Ninety-odd chairs were squeezed into a room at the Beauty & Wellness Center in Danville, Virginia, for a stop on the Data Center Listening Tour hosted by Sens. Louise Lucas and Mamie Locke on July 23rd. The seats were filled early, as were the aisles around them.
Sen. Lucas set the ground rules for the evening: “Just for the record, this is a listening tour. We’re not trying to influence anybody one way or another. We just want to know how you feel about data centers and the impact that it has on your life.”
Over roughly two hours, the senators heard plenty. Little of it fell along familiar lines of support or opposition.
Rather, the attendees – ranging from local politicos to local farmers, technology workers to stay-at-home moms, Danville natives to Danville transplants – voiced concerns about what is happening to their “community.” For several, it had little to do with data centers themselves.
Perhaps none represented this better than a woman who, due to “unforeseen circumstances,” returned to Danville following a career that took her up and down the East Coast.
“I want to reserve judgment on the data center,” she said. Her concerns were broader. “Two, five, seven, 10, 15, 40 years down the road, what does the community look like?” Will poverty be lower? Educational achievement higher?
“I don’t care about the politics …. I care about what happens to my neighbor. I care if my neighbor is able to pay their bills and get health care and buy groceries.”
Beyond the Numbers
A number of surveys in recent months suggest that people don’t favor data centers. The Wilder Center survey in July, for example, found that 69 percent of respondents either “strongly” or “somewhat” oppose “[A]llowing data centers to receive a sales tax exemption as an incentive to building in Virginia, creating jobs and spurring local economic growth.”
These numbers are in line with other national surveys.
Robinson Meyer, founding executive editor of Heatmap, said in an interview with the New York Times that his company surveys 4,000 Americans quarterly, asking: “Would you support or oppose a data center being built near where you live?” Last August, 43 percent supported and 42 percent were against it. This spring, he said, 71 percent opposed.
For two decades, data centers have been a growth industry in the United States, and especially here in Virginia, where currently there are more than 665 of these facilities. Understanding why they’ve become a political hot potato only now is challenging.
“Once you get past local projects,” Meyer said, “there is not as much agreement about why people are opposed to these things in an ideological or national way.”
He does speculate, however, that if prior computing revolutions had made us “clearly happier than [we] were 10 or 15 years before it happened, then we probably wouldn’t be seeing a backlash on the scale that we’re seeing now.”
Evidence of our struggle with prior computing revolutions has been with us for some time. Concerns over the effects of social media, especially on teenagers and our body politic, have been a significant public policy issue for more than a decade.
Screen time and children’s exposure to it, especially in the classroom, led Virginia to be among the first to legislate smartphone bans during instructional time in K-12 settings.
Data centers, however, though essential to making smartphones and social media possible, were rarely part of that conversation.
Artificial intelligence has changed that. Demand for data center services like “[c]loud adoption, streaming, digital payments, remote work, business software and cybersecurity were all growing steadily before generative AI,” reports Forbes. AI has “added a fresh wave of demand” that has led to an even greater pressure to build the data centers that can meet that demand.
And it’s occurring at a time when affordability remains the top worry for many.
The same Wilder Center survey that revealed broad disapproval of tax exemptions for data centers in Virginia also revealed a greater percentage of respondents – fully 79 percent – who said the cost of attending college was “Much” or “Somewhat” too high.
And 31 percent of respondents said that “Inflation and cost of living” is the most important issue facing Virginia. “Housing affordability” and “political extremism” were distant seconds, each drawing 11 percent of respondents.
The Challenge Ahead
For three decades now, digital technology made possible by data centers has transformed our lives in ways few could have imagined. Those changes are accelerating today at a pace even five years ago few if any could have foreseen. Data centers have become the most-visible symbol of these changes, and subsequently the target of some people’s concerns.
But as some in Danville expressed, it’s not the data centers that are the issue. It’s how we leverage the revolution they make possible and the wealth that they generate to address longstanding challenges – affordability, education, and poverty.
Picking the right public policy battle matters, and answering what the community will like in 40 years is the right one. Data centers won’t answer that question; the wealth they generate will play a significant role in how the people of Danville, and across Virginia, will.
