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PORTLAND, Ore. — In 2014, a new Amazon supply center struck a deal with its local utility company to build a multimillion-dollar transmission line. The six-mile route required an easement to run through Elena Schlossberg’s 10-acre property in Northern Virginia.

 

“If you're not willing to negotiate whatever cheap price they're willing to throw at you, they would seize your property,” said Schlossberg. A few weeks later, Elena sat at her dining room table and founded The Coalition to Protect Prince William County.

 

Elena founded the coalition because she realized more was at stake than just her property. “Yes, it was a fight about a transmission line, but it was a fight about something much bigger.” Schlossberg believed her local utility company, Dominion Energy, was monopolizing its power supply to prioritize one customer – Amazon.

 

After a five-year fight, Schlossberg and her community succeeded in settling with Dominion Energy on an alternative route that avoided her and other’s property. The rerouted transmission line cost close to $200 million, which, according to Schlossberg, is being socialized by Dominion Energy customers. “If they had to pay for their own infrastructure, you would not see this proliferation today.”

 

Since then, big tech has bought and developed much of Prince William County’s farmlands, city blocks, and wild spaces. Virginia is known as “the data capital of the world,” with over four times the data processing capacity of London. Existing and proposed land for data centers in Prince William County spans 33 square miles – roughly half the size of Washington D.C. “If you sell out your neighbors and you sell out your community, you sell your soul,” said Schlossberg.

 

Schlossberg said data center companies gravitate toward sparsely populated areas with cheap land and power. Local elected officials and organizers, like city planning and development staff, are quickly approached with non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). “In the Amazon fight, they couldn’t even say the word Amazon,” said Schlossberg. Instead, Amazon was operating under the subsidiary VA Data. “I don’t know exactly what they were hiding.” 

 

Data centers have overtaken shopping centers and high-density mixed-use housing blocks in Prince William County. Transforming existing developments into data centers is lucrative for the owner, but has substantial long-term negative impacts for residents. Housing and retail plots are equipped with electricity and plumbing, and paid for with taxpayer dollars. According to Schlossberg, these losses increase taxpayer burdens and contribute to urban sprawl. When towns begin to sprawl, more streets, sidewalks, schools, and other infrastructure are needed.

 

Farmers and rural landowners are also selling out to data centers. In one case, 90 landowners took less than a year to organize 805 acres for sale. Many were offered a million dollars per acre. Some sold because the alternative – staying – would leave them surrounded by industrialization.

 

Data centers are also destroying wild spaces. Bobby Harris, an assistant professor of environmental economics at Georgia Tech, explained how nature is measured through human use. For example, a lake’s value can be measured by its number of annual visitors.

 

Determining the economic value of nature for nature’s sake is more complicated. “We're less good at figuring out what's the existence value of something – how much do we just care about that thing existing,” said Harris. “What's the value of a bird, you know? We're not good at that.”

 

The Indigenous Seventh-Generation Principle takes a different approach by asking us to consider how today’s decisions will impact the next seven generations. “It connects us in a really human way to universal values,” said journalism professor and Mash-Kiibiizii citizen Patty Loew. All of us want clean water for our children. All of us want our grandchildren to breathe clean air.”

 

Organizations like the Sierra Club have called for the data center industry to prioritize taking a less harmful approach to development. But no one knows how much nature has been obliterated by data centers. Bill Wright is a Gainesville resident who scours public records to track data center proliferation in Prince William County. According to Wright, neither the county nor the data center industry is transparent about the numbers. “It is safe to say there has been a lot more greenfield than brownfield development.”

 

Rapid data center development has challenged the local environment in other ways too. Last year, Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality attempted to pass a variance allowing data centers to use diesel generators when the grid was strained.

 

According to Schlossberg, high-energy-use days often coincide with red alert days when residents are encouraged to stay indoors due to poor air quality. “I am not a scientist. I have a master's degree in middle school counseling. But I am just going to go out on a limb and say that running diesel generators on peak load days where you generally have red alerts – maybe not a good idea.”

 

“Long story short, it blew up in their faces and it failed,” said Schlossberg. “It didn't fail because they suddenly got a moral conscience about their mission. It failed because it got too hot for the governor and it got too hot for the data center industry.”

 

Economist Harris believes carbon tax regulations will help curb power and environmental issues. “The first best solution and any economist would tell you is we should just have a carbon tax applied broadly to every sector in the economy. That would provide the right incentive to data centers as well as power plants to reduce emissions.”

 

On a global scale, data centers’ energy use is relatively small. The International Energy Agency’s annual electricity report estimated that data centers consumed 2% of worldwide electrical demands in 2022.

 

Data use has skyrocketed since 2022 and is expected to continue. But the demand for data and tech does not conform to a one-to-one ratio with energy use.

 

As hardware develops, the energy it needs decreases. Well-respected 1990s predictions, like Forbes, were wrong when new demands for personal computers didn’t double energy needs. Digital demand boomed, but energy requirements didn’t increase at the same rate. This is because technological advancements lead to efficiency gains.

 

So what does this mean for the future of data centers and their energy use? “Industrial policy is kind of tricky,” said Harris. “The government's not great at predicting what industries are going to be successful and what aren't.”

 

But localized communities, like Prince William County, are having to deal with real-time consequences. “Virginia is fighting back because we are literally running out of power,” said Schlossberg. “As Virginia is subsumed by all the impacts of data center development, you see like any good plague or cancer, it's metastasizing,” said Schlossberg.

 

The industry’s insatiable need for energy has prompted Microsoft to reopen Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania where in 1979, the U.S. had its most serious commercial nuclear power accident.

 

Georgia recently built two new nuclear receptors. The project is estimated to cost $35 million, which is being offset and paid for by Georgia Power customers. So far, regulators have increased electrical rates by 6%.

 

Schlossberg says she and her coalition have been talking to people in Fayetteville, Georgia, to help them fight the data center industry. She has also spoken with people impacted by big tech in Maryland, Missouri, Indiana, and other states.

 

“I'm not glad that other places are experiencing this, but I'm glad that they have the resources to fight,” said Schlossberg. “My hope is that enough people will be impacted that they will realize that this industry is a parasite. And we are the host that they are sucking dry.”

 

The bottom line is that it's much easier to build a data center than to power it. To compensate for current energy and power grabs, many data centers have published carbon-neutral goals. “I love how everybody talks about, ‘Oh, we're going to come up with carbon capture.’ Okay, well, that hasn't happened. So what is your carbon capture? Your carbon capture are your trees, your pristine soils,” said Schlossberg. “That serves as your cheapest kind of environmental protection that we all don't have to pay for.”

 

Amanda Joy Ravenhill, the co-CEO and co-founder of TMRW, an ecologically aware AI with plans to launch in 2025, believes the data center industry is moving too fast. “Any technology that confers power will induce a race, and that race will result in all sorts of negative unintended consequences.”

 

But Schlossberg questions if the global AI arms race is real. “Look at how many data centers China has in comparison to the United States of America, they don't hold a candle.”

 

This October, The White House released a National Security Memorandum on AI.  “I'll tell you what national security risk is,” said Schlossberg. “Affordable, reliable power. Water. It’s clean air. These are the risks.”

 

The future benefits of AI cannot yet be known. But the actions big tech is taking to court federal and local governments and meet increasing cloud-based demands are undoubtedly causing localized harm.

 

“Who are the biggest offenders here?” asked Madeline Tien, a sustainability specialist. “There should be a responsibility on these cloud computing services – Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. There really should be a responsibility to do better.”

 

Schlossberg is looking to local politics to enact positive and protective measures. “The data centers have a ton of money and they can throw that around. What they can't do is vote. They literally cannot vote.”

 

“I still have hope for Virginia,” said Schlossberg. “I still believe that we can save Virginia from itself.”