In response to Dwayne Yancey’s “Data centers are creating blue-collar jobs. Are Democrats on the wrong side politically of these workers?”, September 29, 2026.
Dwayne Yancey is right that the Munters plant in Botetourt County is making real things for real wages, and right that a moratorium would reach workers nobody in the moratorium debate is thinking about. He is also right that this is more complicated than a bumper sticker. I want to take that last point further than the column does, because the jobs number is softer than it looks and the rest of the ledger rarely gets added up.
Start with where the numbers come from. The PwC study Yancey cites was commissioned by the Data Center Coalition, the industry’s trade association, and published on a website the Coalition runs. Those are the sources available, which is the problem. Read it as a party’s filing rather than a finding.
The JLARC number is more interesting than either side has noticed. Yancey reports about 50 jobs for each 250,000-square-foot facility, citing JLARC’s 2024 study. What the study says is that “several data center representatives indicated” that figure, and that about half of them are contract workers: electricians, pipefitters, security. Fifty is also the number the statute asks for. To claim Virginia’s sales tax exemption a data center must invest $150 million and create 50 jobs at 150 percent of the local average wage, with lower thresholds in distressed localities. Virginia is not observing that data centers employ fifty people. Virginia is observing that they employ the number Virginia told them to employ.
Then the measurement. No series publishes union membership annually for a single trade in a single metropolitan area, so far as I could find, so I built one from sixteen years of federal filings signed under penalty of perjury. Inside electrical construction membership in hyperscale data center metros grew 17.3 percent faster than in comparable metros through 2025. Covered employment in those same places, on the government’s own count, grew 9.1 to 11.9 percent faster. Both numbers are real and they are not the same claim. Some of what reads as job creation is a trade organizing work that was already there. That is a good thing for those workers, and it is different from hundreds of new jobs, and anyone arguing either side of a moratorium should know which one they are holding.
Now Botetourt, since that is where the column starts.
Google bought 312.55 acres of the county’s flagship business park at Greenfield in June 2025 for $14,055,406.37, plus $4 million for county initiatives, on an option signed the previous October. Eight weeks after that signature the county added “data center” to the permitted uses of the only zoning district that could host one and called it housekeeping. The staff report on the accompanying rezoning said “no use or concept is identified at this time.” The county had been hosting Google site visits since January 2024 under the code name Project Raspberry. The performance agreement caps the company’s effective equipment tax rate at $2.40 per $100 for twenty years per building. It binds the county and its development authority, on a records request reaching Google’s confidential information, to notify the company and help narrow or resist it. It assigns Google “all media and press relation services” concerning its involvement with the county. And it promises $1 billion and 50 jobs for each data center built. Fifty again.
A local government signed away its own ability to talk about the largest transaction in its history. The noise standard it will hold the finished campus to asks only whether the sound is clearly audible fifty feet from the property line.
None of that appears in a jobs count. Neither does the transmission. When a 765-kilovolt line is built in PJM, Schedule 12 splits the cost two ways: half by a zone’s share of regional load, half by a flow calculation. Neither half asks where the towers go. Dominion’s zone carries about 45 percent. The farmer whose fields the line crosses is not a stakeholder in any sense the proceeding recognizes. Once the line is certificated he is a landowner facing condemnation if he says no.
Water is its own accounting. The Department of Environmental Quality simulated a three-million-gallon-a-day withdrawal, the published upper end for a hyperscale campus on evaporative cooling, at nine locations spanning the coastal plain. All nine failed the permitting criteria. That is the closest thing the commonwealth has to an answer about whether the eastern half of the state can physically host what it is approving.
Then there is the subsidy, which is the part that should trouble anyone who cares what the money could otherwise do. Virginia’s exemption cost the commonwealth about $1.94 billion in forgone revenue in fiscal 2025 by operator self-reporting, or about $1.6 billion by state audit. JLARC’s own incentives table puts the return at 48 cents in state revenue for every dollar spent, against 41 cents for the average Virginia incentive, and says that on the state’s side of the ledger it does not pay for itself. The same table credits the exemption with 84 jobs per million spent against 58 for the average, which is the industry’s best card and a real one. It beats the average incentive on jobs and still loses money.
What has never been measured for Virginia is how much of the investment the exemption actually caused. Georgia measured its own. The Carl Vinson Institute at the University of Georgia found that 30 percent of Georgia’s data centers could be attributed to the exemption, and that the other 70 percent would exist without it. The broader incentives literature points nearer 25 percent. Virginia is finally getting a number of its own. The Joint Subcommittee on Tax Policy, revived in this summer’s budget compromise and meeting in August for the first time since 2024, reports December 15. Six weeks after the election.
Listen to how the two sides talked at that August hearing. The Data Center Coalition called it a “valuable and important reminder of the thousands of good paying jobs, billions in tax revenue, and responsible operations” tied to the industry. Senator Louise Lucas, closing the same meeting: “Citizens everywhere are saying they feel like they’re being steamrolled by their local governing bodies and the state, that they’re being kept completely in the dark.” Both are describing the same industry and neither is describing the other’s evidence. That is the whole debate: one number each, held up as the whole case.
I am not arguing against data centers and I am not arguing for the moratorium. The honest position is that this is a trade, and Virginia has never written the trade down. We know what the exemption costs because someone bothered to calculate it. We do not know what it bought. We know what a campus pays a county. Nobody is required to disclose what the transmission to serve it costs the ratepayers three counties over. We know the trades are busier. We are less sure how much of that is new work.
Data centers are not demons and they are not heroes. They are a very large industrial land use arriving faster than the record-keeping around it, and the voters are being asked to decide in November about a study that lands in December.
Tommy N. Turner is an independent researcher who documents the local government and energy side of data center expansion in Virginia. He serves on the advisory board of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation study at Emory University on data centers and the Southern energy buildout, which did not fund or review this piece.
