Paul Lipinski asked me about data centers on the radio last week. We'd spent twenty minutes on AI, the models, the jobs, what a business owner should actually do on Monday morning. Then he turned to the buildings. His listeners had been calling in about them. The well runs dry. The power bill jumps. The town gets nothing.
Fair questions. I gave him the short version on air. The clip above is a minute of it. This is the long version, with the numbers, because these buildings are only getting bigger and more of them are coming to a county near you.
My position today: this is a re-industrialization opportunity, the kind that comes around once in a generation, and the fear being served to people on their phones is mostly out of date. Do your own research. Challenge every line below. But start with the data, not with the clip.
Every data center in the country, combined, uses less water on site in a year than golf courses use in two weeks.
One Virginia county collects over a billion dollars a year from them. A farm town in Washington cut its poverty rate by three quarters.
The trades are booked solid. Electricians, welders, HVAC. Union work.
The fair deal on power is simple: the data center pays for the new supply, and your rate stays put. Some utilities have already frozen home rates on exactly those terms.
The Well
Start with water, because it's the fear that lands hardest. Nobody wants to turn on the tap and hear a gurgle.
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab does the energy accounting for the US Department of Energy. Its 2024 report put direct, on-site water use for every American data center at about 17 billion gallons in 2023. That sounds enormous until you look at what else we water. The golf course superintendents' own survey puts irrigation at well over a billion gallons a day. Every data center in America, for a full year, uses what the golf industry uses in under two weeks.
The newer sites do better still. Closed-loop cooling runs the same water round and round, topping up only for evaporation, so a modern building barely touches the drinking supply. Microsoft's latest designs use no water for cooling at all. The ones to worry about are the old open-loop designs, and those are exactly what a county can refuse to permit.
The Bill Nobody Skips
The second fear is that these are empty boxes that pay nothing. Loudoun County, Virginia, is the densest cluster of data centers on earth, and it now collects more than a billion dollars a year from them in local tax. Roughly a third of the county's budget, from buildings that send almost no kids to school and almost no cars onto the road at rush hour.
Quincy, Washington, is the smaller and more human version. A farm town of eight thousand people that young people used to leave. Data centers now pay more than half of the local property tax. CNN went and looked, and the census numbers back it up: poverty fell from around 29 percent to around 6 percent. That money paid for a new high school, a hospital, a library, and new police and fire stations. Real buildings. People walk into them every day.
The Work Stays
The third fear is that the jobs vanish once the concrete sets. The opposite is happening. These campuses keep growing, phase after phase, and each phase needs electricians, plumbers, welders, pipefitters and HVAC technicians. Talk to any contractor near a cluster and they will tell you the same thing. The trades are booked years out.
The building trades have noticed. IBEW locals and North America's Building Trades Unions are backing a lot of these projects, and the Associated Press has covered union leaders lobbying for them, because it is the best blue-collar work to show up in a generation. Steady, well paid, with a pension.
Who Pays for the Wires
Now the one that actually reaches your household. When a data center shows up, the utility has to build new supply. Substations, transmission, sometimes a whole new plant. Who pays for it?
The fair deal is simple. The data center pays for the new power. All of it. Written into the contract, with a minimum bill so they keep paying even if they leave early. Where regulators have done exactly that, home rates have held. Georgia's public service commission put large-load rules in place, and Georgia Power then agreed to freeze base rates for residential customers through 2028. DTE in Michigan and Alliant in the Midwest have built similar terms into their big-customer tariffs.
Where that language is missing, your bill goes up. So that is the question to ask at the town hall. Who pays for the wires?
The Battery Next to the Building
There is a bonus most people miss. These sites need big batteries to ride through a flicker. Those same batteries can push power back onto the grid when the system gets tight. Texas has already used storage that way to keep the lights on during summer peaks, and the Houston Chronicle has tracked how much of the state's battery fleet sits next to big industrial loads. A grid with data centers and batteries on it is steadier than the one before them, if the contract says the grid can call the battery.
Say No to the Bad Ones
Some projects deserve a hard no. The way to tell them apart is a short list you can bring to any council meeting.
Recycled or closed-loop water, in writing.
The data center pays for its own power and its own wires, with a minimum bill.
The tax money shows up in the school and the firehouse, on a schedule you can check.
The grid can call the battery.
Get those four and you have a neighbor that pays for the high school. Miss them and you have the story from the clip.
This country built its last wave of wealth on factories that made things you could hold. This wave runs on buildings that make things you can't. The towns that write a good contract will look like Quincy in ten years. Quincy has a new high school. The viral clip has a million views. Only one of those is still standing in a decade.
If you sit on a council, a chamber board, or run a business in a county with a project on the table, I'm happy to walk through the numbers with you. This is the conversation I'm having with owners and officials right now.
