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There are only 98 days left until the midterm election. For months, there has been speculation about what the deciding issue will be this year. Will it turn out to be affordability, as Democrats want? Or rampant communism, as Republicans claim? Or could it be the Iran war, the price of gas, Trump family corruption, or aid to Israel?
Surprisingly, it looks like, coast to coast, the one big issue in this year’s midterms may be one we least expected: data centers.
It is something nobody was even talking about a year ago. But suddenly, it’s front and center on every level: national, state, local and international.
President Trump convened a panel of utility CEOs to talk data centers this week. Fifteen states, red and blue, have already banned or delayed construction of any new data centers. Many countries have rejected plans for them. The headline in a recent Italian website blared: “Will we have enough electricity for all data centers?”
Ironically, the crisis over data centers is one of our own making. We spend too much time on our smartphones and laptops. The phenomenal growth in the use of social media plus the explosive new dependency on AI have created a massive need for new electric generating plants, or so-called data centers, which have been popping up like mushrooms all over the country.
In many states, in fact, the debate over building new data centers is occurring after the horse is already out of the barn. As of today, there are over 3,000 data centers in the country, including 277 in California, 296 in Texas, and 398, the most of any state, in Virginia. Don’t believe it? Take a drive out Route 66 toward Manassas, Va. Note the mammoth, low level, warehouse structures lining the highway. They may look like Costco, but there are very few people in them. Just electrical equipment.
High tech firms and electric utilities insist construction of data centers is essential to meet the needs of an ever-more-reliant online population, while also providing the advantages of more jobs, zero pollution, and higher tax revenues for local communities. And they have no bigger cheerleader than President Trump himself, who told a gathering of energy industry officials at EPA last week that many communities are actually “begging” for new data centers because they will provide lower taxes, “tremendous numbers of jobs and very little actual disruption.”
Not for the first time, it makes you wonder what planet the president is living on. On July 23, the same day Trump insisted that communities were “begging” for new data centers, Emerson College released a poll taken July 19 and 20, which showed that 63 percent of Americans oppose construction of data centers in their community, based mainly on economic and environmental concerns.
And their concerns seem justified. On jobs, for example. Local governments routinely offer huge tax breaks to utilities to build new data centers based on the promise of all the new jobs they’d create. But that’s misleading. Yes, there may be hundreds of workers hired to build the plant. Those are legitimate, well-paying construction jobs, but they last only 1-2 years. Once built, a large data center, because it’s so automated, employs only a few dozen to a couple hundred technicians: not enough jobs to justify the loss of tax revenue.
Demand for water is another big problem. Since data centers use water-based systems like evaporative cooling to cool servers, a large plant can use hundreds of thousands to millions of gallons a day. This creates real conflicts in some states, especially in the Southwest, where data centers suck up water needed for agriculture or residential uses.
The biggest problem may be related to delivering electricity. Demand is rising faster than utilities can provide for. Since not all data centers can be built near where the demand for new power is, that means higher traffic on an already creaky, out-of-date, national electric grid. And building new transmission towers could take decades, which consumers would have to pay for.
The combination of those challenges has made data centers the new political hot button of 2026. It’s why both blue state New York and red state Texas have banned or put strict limits on new data centers.
Politicians of both parties beware. For most voters, the answer to “Do you support construction of new data centers?” is clearly: “Yes, but not in my backyard.”
Bill Press is host of The Bill Press Pod. He is the author of “From the Left: A Life in the Crossfire.”
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