Like the historic company towns of the Appalachian coalfields, the modern data center relies on massive, asymmetric consumption of water, electrical power and local political influence.
data center opinions
Posted inOpinion
Appalachian author: Who pays when Virginia’s data centers go quiet or get sold to another firm?
A county counting on decades of revenue is really counting on repeated rounds of reinvestment. Each round is a fresh corporate decision about whether to refill that building in Pittsylvania or Russell County or to put the new chips somewhere cheaper, unless a legal agreement requires the same site to be used.
Posted inOpinion
Some politicians want a data center moratorium, but no one is proposing to stop the forces driving the demand for data centers
To do so would require legislators to reach further into the business world than even the most regulation-happy politician has ever proposed.
Posted inOpinion
Consultant: Western Virginia is on the data center map. Landowners should set the terms.
A county, an industrial development authority, a foundation or a nonprofit that controls a developable site does not need to wait for a developer’s proposal. It can write its terms first and then invite developers to compete to meet them. If it leases the land rather than selling it, those terms stop being promises made at a public hearing. They become lease covenants, enforceable for decades.
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Some of your data may already be overseas. Would a data center moratorium accelerate that? Should that matter?
We can stop building data centers but we won’t stop creating data, so where would it go?
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What’s our personal data center footprint? We might use 58 to 87 data centers each day.
American life has become digitized. Here’s a look at all the things we do that require “compute” hubs, and how many.
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Researcher: The data center jobs are real. So is everything else on the ledger.
The challenge is that we don’t know some of the things we need to know to calculate the true trade-offs on data centers.
Posted inOpinion
Taxes from data center electricity helps lower health insurance rates for 200,000 Virginians. There may be a catch to this revenue stream, though.
Democrats celebrated the connection between these two events. However, this could create a scenario where Virginia has a stake in seeing more data centers built.
Posted inOpinion
Spanberger wants to see data centers generate more power on site
Speaking in Danville at an event sponsored by Cardinal News and the Institute for Advanced Learning and Research, the governor also acknowledged that some rural counties have “solar fatigue.”
Posted inOpinion
Data centers are creating blue-collar jobs. Are Democrats on the wrong side politically of these workers?
Most of the jobs being created by data centers aren’t in the computer facilities themselves but in supply chains. The candidates who call for a moratorium on data center construction would put some of these jobs at risk.
