Legislators in Maine passed the nation’s first statewide ban on large data centers, part of a growing backlash to the energy-intensive facilities that fuel AI. Voters in Virginia, a global hub for data centers, have turned sharply against the facilities after previously welcoming them. In 2023, 69% of voters said they would be comfortable with a new data center in their community. That has plunged to 35% in the past month. That shift suggests Virginians now consider data centers almost as undesirable as nuclear power plants. A 2023 poll found just 33% of voters nationwide would be comfortable seeing one built in their community. Similar disillusionment has taken hold across the country. Nationwide, 62% of Americans say the cost of data centers outweighs the benefits
Voters in Virginia, a global hub for the hulking warehouses of computers known as data centers, have turned sharply against the facilities after previously welcoming them, a Washington Post-Schar School poll has found.
Legislators in Maine on Tuesday passed the nation’s first statewide ban on large data centers, part of a growing backlash to the energy-intensive facilities that fuel the rise of artificial intelligence.
The measure would block the creation of new data centers that draw more than 20 megawatts of power until the fall of 2027 and establish a mechanism to study their impact on the electrical grid. Maine’s moratorium was approved in final votes Tuesday by both houses of the state legislature. The bill will now go to Gov. Janet Mills (D) for signature.
The share of Virginian voters who would be comfortable with construction of a new data center in their community has plunged to 35 percent, according to the Post-Schar School poll conducted late last month, as worries mount in the state and across the nation that the projects are a scourge on the environment and household utility bills. Data centers enjoyed bipartisan support from Virginians as recently as 2023, but that has flipped to dismay throughout the state, including in regions that are far from the dense cluster of hundreds of facilities outside Washington known as “Data Center Alley.”
The poll shows a striking drop since the same question was asked in 2023, when 69 percent of voters said they would be comfortable with a new data center in their community.
That shift suggests Virginians now consider data centers almost as undesirable as nuclear power plants, which a 2023 Post-University of Maryland poll found just 33 percent of voters nationwide would be very or somewhat comfortable seeing built in their community.
Similar disillusionment has taken hold across the country. Nationwide, 62 percent of Americans say the cost of data centers outweighs the benefits, according to a Marquette Law School poll conducted in January.
Virginia voters have also soured on tax breaks for data centers that create at least 1,000 jobs. In the 2023 Post-Schar School poll, they were favored by 61 percent of voters, but the new poll found that 37 percent now support them.
In a separate question, the poll found that 26 percent of Virginia voters support continuing the sales-tax exemption for data centers that meet investment requirements, while 67 percent want to end those incentives. State lawmakers are weighing whether to gut the incentives.
The new poll results underscore the intensity of public frustration with Silicon Valley’s plan for a boom in construction in Virginia and nationwide. The tech industry’s insistence that it must rapidly construct power-hungry data centers to compete in artificial intelligence innovation has created a major political hazard for elected officials, especially at the local level where the projects receive approval.
“Lots of people are making money on these institutions,” Charlottesville retiree Sylvia Whitt, 78, said of data centers. “Not Virginians who pay for it and who are going to be paying through the nose through water, electricity and degradation of the environment.”
“I like the internet as much as anybody, but we’ve got to go on an internet diet,” she said. “We don’t need to pay for corporations to do their internet stuff.”
Whitt described herself as a “bleeding-heart” liberal. But she has similar views on data centers to Mark Lauzier, a 64-year-old government worker from the Leesburg area who identifies as Christian conservative. “It is just crazy what is going on,” he said of the boom in data center construction. “It is driven by money and greed, and it is diminishing our quality of life.”
Virginians widely share those concerns about costs to the environment and the power grid, according to the Post-Schar School poll. It found that 57 percent of registered voters believe data centers are having a negative impact on home energy bills, as opposed to 14 percent who say they are helping.
And 59 percent of voters said the projects are negatively affecting the local environment, as opposed to 14 percent who say the impact is positive.
“What is happening in Virginia is happening around the country,” said Eric Eve, a White House aide during the Clinton era and a former vice president for global community relations at Citi who now helps corporate clients build local relationships.
“Americans are asking: Why am I supporting the evolution of something that could be so incredibly destructive without understanding how it benefits me?” Eve said. Rising energy costs and the drive by Silicon Valley firms to deploy a technology that its leaders say will automate many jobs add to the discomfort, Eve said.
The intensity of American opposition to the projects is reflected in the hundreds of proposals to rein in data centers that have rapidly emerged in Virginia and statehouses and city councils across the country. On Tuesday, legislators in Maine passed a measure that would block the creation of new data centers that draw more than 20 megawatts of power until the fall of 2027.
Project proposals that would have sailed through planning boards only a couple of years ago are now getting blocked, analysts say. Candidates are running on anti-data-center platforms in some parts of the country, and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) have proposed a nationwide moratorium on the facilities.
The number of grassroots organizations fighting data centers nationwide has doubled over the past year to nearly 400, according to Data Center Watch, a tracking effort by the nonpartisan research firm 10a Labs. With 57 such groups, Virginia has more than any other state.
National organizations like the NAACP, the Sierra Club and Earthjustice have also joined the battle against data centers in a major way. “In 2024 or 2025, if you were a developer proposing a data center project, you would factor in opposition as a possibility,” said Miquel Vila, a researcher at Data Center Watch. “Now it is something you have to count on. Silicon Valley’s arguments that these are a good thing are not working — not their broader narrative, and not the more specific arguments they are using at the local level.”
At least 48 data center projects were blocked or delayed across the country in 2025, according to Data Center Watch, scuttling $156 billion in planned development. That includes a $1 billion plan for a 515-acre data center campus east of Richmond that the developer shelved in August amid fierce community opposition, as well as a Fauquier County project called “Gigaland” that was bitterly fought by residents.
There were 238 state legislative proposals to place new rules on data center development nationwide last year, 40 of which were passed, according to monitoring by the government affairs firm MultiState.
The frustration is mounting in Virginia even as local leaders who championed the projects can point to an influx of revenue that has helped keep property taxes down and schools and other services well funded, a point not lost on retiree David Spahr, 63, who has lived in Ashburn for three decades.
“They certainly provide revenue to the country, so our home taxes don’t go up, but the values of our houses do,” he said. “It’s generally positive.”
Spahr’s views are in the minority. Even in Loudoun County, where data centers have provided a major boost to local coffers, the Post-Schar School poll found that 51 percent of voters perceive the developments are making their tax bills worse.
“I find it surprising,” said Terry Clower, a professor of public policy at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, which co-sponsored the poll. “Anyone in Loudoun County who says they don’t see a benefit from this should look at their tax bill. … At some point there are going to be case studies of how the tech companies managed to so badly blow their messaging.”
A majority of voters in Virginia agree with tech companies that the data centers are creating employment opportunities, with 56 percent saying their impact on job growth is positive. And more voters say the projects have a positive impact on the local economy than say those impacts are negative. Yet fewer than half of Virginia voters say they help funding for county governments or local property tax rates, two of the most common arguments for their construction. In Loudoun, 51 percent say data centers have a positive impact on local government funding, but 25 percent say the same about local property tax rates, despite the county lowering property taxes by 30 percent over the past decade.
Overall, a commanding majority of Virginia voters are not comfortable with a new data center getting built in their community at a time when the industry is on a construction spree. That tension is reshaping the political landscape throughout Virginia, where Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D) is resisting calls to cut tax breaks for data centers, which the Post-Schar School poll show are unpopular with the electorate.
“You should know what you’re giving up,” Spanberger said in an interview with The Post. “How many fewer data centers might come to Virginia? What is the modeling for what that means in terms of impact to local revenues? What does that mean for what the state might then have to backfill to local revenues? And importantly, what’s our legal exposure if we’re breaking contracts?”
“Whether we’re making promises to localities or to businesses or to a workforce, Virginia should be a place that keeps its commitments,” she said. Navigating the issue has become particularly challenging for Democrats, who are facing a base of voters whose views on data centers have changed dramatically in the past few years. The share of Democrats who would be comfortable with a new data center built in their community has plunged 44 percentage points since 2023, according to the poll, with 28 percent now saying they would be comfortable with it.
At the same time, the number of data center projects are booming. If there is one point on which even voters with wildly diverging views on data centers can agree, it is that the issue is not going away. Spahr remarked on how the construction spree seems endless.
“They’re not stopping anytime soon,” he said.The poll was conducted by The Post and George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government from March 26-31 among a random sample of 1,101 registered voters in Virginia, drawn from a statewide voter database, including 160 interviews with voters in Loudoun County. Live-caller interviews reached respondents on cellphones (62 percent) and landlines (16 percent); 22 percent were reached via text message and invited to take the survey online. The overall margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.4 percentage points
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