Silicon Valley and Washington sees data centers as the backbone of America’s AI future. Residents who live next to them see giant, humming boxes that throw diesel exhaust into the air, drive up energy costs, and steamroll the look and feel of their neighborhoods—“a plague,” as Virginian anti-data center activist Elena Schlossberg put it.
“If you live near a data center that’s being powered by these gas turbines, you simply cannot imagine living there,” she said. You can “hear the noise” in your home, added Schlossberg—who got into the fight a decade ago while trying, unsuccessfully, to stop Facebook from putting a data center next to her property.
Virginia has long been the biggest data center hub of not just the country but the world, with northern Virginia alone hosting 13% of the globe’s data centers in 2023, according to a government report. And for just as long, residents have been locked into battles over what that footprint means for their communities.
Now, Schlossberg is leading a Virginia nonprofit group, Save Prince William County, to fight against the encroachment of even more data centers to power the AI boom. Data center power demand is expected to rise five-fold over the next decade, Deloitte projects; reaching 176 gigawatts, the same amount as Australia and the United Kingdom’s entire power grids combined.
AI infrastructure builders, and the tech giants that plan to rely on the future data centers, argue that they’re essential to unlocking AI’s economic benefits. But in some of the states slated to house these projects, many of them politically purple-ish or even red—Virginia, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania—voters are revolting, often successfully keeping them out of their neighborhoods. Indeed, in elections held last month, opposition to data centers helped tip elections in Democrats’ favor in Virginia and Republican-leaning Georgia.
“Folks realize they’re getting duped,” said Kerwin Olson, executive director of the Citizens Action Coalition, an environmental advocacy coalition based in Indiana. “It’s not just something they hear on Fox News or MSNBC anymore. It’s happening in their own backyard.”
Big Tech companies, Olson added, are showing up at local planning commissions and drainage boards asking for “huge giveaways”— tax abatements, zoning variances, special exceptions —”all to build a $3 billion box that creates maybe 30 jobs.”
“So they’re like, what’s in it for us?” Olson asked.
Upcoming political battles
The first signs of what could be a broader political reckoning are appearing at the county level. In Prince William County—home to the fight over a proposed 2,000-acre “Digital Gateway” development near the Manassas battlefield—data centers have already forced recalls, resignations, and primary defeats of elected officials, Schlossberg said. The issue has become so radioactive that candidates in both parties now treat opposition to data-center expansion as a prerequisite for running, she added.
“It’s never been red versus blue,” Schlossberg said. “It’s people who live here versus people who want to industrialize where we live.”
That county could be a canary in the coalmine for what comes next, as Democrats and Republicans approach critical midterm congressional elections in 2026. Across key swing states, activists say the next wave of AI-driven projects will collide with a public that is far more organized and hostile than it was even two years ago.
That tension is beginning to creep into politics. In Indiana, legislators publicly tout the state’s new data-center incentives while privately warning counties that the projects are not without tradeoffs. In Virginia, candidates now get asked—at libraries, at farmer’s markets, even at high school football games—whether they would support a temporary moratorium.
Olson said his group has been “buried” in calls from Hoosiers in every corner of the state—red, blue, rural, suburban—asking for help deciphering tax abatements and utility filings. “I’ve worked on energy issues for decades,” he said. “I have never seen anything like the scale of anger over this.”
When voters see those consequences firsthand, Olson said, they stop caring about geopolitical talking points. “You can tell people this is about beating China,” he said. But when their bill goes up, and their kids are sleeping in basements with headphones on because of the noise, they’re not thinking about China.
At the heart of the backlash is a basic economic question that data-center backers haven’t convincingly answered: Why should the public subsidize infrastructure that serves some of the world’s richest companies?
Indiana’s first filing under its new “80/20” law—touted as a safeguard to make data centers pay most of the costs—still leaves ratepayers actually footing nearly 40% of the bill, Olson said. The organization he runs, Citizens Action Coalition, did an analysis that revealed that Hoosier households paid 17.5% more in utility bills in 2025 than the previous year. In Virginia, residents fear they will ultimately finance the transmission lines and new generation needed to serve hyperscale facilities.
“The public utility model was always a social contract,” Schlossberg said. “The data-center industry blew that up.”
In many ways, the backlash boils down to a trust problem. Residents don’t trust Big Tech, seeing the hyperscalers as being like “robber barons at the turn of the century” but with unprecedented demands for land, water, and power. Olson pointed to NDAs, closed-door negotiations, and local officials dining with tech consultants as signs that decisions are being made over communities’ heads and without local voters’ input. Layered onto that is a broader skepticism of AI itself: Many voters aren’t convinced they should remake their towns for what still feels like an unproven or overhyped technology.
“It’s like the Gilded Age, part two,” Olson said. “Only bigger.”
