How data centers became a fault line in U.S. politics
by Scott Neuman, general assignment desk correspondent
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Ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, NPR will examine how the battles over data centers are creating new political fault lines and driving policy debates.
For many Americans, massive data centers seemed to arrive almost overnight and, in some cases, nearly in stealth mode. Confidential deals between county governments and data center developers were not uncommon, with officials negotiating land-use changes, tax incentives and infrastructure commitments behind closed doors.
Secrecy is not the only reason many people missed what was happening. The esoterica of zoning regulations can hardly compete with getting kids to soccer practice or collapsing into Netflix after a long day. Most people I spoke to for “The data center backlash is reshaping American politics — one community at a time” admitted they hadn’t paid much attention to local politics until one of these facilities was built — sometimes almost literally on their doorstep.
Then came the consequences.
Data centers require massive amounts of water and electricity. Increasingly, they must produce their own power because the grid isn’t up to the task.
Then there’s the noise.
“When you walk up, when you come up, can you hear that noise?” asked Hari Doue when I went to interview her at her home in Sterling, Va., just across the street from the Vantage VA2 data center. Doue told me her kids sometimes have trouble sleeping because of the noise.
For years, politicians eager to attract data centers competed to offer increasingly generous tax incentives to attract the biggest names in tech: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta.
Today the politics look very different.
With the hyperscale artificial intelligence buildout on hyperdrive, residents in places like Loudoun County — which has the highest concentration of data centers in the world – Bessemer, Ala., and DeForest, Wis., are organizing against their spread. And they are having some impact.
In some cases, they’ve stopped projects cold. That’s what happened in DeForest, a suburb of Madison. Ed Morganroth, Jr. says the whether to build a data center was “the biggest decision the village … had ever made.” But officials chose to try to “run it through” with little input from the public.
Party lines have been blurred, too. Grassroots campaigns like the one in DeForest and Loudoun have brought Republicans and Democrats together, while local political spats increasingly pit members of the same party against one another.
Kathy Cramer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told me the data center issue has something for everyone to dislike.
“There’s this huge overlap in concerns among people who you might think are more left-leaning because of environmental concerns or more right-leaning because of this sense of ‘we just don’t want government messing with us in this respect,’” she said.
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