Data centers are being developed faster than the rules meant to govern them can evolve. Communities are pushing back on rising power bills, air pollution, strained water supplies and constant noise. Grid operators are warning about reliability. Governors and county boards are improvising, from moratoriums to new permitting rules, because Washington has no framework, even as the industry asks for one.Without one, the country risks stalling tools central to its competitiveness, or building them at the expense of the communities next door.

Governors and communities in both parties are raising the alarm. 

We’ve seen this before

A century ago, the airplane was years ahead of the rules governing it. Pilots followed rail lines and roads a few hundred feet off the ground and in low-light, they landed by bonfire.

The United States invented the airplane but had no national aviation policy, and Europe was pulling ahead. In 1925, President Calvin Coolidge convened a board to study aviation for national defense. The findings were blunt: aviation was essential to the country’s defense, civil aviation served a national purpose, and the public would not trust it until the federal government set standards for the aircraft and the people flying them. Congress answered with the Air Commerce Act of 1926, which put the Commerce Department in charge of commercial flight.

By the late 1930s, the country had four major airlines and well over a million air passengers a year. When aviation outgrew the Commerce Department, Congress consolidated oversight into a single independent agency in 1938 and then again in 1958 under the FAA, which moved quickly to strengthen air traffic management and safety rules. As the industry kept growing, Congress added safety, noise and emissions standards to protect the communities living beneath the flight paths. Each framework was designed to keep the country competitive and secure while protecting the public, and the industry grew up inside them.

Data centers are at the bonfire stage, but we don’t have decades to get it right.

The warning signs, and state response

In May, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation issued a Level 3 alert, its most serious, warning that sudden swings in data center demand threaten the stability of the grid. Last month, Pennsylvania’s Public Utility Commission reported that the largest grid in the country will miss its reliability standard starting next year.

Governors are responding the only way the current system allows. Some, for example, are imposing moratoriums of up to a year on new hyperscale facilities, while others like Virginia removed future large data center projects from its fast-track permitting process, allowing developers to develop community benefits agreements, protect grid reliability, and meet standards on water, pollution, noise control and local hiring. The “blanket response of no” or forge ahead unbridled are more of a short term political response. The “maybe, but here’s what you have to do” is the beginning of a responsible framework.

Why we can’t just say no

Data centers house the computing power that underpins American competitiveness, our national security and, increasingly, the everyday digital lives. They will be built, but the questions are how, where and who will benefit? Our responsibility is to set the terms.

AI has quickly become a matter of national security and global competitiveness. The country that leads in artificial intelligence will help write the rules of the global economy for generations, and the U.S. will need all of it: cloud computing, the everyday AI tools Americans currently use, and the most advanced systems that can propel society to its highest levels or possibly destroy it as we currently know it.

Simply put, to stay economically competitive, America needs computing power that matches or beats its adversaries’. The debate over the most advanced AI systems will keep playing out in national security circles. Our focus is more immediate: the infrastructure behind the ordinary AI tools that a quarter of American adults now use daily.

So we must charge forward, but not with a one size fits all approach. Facilities differ in cooling technology, load profile, footprint and demand for water. Community needs differ across the nation and they should have a say in how they participate. The fit should be a deliberate choice, not an imposition. Here is what that choice looks like done well.

Start with the community

With a pragmatic and fair approach, data center infrastructure can operate from a combination of baseload fuels, battery storage, and renewables, while prioritizing community needs and impacts. Communities should not shoulder the costs of water infrastructure, interconnection and transmission upgrades. As a matter of fact, under the right conditions, data centers can leave the grid stronger than they found it while simultaneously providing significant co-benefits to the community, if we hold them to that standard.

Industry has made this harder than it needed to be, and it’s a story we’ve seen before. After the fracking boom, some pipeline developers raced for market share and cut corners on siting, restoration and appearance. Projects that communities had originally welcomed were suddenly met with fierce opposition, and companies had to improve. Today, data centers are on the same path. In Northern Virginia, much of the noise neighbors complain about comes not from the buildings but from the gas generators running behind them.

Much of these are solvable problems, if the right people are engaged to ensure that the community is involved from the onset. The appropriate parties should negotiate a community benefit agreement, transparently , that puts value back into the community and makes lasting changes that fit its unique needs, such as replacing aging water and electricity infrastructure, lowering costs for affected residents, and building a trades curriculum at the local high school. These are just examples, but residents across generations can point to exactly what the data center gave them: students graduating ready for jobs in their local facilities, and infrastructure built to sustain.

We’re seeing this model take shape in Virginia, which would require local approval of any data center using more than 25 megawatts of power, regardless of prior approvals, and would ban nondisclosure agreements that keep communities in the dark. It’s also a model that has outlasted a change in party. Governor Spanberger, a Democrat, is building on the groundwork laid by her Republican predecessor, Glenn Youngkin, rather than tearing it up. Under this approach, a developer with a sound project has nothing to lose, and the community decides which projects fit best and how they should benefit residents.

The right facility suits its site. A closed-loop plant that recirculates its cooling water, set on a remediated industrial parcel behind an enforceable setback and a noise standard, makes an unobtrusive neighbor. Such facilities successfully operate today, prioritizing community leadership, transparency, compensation and quiet all at once. Ultimately, it is in the best interest of the companies themselves to put people and communities first, allowing everyone to benefit from this new technological frontier.

Where we stand

None of this enforces itself, and today no one is positioned to enforce all of it. The federal government currently regulates a snack cake more rigorously than it regulates some of the infrastructure that now underpin the economy. Data centers are permitted through a patchwork built for a different era: pieces at EPA, FERC, the Army Corps, state utility commissions and county zoning boards, with no one responsible for the whole.

The patchwork

The patchwork isn’t working. Infrastructure on this scale needs a dedicated body that can keep pace with the technology and draw on the expertise already spread across existing agencies. To be clear, its job would be AI infrastructure, not AI itself. It would hold developers, hyperscalers, and utilities each accountable for their part and require projects to answer to the communities that host them. With one entity in charge, no community slips through the cracks.

One of us is a smaller government Republican who is cautious about the call for a new bureaucratic entity to serve as the point for coordination, while the other is a Democrat who agrees but is clear eyed about the muscle required to compete globally and at home. Together, we propose putting oversight of AI and digital infrastructure, the infrastructure and the power behind it, under one roof.

Data centers will not follow aviation’s path exactly, but the shape of this moment is familiar. For the security of our country, the strength of our economy, and the trust of our people, it’s time for a national guardrail with a community touch.

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