In an exit poll during last week’s midterm elections, more than half of voters said opposition to data centers affected how they cast their ballots.
The pushback is largely because of how much electricity and water data centers consume. On the other hand, those who support them point to the money data centers can bring money to communities.
Students are eating lunch inside Mecklenburg’s combined middle and high school.
This school division in southern Virginia closed a handful of older schools and consolidated them into this new building four years ago. They have a greenhouse and a farm outside, even a pond and a wooded area for forestry and biology students.
“I mean, I don’t know many schools that have that under a roof like we have. Or on campus like we have,” said Mark Lineburg, superintendent for Mecklenburg County Public Schools.
“And our teacher pay is up,” Lineburg said. “All this is a result of the investment by Microsoft in our community.”
Microsoft and other data centers provide 45% of Mecklenburg County’s tax revenue. That money helped the county build this school. They also train students to work at data centers, said Chrystal Elmore, the school’s career and technical education director.
“And it’s been a really good program for our students,” Elmore said. “Because it gives them a way to go directly into work without leaving home.”
Students continue this program at Southside Virginia Community College, 30 minutes from the high school.
Like most community colleges, they have welding, HVAC and IT classes. The college’s dean of career technology Chad Patton said they’ve been flooded with students wanting to go into the data center industry. “Our enrollment just really increased to the point that this was HVAC, and this was electricity,” Patton said, pointing to the renovated space where their data center academy is located. “We had to move those to another room in the building. And just this whole building now is the Microsoft Mock Data Center.”
An entire room is filled with rows of computing equipment. On this day, the machines are turned off. When they’re on, Patton said it’s so loud, students have to wear earplugs.
“If we were at an actual data center you would see huge rooms of this. Just miles and miles,” Patton said. “But we didn’t have enough power in the building to fire all this up at one time.”
Microsoft helped them upgrade their electrical capacity, and donated most of the equipment for this mock data center.
Patton said a number of people have also studied here to switch careers. “We’ve seen, you know, people who were teacher’s aids. We’ve seen bus drivers come through, people who worked at Walmart,” Patton said. “Just all walks of life. All kind of skill sets, and they come in and just do incredibly well.”
Patton said a lot of their students go on to work in data centers even before they graduate with an associate’s degree. They’ve heard from other community colleges across Virginia looking to replicate their data center training program.
Microsoft’s Jeremy Satterfield said they want to help train more Virginians to work in this industry.
“And now you’re starting to see a lot of these young men and women that are sticking around because there are true job opportunities here,” Satterfield said.
He noted the company hasn’t always been transparent with residents. “We don’t want to hide behind the scenes,” Satterfield said. “We kept everything a little bit under the vest nine years ago. But now, like I said, when we go into a community from day one we’re actually getting started with community engagement, just so that we can gain and garner some of that trust from the community.”
Governor Abigail Spanberger signed a new executive order in September, adding tighter regulations over data centers. One of its actions bans certain nondisclosure agreements as companies negotiate future projects. The order also encourages communities to do more workforce training, and asks data centers to prioritize hiring local workers.
This is part of a two-part series about data centers in Mecklenburg County. The first story looks at the economic impacts from data centers in the community.
