The backlash about data centers might really just be about electricity

Two days after the midterms, OpenAI's chief global affairs officer, Chris Lehane, wrote that data centers had become a proxy for unease about affordability, corporate power and people losing control over their futures. MIT Technology Review's James O'Donnell spent days in Ashburn, Virginia, the world's largest data center hub, and came away with a simpler read: the backlash is mostly about electricity.

That distinction matters because it decides the fix. A culture war can be addressed with better messaging and community benefits. A physical problem, gigawatts of demand and the turbines or grid upgrades to meet it, can't be spun away.

We think this piece is right, and it's a useful corrective to an industry that has started treating opposition as a perception problem. The scale numbers make the point on their own. The average data center in this part of Virginia draws 54 megawatts, more than Denver International Airport. The smallest sites attractive for AI training are around 300 megawatts. The ideal ones are closer to 6,000 megawatts, roughly the estimated draw of Chicago.

There are two paths to that power, and each produces its own backlash. Grid-connected sites, like the Equinix facility O'Donnell toured, strain shared infrastructure, which is why Virginia now requires data centers to fully pay for new transmission lines rather than spreading the cost. Developers told him they expect rules cutting them off during peak demand. The other path, bringing your own gas turbines to rural land with little grid, swaps a bill problem for an air quality problem. The piece reminds us the EPA said Elon Musk's Memphis turbine setup violated air quality laws.

Here's where I land. We're pro-compute. Many advances that improved modern life required enormous electricity, as the piece itself notes, and AI capacity has real value. But when private companies build power generation on the scale of public utilities, communities have always expected a say in where it goes. Skipping that step is what makes these companies, in the article's phrase, horrible neighbors.

The trajectory worries me more than the present. If onsite power becomes the norm, facilities go where the fewest people can resist: sparse regions like the Permian Basin, or abroad. Google announced $15 billion for data centers in Malaysia the day after the election. That's not solving the backlash. It's exporting it to people with less leverage.

The honest path is boring: pay the full cost of grid upgrades, take emissions seriously, and give host communities real power over siting. Less glamorous than talk of data centers in space, which Musk floated hours after the results. Far more likely to work.

Loudoun County data centers have been built at a steadier pace than the current national expansion and mostly connect to Dominion Energy, which relies heavily on natural gas. Activist Elena Schlossberg told the reporter the fight was always about power. Anthropic has reportedly agreed to pay $3.4 billion for gas turbines, described as the largest power generation purchase by an AI company. The piece also notes misinformation fuels some opposition; most facilities use far less water than many people think.