Data centers, the massive, power-hungry facilities that make the internet and AI work, continue to pop up across the Commonwealth. They bring billions in revenue for Virginia and its localities, but they can also bring neighborhood complaints, development concerns and drains on natural resources. The current landscape leaves open lots of options for how Virginia’s candidates for governor say they’d shape the data center future.
Ann Bennett is a Great Falls resident who helped compile a massive new report on the facilities for environmental group The Sierra Club. Her research suggested there were about 1,200 data centers in Virginia either completed or in the approval process. There’s 220-million square feet of the facilities in Northern Virginia alone. Nearly 9,000 diesel generators have been approved to offer backup power but testing spews exhaust into the area.
28 proposed projects will require at least one gigawatt of power with a total of 37 gigawatts needed in the coming years. Most are not yet online, and they’re moving south with eight counties in the greater Rappahannock region area slated for 121.7 million square feet of data centers.
“Even with data missing, the numbers are quite astounding and suggest current estimates continue to be very low and the demand for energy and water and the air quality risks, and land use implications may be greater than the state might have anticipated,” Bennett said at a recent presentation of her report.
The push to expand data centers is already angering locals. Tyler Ray is the founder of the Save Bren Mar Coalition, a local group working to block a 466,000 square foot proposed data center and an attached five-acre electrical substation.
The coalition managed to block the project in 2022, but state law allows data center construction by-right, which leaves little room for public input and it's since returned.
Ray is worried about kids and the elderly who live near the proposed facility, and he said locals are already struggling to sell their homes if they want to move away. "No one wants to live near them," he opined during that same Sierra Club report presentation.
“My community is just one example facing potential impacts and are a canary in the coal mine for what is coming; not just in Virginia, but across the country if nothing is done," Ray said. "We need action at the state and local level to ensure the impacts of data centers don’t ruin our communities.”
But Sierra Club's Tim Cywinski made something clear after Ray spoke: They’re not opposed to data centers in general, but...
“We are against reckless data center growth." Cywinski said. "We understand there is a need for revenue. We want people and counties to be able to raise money for their schools, for their infrastructure, for their first responders. But it shouldn’t come with the tradeoff of sacrificing communities.”
To be clear, the money is lucrative.
According to Virginia’s nonpartisan Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, data centers accounted for 74,000 jobs, $5.5 billion in labor income, and $9.1 billion in GDP and $24 billion in capital investment in Virginia in 2024 alone. They accounted for 84% of all new capital investment in the state between 2022 and 2024.
That 74,000 jobs number is often criticized; once the facilities are up and running, they’re usually manned by a skeleton crew of a few dozen employees. But there’s decades of new data centers planned for the Commonwealth, and it’s led to a boom in high-paying, union-backed employment.
“Before this I’d been doing a lot of service work, like bartending, coffee shops, stuff like that. And I just kind of felt like I was wasting all my time,” Madison McCann said at a recent tour of the IBEW Local 666 training facility outside Richmond. At just 23, she joined the local electrician's union in February of this year, and it's already changed her life.
“Now, when I go to work, I feel like I’m actually building stuff and helping the community,” she said.
McCann said the IBEW training program is $600 every few months, thousands less than college, and she’s learning a trade that will help build the backbone of Virginia’s, and the country’s, data center future.
Charles Skelly is the IBEW Local 666’s business manager. He joined in the early 2000s and started on a data center project. He said he’s been in and out of other data center projects ever since. And McCann is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to filling the estimated 80,000 new electrician jobs Virginia’s data center industry will need to meet its estimated goals.
“Career switchers, folks with college degrees, and folks who just came out of High School. I was in my mid-30s after graduating from VCU," he said of his own journey to the union shop. "It’s not unusual. People realize this degree is great, but they land a job that isn’t paying well. So, they land in the trade.”
Skelly added these are good paying gigs, with full benefits and the ability to move to other states with the same training.
The push and pull between financial incentives and environmental and community concerns is likely to continue well into the future. Legislative efforts floundered this past legislative session, but in interviews, both candidates for governor shared their ideas to address the issue with Radio IQ.
“Data centers aren’t going anywhere, they’re here to stay," said Lieutenant Governor Winsome-Earle Sears — the Republican gubernatorial candidate. "They do bring some good, of course. That’s what it means by getting together in a room and understanding we all want the same things. We want good jobs, fresh air, cheap electrical power and we can figure this out.”
“Everything’s happening differently in different places," said Democratic hopeful and former Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger. "So, the reason I believe a statewide strategy is important, ensuring all communities have the tools to make strong decisions, and whether some of that becomes a legislated minimum standard, not to preclude communities from being able to do anything, but setting a standard on what we expect in Virginia.”
Early voting in Virginia starts in two months, with the next governor taking office in January.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
