Data Center Protests Are About Electricity, Not a Culture War

As the US midterm elections were taking place, MIT Technology Review writer James O'Donnell drove around Ashburn, Virginia, the heart of "Data Center Alley," the world's largest hub. Concrete boxes with names like Skybox and CloudHQ line every major road. This, he says, is where today's resistance to data centers began to take shape.

Big Tech has a convenient version of events. Two days after the election, OpenAI's head of global affairs Chris Lehane wrote that data centers have become a "proxy" for anxiety over prices, corporate power and loss of control over the future. In other words, a culture war. O'Donnell disagrees: the main nerve of the protest is electricity.

Two ways to power a data center, and both are irritating

The first way is to connect to the grid. That is how most facilities in Loudoun County work. The Equinix data center the author visited draws power from local utility Dominion Energy and keeps diesel generators only as backup. The average capacity of such a facility in the region is 54 megawatts, more than Denver's airport consumes.

This puts strain on the grid. In the words of activist Elena Schlossberg, "it has always been about energy." The protests have already led to new state rules: data centers must fully pay for new transmission lines rather than spreading the costs across everyone else. Developers are also preparing for rules that would cut them off from the grid during peak-demand hours.

The second way is to generate power on site, "behind the meter." This is how most new AI campuses are being built. They need scale, and out in the middle of nowhere there is no grid. The minimum for training models is about 300 MW, and the ideal is roughly 6,000 MW, an estimate of Chicago's consumption. Anthropic has reportedly agreed to spend $3.4 billion on gas turbines.

On-site generation takes the load off the grid but creates a different problem. Gas turbines emit pollutants, and diesel is even worse. In their rush, companies behave like bad neighbors: according to the EPA, Elon Musk violated air quality laws when he ran dozens of turbines for a data center in Memphis.

Why PR doesn't help here

The author's argument is simple: you can ask a small town to accept a Disney World, an international airport, a steel mill and power plants for all of them next door. It is hard to be surprised by locals' anxiety after that. Taxes, jobs and dialogue with the community help, but they don't cancel out physics.

At the same time, the author does not reduce everything to electricity. Fear of job loss, existential risks, concentration of corporate power and disinformation also fuel the protest. For example, most facilities consume noticeably less water than people think. And high energy consumption is not evil in itself: many improvements in life required exactly that.

One developer told the author that the industry is held back not by public opinion but by a shortage of electricity. That is worth remembering.

What comes next and what to do about it

The author predicts that new campuses with their own generation will move to places with fewer people able to resist. One example is the Permian Basin, where it is easier to connect to gas networks and the population is sparse. Some will go abroad: the day after the election, Google announced $15 billion for data centers in Malaysia. Musk wrote the same day that data centers in space "look increasingly attractive."

For developers and founders, the takeaway is down to earth. Compute is constrained by megawatts, not just chips, and that is where risks arise. Grid limits, peak-hour shutoffs and generation permits can shift the timing of capacity launches and inference prices. If your strategy depends on cheap GPU-hours in a specific region, build energy and local politics into your risks as seriously as hardware supply.

There is one limitation to the piece: it is an opinion column based on a trip to a single hub, not a study. But the logic can be tested: watch how grid payment rules change and where exactly new campuses start to be built.