Data Centers

The issue of data centers poses tough challenges, especially relevant given that Loudoun County, in Virginia’s 10th district, is the data center capital of the country.

Two things can be true at the same time.

1. Data Centers result in some serious and ugly externalities:
   1. Rising electricity costs — areas with high concentrations of data centers have seen wholesale electricity prices climb roughly 267% over the past five years.¹ Nearly three-quarters of Virginia voters surveyed in January 2026 blamed data centers specifically for rising electricity bills.² Utilities can also pass the cost of grid upgrades needed to serve new data centers onto all ratepayers, including residents whose own electricity usage never changed.
   2. Heavy water consumption — A single hyperscale data center can consume up to roughly 5 million gallons of water a day, comparable to the water use of a small city.³ Globally, data centers are projected to consume between 4.2 and 6.6 billion cubic meters of water annually by 2027, and several U.S. localities hosting data centers have already reported water stress tied to this demand.
   3. Noise — industrial-scale cooling fans and backup generators run continuously. In Loudoun County itself, the Board of Supervisors has been fielding a flood of resident complaints about data center noise and generator fumes,⁴ and county officials have acknowledged the current noise ordinance doesn’t account for low-frequency, tonal hums residents find most distressing.⁵ Neighboring Prince William County has seen similar complaints, with one resident describing the constant noise from a nearby facility as an “internal organ vibration.”⁶
   4. Air pollution and public health costs — backup diesel generators and the power plants generating electricity for data centers emit particulate matter linked to lung disease, cardiovascular disease, and stroke. One peer-reviewed estimate, from a Carnegie Mellon University economist, put the nationwide health and environmental cost of this pollution at roughly $25 billion a year.⁷ A separate study by researchers at UC Riverside and Caltech projects that AI-related data center electricity generation could be linked to approximately 1,300 deaths and 600,000 asthma cases annually by 2030.⁸
2. Data Centers are a vital necessity — data centers are essential infrastructure for our information-based economy. Were there to be a complete national moratorium on any new data center being built anywhere in the country, we would likely lose the AI race to China. If you were to tell Americans exactly what it would cost them to have no new data centers built in this country, most would not want to pay that price. They want the benefits data centers bring, from cloud storage to AI tools people now use daily, but they don’t want to live next to one. It’s a real, understandable NIMBY dynamic, not a contradiction to be dismissed.

How Residents Are Fighting Back

Residents in localities across the country, including here in Virginia, are responding primarily in two ways: passing local moratoriums or zoning changes banning new data center construction where state law permits it, and pushing to remove existing tax incentives and exemptions, an effort that has succeeded at the state level in Ohio, Illinois, Arizona, and Maine. No locality has yet gone further to impose special, elevated taxes specifically designed to make new data center construction cost-prohibitive, though I believe this is a tool worth putting on the table.

The Equity Problem This Creates

Ultimately, if this fight is left entirely to individual localities, data center growth will end up concentrated in the communities with the least political power to resist it, typically lower-income communities with fewer resources to organize, hire land-use attorneys, and sustain a multi-year fight against a well-funded developer. This pattern has a long history in American land use: landfills, incinerators, and other locally unwanted infrastructure have consistently ended up disproportionately in under-resourced communities. In the U.S., this has often meant communities of color, though the underlying driver is political and economic capacity to resist, not race itself. Wealthier, better-organized communities will keep data centers out. Poorer ones, with fewer resources to fight back, will end up bearing the noise, the water stress, the air pollution, and the strain on the local grid.

What’s Already Moving in Congress

This isn’t a fringe issue in Washington. Both parties are actively working on it, though every current proposal solves only part of the problem.

The AI Data Center Moratorium Act (Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, Carson) would freeze all new AI data center construction until Congress separately enacts safeguards on rates, environmental harm, community approval, subsidies, and labor standards. Two of its conditions, barring subsidies and requiring community approval, are sound and worth keeping. But a blanket, indefinitely timed freeze with no defined criteria for when or how it ends doesn’t solve the underlying problem, it postpones it, while doing nothing to prevent the same siting and equity problems from recurring the moment the freeze lifts.

The AI Data Center Site Selection Transparency Act (McIver) requires developers to publicly disclose a proposed site, along with its environmental, utility, and cost impacts, at least 180 days before breaking ground, enforced by the FTC. This is a sound, narrow mechanism worth adopting directly.

The GRID Act (Hawley, Blumenthal) would require new data centers over 20 megawatts to source 100% of their power off the public grid, with a 10-year window for existing facilities to comply, backed by steep daily penalties. This bipartisan effort correctly identifies the ratepayer cost-shifting problem as one of the most politically salient harms, but as written it has real feasibility problems: industry estimates put full off-grid compliance at $500 million to $2 billion in added cost per facility, the 180-day compliance window for new facilities isn’t realistic given how long it takes to build independent generation, and exempting off-grid facilities entirely from federal reliability oversight creates a genuine safety gap. Last summer, 60 data centers near Loudoun County simultaneously dropped off the grid due to a standard safety mechanism, forcing grid operator PJM to scale back power plants to avoid a cascading outage. An off-grid mandate that removes a facility from reliability coordination altogether can create new grid instability risks, not just remove old ones.

The Local Control Protection Act (Bresnahan) would bar developers from suing a municipality or county in federal court over a denied data center application, so long as the denial rests on documented findings about public health, infrastructure, water, or community character, and would bar federal agencies from approving permits for a developer actively litigating against a locality that said no. It also requires community benefit agreements as a condition of federal tax incentives for projects that are approved.

My Proposal: The Distributed and Responsible Data Center Siting Act

My goal is to bring lawmakers of all backgrounds together to pass a bipartisan bill that takes the strongest, most defensible piece of each existing effort, and of the research literature on state-level data center governance,⁹ and attempts to fix the gaps in each.