A couple:
The Data Center Coalition, the leading industry group, is also at the negotiating table. The sector’s lobbying arm represents the hyperscalers, who don’t always play nicely with the organization’s smaller companies. The undisputed heavyweight in Virginia politics, however, is Dominion, a major political donor that has contributed to Lucas’s and Scott’s campaigns, and to Spanberger’s 2026 inaugural fund.
“They definitely benefit in a major way from having a huge data center demand on the horizon that helps them do what they do best, which is to build very expensive capital infrastructure on which they earn a return,” says Brennan Gilmore, executive director of Clean Virginia, a clean-energy and government accountability group. Dominion has conveniently blamed data centers for rising electricity costs, Gilmore adds, and the utility wants to see the costs transferred to them.
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Meanwhile, grassroots opposition to data centers continues to surge. By the end of last year, analysts at Data Center Watch had found local opposition groups in 42 states. Small towns like Canton, North Carolina, were issuing moratoriums on construction. Port Washington, Wisconsin, overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure in April giving residents more say over data center development projects. And other rural Virginia communities, like Appomattox County, are in open protest.
Candidates have put data centers at the forefront of their campaigns, and woe to those who defy voters. Global headline writers proclaiming Maine as the first state to implement a data center moratorium didn’t reckon with Gov. Janet Mills’s (D-ME) veto pen. Mills wanted to save a data center project at a former paper mill site, and the legislature failed to overturn her veto. Destined to be unpopular, her decision pretty much confirmed that she had given up on her Democratic Senate primary fight against first-time candidate Graham Platner, a popular oysterman. She quit the race soon afterward.
Thanks for the discussion, Celerity.
❤️
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