Data center opponents are holding a series of eight marches across Virginia to call for a statewide moratorium on their construction.
On Monday, they’ll be marching in Danville, which is an interesting choice, since the region is slated to get at least 2,050 jobs over the coming years at a data center complex to be built at the Southern Virginia Megasite.
If that number comes to fruition — and that is the number of permanent jobs, not construction jobs, that the performance agreement calls for — it would be the largest jobs announcement in Southside in, well, a long time. The Virginia Economic Development Partnership database goes back to 1990 and the largest is the 2,015 jobs slated for the Microporous battery plant that’s now under construction.
It’s unusual to see people marching against jobs in a part of the state that has undergone decades of economic trauma with the loss of key industries. On the other hand, those data center jobs aren’t there yet, but the energy demands from data centers are — something that those in neighboring Pittsylvania County know well since that county has approved more solar projects than any other in the state, according to the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia, and officials there have spoken openly about “solar fatigue.” To that extent, Southside is a good place to examine the tensions and trade-offs with data centers: jobs and tax revenue versus energy requirements.
There’s also something of a class conflict at work: Virginia’s most affluent counties in Northern Virginia are now tiring of data centers but some of its poorest counties in rural Virginia see data centers as an opportunity for long-sought revenue. Two counties to the east of Danville is Mecklenburg, which has been able to use revenue from a Microsoft data center complex to build three new schools, something most rural counties can’t afford. Many rural counties see a potential moratorium as a case of the rich telling the poor they can’t have the same opportunities; on the other hand, individual counties aren’t responsible for meeting the state’s energy requirements.
State Sen. Russet Perry, D-Loudoun County, whose district includes “Data Center Alley,” last week announced she’ll be introducing a bill to impose a three-year moratorium on data center development. That seems unlikely to become law. In an appearance at the Governor’s Summit on Rural Prosperity in Lexington, Gov. Abigail Spanberger said she’s against a statewide moratorium because some localities want data centers — and those who don’t can impose their own moratoriums at any time.
I asked Perry about the implications of her proposed moratorium on the Stack project in Pittsylvania and here’s what she emailed me: “A recent Brookings study found that while data centers do create some jobs, the long-term employment gains are much more modest than industry claims suggest. Beside the questionable jobs numbers being put forward by the wealthiest corporations to ever exist, simultaneously we have depleting water tables and an unstable power grid in Virginia, largely caused by the strains of the data center industry. The people of Southside Virginia, like those across the commonwealth, deserve the security of knowing they will have clean water to drink and can turn on the lights in their homes. Those are resources every family across Virginia depends on.”
Meanwhile, from Kevin Hughes of Stack Infrastructure, the developer of that 2,500-job Pittsylvania County project: “A data center moratorium doesn’t eliminate demand for digital infrastructure. It shifts where that infrastructure gets built and where the investment goes. Americans will continue creating data, businesses will continue adopting AI and demand for digital services will only grow. The question is whether we build the infrastructure to support that growth in a given locality, state or even in the United States, or increasingly rely on capacity elsewhere. This is about more than jobs and economic development. It’s about American competitiveness, the resilience of our digital infrastructure, and maintaining greater control over sensitive information. Communities should absolutely have a voice in how infrastructure is developed, and legitimate concerns deserve thoughtful, fact-based solutions. But restricting data center development won’t stop demand. It risks sending investment, innovation and opportunity somewhere else.”
Those are the politics of a potential moratorium. What about the technicalities? That’s what I set out to explore today.
What would happen if Virginia did impose a statewide moratorium? Or if enough localities imposed their own that much of the state was off-limits to data centers? The answer seems obvious and Hughes’ answer foreshadows it: Data centers would simply go somewhere else.
Even without a moratorium, Virginia is on the verge of losing its crown as the world’s data center capital. The commercial real estate firm JLL recently reported that Texas now has almost as much data center capacity as Virginia — and is in the process of building more than we are. We can’t say that Virginia is losing data centers to Texas, but Texas is certainly gaining them at a faster rate now. That might simply be inevitable: Texas is a lot bigger geographically than Virginia so, as the saying goes, everything is bigger in Texas.
Category Texas Virginia Existing 8,963 gigawatts 9,307 gigawatts Under Construction 17,503 gigawatts 3,760 gigawatts
Some might like a statewide moratorium, some might not. You might see the results of either policy in your power bill or your tax bill, but your experience as a data consumer would not change. You could still swipe your card at the gas pump, you could still upload your funny cat video to TikTok, you could still watch all the Netflix movies you want and never notice which data centers all that data is being routed through. TikTok uses a lot of servers in Virginia now, but until 2023 it stored some of its American data in Singapore. Some of your other online transactions might already be happening on servers overseas.
What would happen, though, if there were a national moratorium on data centers? Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., have already called for one. So has Rep. Frank Pallone Jr., D-N.J., the ranking Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee who would be in line to chair that panel if Democrats win a majority in November.
That raises a more interesting question. We’re not going to stop creating data. We can’t. We have created a digital society where much of what we do is online — from banking to movies to music to shopping to video games. Exploding Topics reports that we create 402.74 million terabytes of data every day. That appears to be a global figure but the website Quartz says about one-third of the data in the world is American. That would seem to suggest every day we Americans create 134.24 terabytes of data. Solix Technologies says a single “data hall” — the part of a data center where the servers are — typically can hold maybe 1,000 terabytes of data, depending on the size of the place. By that measure, every week Americans create 939.68 terabytes of data, or enough to fill up a new data hall every week. Solix goes on to say that a typical data center might have 3-10 data halls, so that means we’re filling up a new data center every 3-10 weeks.
Here’s where I must ping a few data centers to make sure I get the old Everett Dirksen quote right: “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.” Alas, it appears the former Republican senator from Illinois never actually said that, although he said things close to that, but you get the idea. All this data has to go somewhere. If we were to stop building data centers, where would it go?
Once again, the answer seems obvious: It would go to data centers overseas.
This is where things start to get tricky. Some of our data is already overseas. We just don’t know much and no one in the data center industry I talked to could offer an estimate. Neither could the internet, so this is really an unknown figure. We know anecdotally that some of our data is overseas because in 2013 the Federal Bureau of Investigation wanted access to the emails of a drug suspect but Microsoft said that they were on a server in Ireland and that U.S. law didn’t reach outside the country. The case wound its way to the U.S. Supreme Court; before the court could rule Congress passed — and President Donald Trump signed — the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act, or CLOUD Act, which rendered the case moot. That law says that if American technology companies have servers overseas, U.S. law enforcement can still access the data with a warrant.
If you dig deep into Google’s support pages for Google Workspace, you’ll find this: “As an administrator, you can use data regions to store your covered Google Workspace data in a specific geographic location. Your location options are the United States, European Union (labeled Europe in the Google Admin console), or No preference.” Steve Chipman, who founded the technology company Lexnet, wrote an article several years ago about where Google stores its data: “Google stores subscriber data (email, documents, spreadsheets, etc.) in small pieces. Each of those chunks is copied several times and stored in multiple geographic locations. … When you look at an email or open a document, the pieces are effectively reassembled for you, on-demand. … Because these pieces are geographically distributed and copied, if one or even several centers were to go completely down, you would still have access to your information. … So, where are your Gmail and Google Workspace data stored? Everywhere and nowhere.”
For those of us for whom that answer is far too metaphysical, there’s this: Google says it has 36 data center complexes around the world, with another 33 under development. That will eventually be 68 in all; of those, 43 are in the United States, meaning 25 aren’t. Of those, 17 are in Europe, six are in Asia and two are in South America.
That means in theory the email you send, or the file you have stored online through Google, could at this moment be scattered in bits and bytes from Loudoun County to Uruguay to Finland to Taiwan.
(Google, by the way, is one of our donors through its Google News Initiative for our New River Valley expansion, but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy. You can become a donor, too, and test this proposition. For what it’s worth, Google was not a source for this column, other than me reading things off their website.)
None of this, though, answers the question of just how much of our data is sitting on a server in some other country. Here’s the best figure I can come up with: According to Goldman Sachs, the demand of American data centers exceeds supply. Goldman Sachs measures this in gigawatts of power and calculates that the current demand is 49.8 gigawatts but U.S. capacity is 40.5 gigawatts. That would seem to suggest the remaining 9.3 gigawatts is somewhere else, although it’s unclear from the Goldman Sachs report whether that demand really has transferred somewhere else or is simply sitting in a queue somewhere waiting to be served. Such as, say, the Google data center complex that recently broke ground in Botetourt County in the Greenfield business center not far from my house or the one coming to the Wood Haven Technology Park in Roanoke County.
Remember that CLOUD Act I mentioned? That addressed the question of whether American law covers your data stored overseas; it does. The flip side of that is to what extent foreign law covers your data overseas. Now, conveniently (and I’m sure by design), all those Google data centers are in friendly countries, although, as we’ve seen lately, the definition of a friendly country is sometimes subject to change. However, if a data center is located on foreign soil, that country does have the ability to seize the data if its laws allow. Oddly enough, over the weekend a Russian diplomat said the Trump administration is discussing the possibility of joint U.S.-Russian data centers that could use Russian nuclear plants for power. It’s hard to know whether to believe anything Russian diplomats say, but the Trump administration has been unorthodox, shall we say, in its approach to Russia of late. Would any American company be OK if some of its data were stored in Russia? Or should we just CC everything straight to Moscow?
Should it matter to you where your data is stored? That’s up to you — I’ll confess I’ve never thought about it until now. For all I know, though, pieces of my medical records might be in Chile, my financial records in Singapore, my cat videos in Denmark.
If we ever had a national moratorium on data centers, whatever percentage of our data is now overseas would surely increase. Would we notice? Probably not. However, I can also see that being raised as a political issue. We’ve seen a push to re-shore manufacturing supply chains; the pandemic definitely taught us that maybe it’s not such a good idea to be reliant on medicines produced in some other country. Would a data center moratorium lead us to look more closely at the question of “data sovereignty” and “data residency” and where our data is stored? Some countries care; countries that require “data residency” for at least some data range from China and Russia (which, of course, like to keep tabs on their people) to more open countries such as Germany and South Korea (which believe that certain types of data, such as medical, financial and tax records, shouldn’t be in some other country). That, of course, means building data centers. Would a national moratorium lead to just the opposite — a fear about our data falling into foreign hands lead to demands for “data residency” and mandates we build data centers as a matter of protecting privacy?
We live in interesting times.
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