The growing backlash against AI data centers isn’t just a culture-war stand-in for anxiety about Big Tech. It’s mostly about electricity, as MIT Technology Review’s James O’Donnell reports after a trip to Ashburn, Virginia, the heart of “Data Center Alley,” the world’s largest data center hub.
Tech leaders tend to see it differently. 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.”
Virginia activist Elena Schlossberg isn’t buying it. She says she’s “always banging my head against the wall” when the industry frames the fight that way. “It was always about power,” she told O’Donnell — meaning electricity.
The numbers back her up. The average data center in the region has a power capacity of 54 megawatts, more than Denver International Airport draws. Protests have already pushed Virginia to require data centers to pay the full cost of new transmission lines rather than spreading it across other customers.
The next generation is far bigger. The smallest facilities attractive for AI training run about 300 megawatts; the ideal ones approach 6,000, roughly the draw of Chicago. With no grid able to supply that, companies are generating their own power onsite with natural-gas turbines and diesel backups. Anthropic has reportedly agreed to pay $3.4 billion for gas turbines, and according to the EPA, Elon Musk violated air quality laws setting up dozens of turbines for a Memphis data center.
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That leaves private firms building power-plant-scale infrastructure, pollution included, often without the community input public utilities have traditionally faced. O’Donnell expects developers to head where resistance is thinnest: the sparsely populated Permian Basin, or abroad, as with Google’s newly announced $15 billion Malaysia expansion. Musk, for his part, posted hours after the midterm results: “Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now.”
