impacts, from the desecration of green spaces, erasures of wildlife habitats, and air and noise pollution. The public outcry has had a serious impact: Across America, at least 25 different data center projects were canceled last year, and half of all data centers expected to open in 2026 will be delayed or simply canceled, according to reporting from Bloomberg.

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[MustLoveBeagles]

1. They're pushing for one in Springfield IL

I'm opposed. Our infrastructure already can't keep up. Hell to the No!

[SCantiGOP]

2. There is another side to it

No data centers, no future growth of the internet.
And I think the water issue is far more important than the electrical side. Most companies now acknowledge that they will have to build some sort of non-fossil fuel generation with their centers in the future.

[highplainsdem]

3. The race to build more data centers is about AI, not the interner. And AI is destroying the internet -

ripping off websites while depriving them of traffic and ad revenue, and filling the internet with misinformation from AI-generated answers.

Analysis Finds That Google's AI Overviews Are Providing Misinformation at a Scale Possibly Unprecedented in History
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100221159857

[Scruffy1]

5. Even with solar or wind they suck.

There is the 24/7 noise and the heat they generate. They can raise the mean temperature close to them by !0 degrees Centigrade (18 F) and the heat effect has a 8 kilometer radius. I am not convinced they are all that necessary, but that gets long and complicated. Per haps new technology could make the current ones obsolete.

[OGBuzz]

10. A neighbour to one of these described it as living within earshot of a busy airport that never sleeps..

I wonder if these people will be compensated for their crashing property values. Just kidding, we know the answer is no.

[littlemissmartypants]

8. Where's your proof of that assertion?

[eppur_se_muova]

11. The big buildout of the Internet took place a couple of decades back. For a while, fiber optic was a huge growth market.

Then companies like Global Crossing laid down so much fiber that demand couldn't possible pay for the money already invested, and a lot of fiber optic companies collapsed. Corning lost something like 95% of its value. We still have all the Internet capacity we need. AI will only burden the Internet, not speed it up or increase its capacity.

We shouldn't encourage any growth in AI for the same reason we shouldn't encourage any growth in spam emails.

[dlk]

4. A massive surveillance machine is being set up right under our noses

Most Americans are unaware.

[Karasu]

6. There's a reason why the fascists love this shit and are trying so hard to prevent it from having ANY regulation at all.

[DET]

7. I Feel Sorry for Loudoun County

They’ve gotten the worst of this, especially Ashburn. Loudoun has a highly educated population and is very wealthy (in fact, it’s the wealthiest county in the country), which should give it some clout in these battles in the future.

Virginia’s previous governor Glenn Youngkin refused to allow any meaningful restrictions on data centers, and local politicians welcomed the tax revenue (and political contributions), so the number of data centers in Virginia exploded. Hopefully, Governor Spanberger will take a more reasonable position on this issue. I can’t imagine opening the front door and seeing what had been a bucolic landscape replaced by an enormous data center right across the street.

[littlemissmartypants]

9. There are several interesting points in the article:

A couple:

The Data Center Coalition, the leading industry group, is also at the negotiating table. The sector’s lobbying arm represents the hyperscalers, who don’t always play nicely with the organization’s smaller companies. The undisputed heavyweight in Virginia politics, however, is Dominion, a major political donor that has contributed to Lucas’s and Scott’s campaigns, and to Spanberger’s 2026 inaugural fund.

“They definitely benefit in a major way from having a huge data center demand on the horizon that helps them do what they do best, which is to build very expensive capital infrastructure on which they earn a return,” says Brennan Gilmore, executive director of Clean Virginia, a clean-energy and government accountability group. Dominion has conveniently blamed data centers for rising electricity costs, Gilmore adds, and the utility wants to see the costs transferred to them.

...

Meanwhile, grassroots opposition to data centers continues to surge. By the end of last year, analysts at Data Center Watch had found local opposition groups in 42 states. Small towns like Canton, North Carolina, were issuing moratoriums on construction. Port Washington, Wisconsin, overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure in April giving residents more say over data center development projects. And other rural Virginia communities, like Appomattox County, are in open protest.

Candidates have put data centers at the forefront of their campaigns, and woe to those who defy voters. Global headline writers proclaiming Maine as the first state to implement a data center moratorium didn’t reckon with Gov. Janet Mills’s (D-ME) veto pen. Mills wanted to save a data center project at a former paper mill site, and the legislature failed to overturn her veto. Destined to be unpopular, her decision pretty much confirmed that she had given up on her Democratic Senate primary fight against first-time candidate Graham Platner, a popular oysterman. She quit the race soon afterward.

Thanks for the discussion, Celerity.

❤️