The backlash about data centers might really just be about electricity

As US voters went to the polls last week, the reporter was in Ashburn, Virginia, the corridor known as Data Center Alley, where the national backlash against data centers arguably first began taking shape. Driving through it is surreal: monolithic concrete buildings loom along every major road, bearing names like Skybox and CloudHQ. It has become accepted wisdom in Big Tech that opposition to these facilities must be about something larger than the facilities themselves.

Two days after the midterms, OpenAI's chief global affairs officer, Chris Lehane, wrote that data centers "have become a proxy for public unease about affordability, corporate power, and people losing control over their futures" — a culture-war framing. A few days inside Data Center Alley pointed somewhere narrower: the backlash is more about electricity than the industry admits, because no public-relations effort can escape the physical consequences of the power draw.

In Virginia's Loudoun County, where data centers are ubiquitous but have been built at a steadier pace than elsewhere, most facilities connect to the existing grid. One site the reporter entered, operated by Equinix, keeps massive diesel generators onsite for backup but takes power from local utility Dominion Energy, whose generation leans heavily on natural gas. The average facility in this part of Virginia now runs at a power capacity greater than the draw of Denver International Airport. Activist Elena Schlossberg says she is "always banging my head against the wall" when the industry describes the fight as a culture war: "It was always about power."

Grid hookup has produced concrete political fallout. Recent protests have driven new state rules requiring data centers to pay the full cost of new transmission lines rather than having that burden spread among all ratepayers. Developers told the reporter they are preparing for rules that would cut them off from grid power during peak demand. Schlossberg also worries about downstream effects: facilities running more diesel generators, or Dominion expanding fossil fuel inputs instead of renewables to meet demand.

The majority of AI data centers now under construction are designed differently. The scale companies want pushes them into rural areas with virtually no grid infrastructure, so they bring their own power — so-called behind-the-meter natural-gas turbines, with diesel generators for backup. Anthropic has reportedly agreed to what is described as the largest power generation purchase by an AI company, for gas turbines. Even a nearby grid would be unlikely to serve the load: the smallest data centers attractive for AI training start at 300 megawatts. One developer told the reporter he is eyeing a former steel mill as a site.

What to watch turns on unresolved questions. Will Virginia's approach — full cost recovery for transmission, plus curtailable service during peak demand — spread to other states as protests mount? Can behind-the-meter gas turbines scale fast enough to meet training demand without colliding with grid-strain and emissions concerns? And does the opposition remain, as Schlossberg insists, a fight over power, or does it harden into the broader proxy for unease about affordability and corporate power that Lehane describes?