“We are all asking: Where are the people we elected who promised to protect us from these big corporations trying to steamroll us? The people who are supposed to be standing up and protecting us are standing down and caving.” Anger over the perceived trampling of communities by Silicon Valley has entered the national political conversation and could affect voters of all political persuasions in this year’s midterm elections.
Many of the residents fighting the project in Sand

“Any increase in how often they’re running is going to cause corresponding localized air pollution.” This past summer, a fire at an electrical substation forced data centers in Loudoun County to rely on backup diesel generators as their power source. Grid failures like this happen often, but this time, shoppers in a nearby Walmart parking lot heard the noisy generators start up and reported smelling diesel fumes. “People were like, ‘What is going on?’” said Julie Bolthouse, t

All year, the residents of the Loudoun Valley Estates neighborhoods in Ashburn have been railing against a proposed high-voltage power line that could run through their community to energize dozens of data centers on the other side of town. On Monday, they spelled out their concerns to state regulators in Richmond. Dominion Energy said the project is a critical piece of energy infrastructure necessary to power the energy-hungry data centers. The case has been framed as a majo

This coal plant in central Pennsylvania, once the largest in the state, was shuttered in 2023 after powering the region for over 50 years. Earlier this year, wrecking crews blasted the plant’s cooling towers and soaring chimneys. Rising from the dust in Homer City will be a colossal artificial intelligence data center campus that will include seven 30-acre gas generating stations on-site, fueled by Pennsylvania’s natural gas boom . Shawn Steffee of the International Brothe

With the explosion of AI, the demand for data processing power is growing exponentially, sparking debate over the growth of data centers nationally and regionally. Earlier this week, President Trump said he planned to issue an executive order preventing states from limiting data center development. Meanwhile, a coalition of environmental and other groups have asked Congress to halt new data centers to assess energy and environmental impacts. Similar debates are happening acro