A rare nugget of bipartisanship: How data farms’ water gobbling and rate hikes have communities fighting back
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In the polarized world of American politics, there’s one subject at least finding common ground among Republicans and Democrats: Data farms.
More than 5,200 of these massive facilities — hubs for digital infrastructure that process data needed to run websites, apps, and much of the rest of the Internet — are spread across America, from large cities to tiny towns. And tech giants like OpenAI, Oracle, Google, and Amazon are racing to build more farms to fuel their computation-hungry AI research and development.
While data farms promise jobs and local investment, they can also require millions of gallons fresh water to operate, gobble up fossil fuel power and create a huge amount of noise.
In many areas, utility bills are going up to help offset data farms’ enormous energy demands. Ratepayers in 13 states and Washington D.C., where PJM Interconnection operates the regional power grid, are expected to see up to $70 increases, each month, on electric bills by 2028 due to the projected needs of data farms, according to Maryland State Senator Katie Fry Hester.
In response to the forecasted rate hikes, Hester created the PJM State Legislators Collaborative, a collection of lawmakers across the region to address the issue. Her first call was attended by 75 lawmakers.
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Protesters in Indianapolis gather to demonstrate against a data center planned for the Martindale-Brightwood neighborhood in October. While data farms promise jobs and local investment, they can also require millions of gallons fresh water to operate, gobble up fossil fuel power and create a huge amount of noise (screengrab/WTHR)
“All of us legislators are dealing with our little piece of the puzzle right around electric rates and what we can control at the state level,” she told The Independent. ” But the billion dollar decisions are being made really high up. And if we didn’t jump in and try to influence those decisions, then we were going to miss our opportunity.”
Hester, a Democrat, said that she and many other legislators are not opponents of data farms, but are against regular people footing the bill for tech giants’ energy needs. And it’s a message that has found rare bipartisan agreement.
“Some of us are red, some of us are blue, some of them are purple. But everybody thinks that it’s not right for the average rate payer to be lining the pocket of Amazon or Google … these big Fortune 500 companies should be paying for their business,” Hester said.
PJM is currently considering 14 data center proposals but only a few include protections for ratepayers from ballooning energy costs, according to the lawmaker.
The company said, in an email to The Independent, that as a grid operator it is “acutely aware of the challenges that higher energy prices pose to the people and businesses of any state or jurisdiction we serve.”
“We are doing everything we can to bring more generation supply onto the system. We have made substantial progress in reforming our process for connecting generation resources to the grid, and through our recently announced partnership with Google/Tapestry, we are working to use artificial intelligence to further streamline and potentially shorten the study process.”
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A data farm owned by Amazon Web Services, front right, is under construction next to the Susquehanna nuclear power plant in Berwick, Pennsylvania. U.S. data farms used approximately 17 gigawatts of power in 2022. A large nuclear power generator produces 1 gigawatt of energy, which can power between 300,000 and 750,000 U.S. homes (Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)
Similar stories are playing out around the country.
DTE, Michigan’s largest electric utility provider, has said ratepayers won’t see an increase in their bills related to data farms. But Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel filed an affidavit as part of a notice of intervention which stated that DTE’s contracts with data center operators would “entail hundreds of millions of dollars of capital commitments which will affect customer utility rates over at least two decades,” Planet Detroit reports.
The Independent has requested comment from DTE.
When residents of Michigan’s rural Saline Township learned a vast $7 billion data farm was going to be built near their homes, they made their opposition clear, leading to a 4-1 vote by township’s Board of Trustees to reject the rezoning request for the new build.
But the victory was short-lived. Dallas-based firm Related Digital — leading the build project for tech behemoths OpenAI and Oracle — sued the township over its decision, and the trustees reversed course, agreeing to a settlement rather than a prolonged court battle with well-funded opponents.
The data center project is now back on track. “Just leave us alone out in the country. We don’t want it,” local resident Ed Robinson, 60, told MLive.
Rolling out the welcome mat
The rapid expansion of digital technologies, crypto-mining, and AI, paired with the increased density of modern processors and the heat they generate, has seen an explosion in the demand for larger and more efficient data farms.
Today’s warehouse-sized buildings are specially designed to provide optimal airflow and heat management — often via water or air cooling — to prevent the equipment from overheating.
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A server room. The rapid expansion of digital technologies, crypto-mining, and AI, paired with the increased density of modern processors and the heat they generate, has seen an explosion in the demand for larger and more efficient data farms
Some 5,246 data farms are operating in the U.S., according to the most recent information from the Data Center Map project, collectively consuming at least 17 gigawatts of power. A large nuclear power generator produces 1 gigawatt of energy, which can power between 300,000 and 750,000 homes.
In the race for AI dominance, countries are rolling out data farms at breakneck speed to cope with the immense amounts of compute need.
With data farms needing more workers, land, and resources, some legislators have taken steps to make their cities and states more attractive to developers, seeing the opportunity for potential jobs and tax revenue.
In the past eight years, direct employment in the data farm industry grew by more than 50 percent – streaking ahead of the 10 percent job growth rate in the broader U.S. market. Data farms contributed $355 billion to the economy in 2017, ballooning to $727B in 2023 – a 105 percent increase.
State and local communities are getting a big slice of that pie. The Data Center Coalition reports that data farms contributed $162.7B in 2023 across all levels of government. (For comparison, the cost to build and maintain the International Space Station over its entire life has cost approximately $150B, according to the European Space Agency.)
Virginia capitalized on the data farm craze early on. Long a hub for internet and tech development, the state offers tax incentives and has eased regulations to promote investment from data center within its borders.
Loudon County — specifically Ashburn — has been dubbed “Data Center Alley,” with 199 data farms in just that county. Nearby communities offer their own incentives and job training programs.
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High-voltage transmission lines provide electricity to data farms in Ashburn in Loudon County, Virginia, on Sunday, July 16, 2023. Loudon County is home to 199 data farms as of early 2025, earning it the name “Data Center Alley” (Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)
Dominion Energy, Virginia’s largest energy provider, charges utility rates that are 28 percent below the national average to data farms, and the Potomac River feeds their water needs.
A 2023 report, by the state, determined that “the data center industry is estimated to contribute 74,000 jobs, $5.5 billion in labor income, and $9.1 billion in GDP to Virginia’s economy annually.”
There’s no doubt that data farms bring jobs and money. But they also extract a cost.
A heavy price
Data farms rely heavily on an area’s water and energy infrastructure – and approximately 56 percent of their power is from fossil fuel sources, according to a 2024 Harvard-led study. Researchers also found that data farms emit 105 million metric tons of carbon emissions, approximately 2 percent of all U.S. emissions.
Some states are leaning in, regardless. West Virginia passed a law earlier this year that stripped away local control over data farm ordinances and handed it to the state, to make it easier for locations to be built, Government Technology reported. Lawmakers also passed a slew of legislation that promotes fossil-fueled power to provide the energy for future data farm development.
But it’s not just carbon emissions and increasing energy bills that have residents concerned — they’re worried that natural resources and way of life will be irreparably changed.
A large data center can consume up to 5 million gallons of water per day — the equivalent for a town of 10,000 -50,000 people, according to the Environment and Energy Institute.
It was, in part, water use that stalled the $3.6 billion Project Blue, a massive data center project in Tucson, Arizona, earlier this year.
A group of concerned residents, calling themselves the “No Desert Data Center” group, approached the Tucson City Council in the summer to warn that Project Blue would deplete the city’s already at-risk groundwater supplies. The council voted unanimously to reject Project Blue in August.
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An Amazon Web Services data center is shown situated near single-family homes on July 17, 2024 in Stone Ridge, Virginia. Loudon County, where Stone Ridge is located, is home to 199 data farms as of early 2025, earning it the name “Data Center Alley” (Getty)
Beale — the company behind Project Blue – has since returned with another proposal, this time using circulated air to provide its cooling instead of water.
Pima County Supervisor Jennifer Allen opposed the project early on, and was frustrated that Beale didn’t bring the water-saving option to them from the start.
“Now they’ve changed their tune, after dragging us through really contentious community meetings and forums and all of this, they pull out of their back pocket that they could have done an air cooled data center all along and claim that it’s just going to be water for incidentals — sinks and toilets and whatnot,” she told The Independent.
Beale told The Independent that “the City of Tucson expressed a strong, early desire for an investment in their reclaimed water infrastructure, as it would be a benefit to the city, our project and the community at large. This design would have used reclaimed water for evaporative purposes, as well as potable water for administrative use.”
The company added: “When the city changed their perspective on this, we listened, and we redesigned the facility. The current plan implements an advanced closed-loop air-cooling system that virtually eliminates industrial water consumption for cooling, addressing the community’s water concerns head-on.
“Unfortunately, the City had already turned down the project so we were unable to engage with them on this alternative.”
The company said it has committed to “100 percent renewable energy use” for its air-cooled proposal and an additional $15 million investment in the community.
When the Pima Board of Supervisors was tasked in June with voting on whether or not to rezone county land for Project Blue’s data farms, Allen said her “no” vote was an easy decision, after speaking with other legislators.
“So the reason that I knew, early out of the gate, to oppose the data centers, is because I reached out and called elected officials who had already been in our shoes and previously had to make decisions about whether to approve data centers or not. What I got, over and over again, was that people felt like it was one of the worst decisions they had made,” she said.
But even with Project Blue stalled, the Tucson area is still a sought-after area for data farms. The Davis Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson is looking for clients to build facilities on its land.
The nearby town of Marana announced in early November that it is accepting applications, from a subsidiary of Project Blue, to build a data farm complex on two land parcels of approximately 600 acres, Government Technology reports. South of Tucson, the town of Sahuarita is courting its own data farm project.
“So those projects will just keep us circled with data centers,” Allen said.
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Chris Radwanski, data center supervisor, checks on Bitcoin mining machines in a shipping container behind the Scrubgrass Power plant in Russellton, Pennsylvania in 2021. Cooling the equipment stored in data farms can require up to 5 million gallons of water per day (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)
Allen considers the Pima County Board of Supervisors’ initial vote to allow Project Blue’s rezoning as the breach in the dam that encouraged other data farms to rush into the region. The board has since taken steps to regulate future projects.
The county supervisor said that future data center projects will be subject to due diligence reviews that include robust environmental impact studies. A law that allowed developers to use NDAs to keep the details of their projects hidden from the public is being reformed.
Pima County has also dispatched its lobbyists to Phoenix, instructing them to “put an end to the tax breaks that data centers get on sales state and local sales tax for the purchase of data center equipment.”
Allen is hopeful that the local government would be successful in wrestling control away from data farms and putting it back into the hands of the public.
“The tide is turning,” she said. “We are now seeing, all over the state of Arizona, other municipalities have made changes to their ordinances and their zoning and putting limits on data centers … so you know, I think we’re optimistic.”
