[ideonexus]

This is a 5-year-old article, and it's still very pertinent. This past summer I did a lot of bike-riding around Loudon County surveying trails for the Park Service (volunteer) and it's like riding through a cyberpunk future out there. Endless windowless buildings humming loudly, lots of electrical substations, and wires crisscrossing everywhere. The Washington Post reported that Dominion Power is now running electrical lines deep into West Virginia and bringing defunct coal plants back online to meet the energy demands (1), but a recent independent report found that it won't be enough as energy demands are going to double at a minimum (2).

I live in eastern Prince William County and the spread of datacenters is a hot-button topic here. People living on the Western side of the county, near Loudon, are getting rezoned for data centers, which means dramatic increase to their property taxes. The same report that highlighted energy demands also found that the increased tax revenue and jobs created are only really during the construction of the buildings, once completed they don't take many techs to maintain them.

I feel this last point may underestimate the jobs created because it doesn't consider all the folks connecting to these data centers to do work. For example, Amazon is expanding here to be close to the datacenters and my friends who work for Amazon have to be within driving distance of the campus. I could be overestimating this effect though.

(1) Gift WaPo article: Internet data centers are fueling drive to old power source: Coal https://wapo.st/40A4SBm

(2) 2024 Data Centers in Virginia Report https://jlarc.virginia.gov/pdfs/reports/Rpt598-2.pdf