Opponents of the data center boom have taken to calling Virginia the canary in the coal mine, and the geography is fair. If these buildings drain local water, drive household power bills through the roof, and leave counties poorer than they found them, the damage should already be visible in the state that has hosted the densest cluster on earth since the mid 1990s. Northern Virginia has lived with that concentration for thirty years, and the wreckage the models keep announcing has not shown up in the bills, the taps, or the tax rate.
Virginia now hosts roughly 385 operating data center buildings, totaling on the order of 75 million gross square feet. Measured by square footage, that is about 5 times what Texas has, roughly 7 times California, roughly 7 times New York, and roughly 10 times Florida. Adjusted for population, the gap widens. Virginia has nearly 5 times as many data centers per resident as Texas, 6.2 times as many as California, 5.9 times as many as New York, and 8.5 times as many as Florida. Northern Virginia is the largest data center market in America and the largest in the world, and Loudoun, Prince William, and Fairfax counties alone account for roughly 80% of the Commonwealth’s inventory. Other states are still arguing from models of what might happen if a campus were to arrive. Virginia already has the record of what did happen after the campuses arrived in force and stayed.
The water claim is the one that travels fastest. Critics say the facilities will drain a community’s supply and then poison what remains with their discharge. A large share of Virginia’s data center buildings do not use meaningful quantities of water after the tanks are filled. About 40% are exclusively air- or dry-cooled, meaning they reject heat mechanically and consume almost no energy once the system is charged. Another 35% are hybrid, running dry through most of the year and switching to evaporative assistance only in the hottest stretches of summer. That leaves roughly 25% that depend on water. The phrase “data centers use water” treats those three machines as a single entity.
Virginia’s fleet consumes about 2.1 billion gallons of water a year, of which roughly 780 million gallons are discharged. The fair test is what the same land and the same 75 million square feet would demand as ordinary offices. Federal Energy Star benchmarking puts median office water use at about 14.48 gallons per square foot per year. Multiply that out, and you get roughly 1.086 billion gallons of annual use and roughly 619 million gallons of annual discharge. The data center stream is larger by volume, somewhere in the range of 16% to 26% depending on which assumptions you carry through the arithmetic.
A treatment plant cares less about the raw gallon count than about what is dissolved and suspended in those gallons. Cooling tower blowdown contains elevated levels of salts and dissolved minerals. Office discharge, on the other hand, carries human sewage. Of that 619 million gallons, roughly 229 million to 294 million gallons would be restroom wastewater containing urine, fecal matter, toilet paper, and the associated pathogens. EPA figures place untreated domestic wastewater at something like 1 million to 10 million fecal coliform organisms per 100 milliliters, a burden that cooling tower blowdown simply does not carry. The restroom fraction alone imposes something like 7 to 17 times the biological treatment demand of the equivalent data center stream, and if the whole office stream approaches domestic strength, the multiple runs from 18 to 36 times. Replace the campuses with an equivalent quantity of ordinary office space, and you would trim discharge volume somewhat while multiplying the pathogen and biological loading on local plants by an order of magnitude. The volume argument, taken alone, is the wrong measure of what a wastewater plant is being asked to do.
Virginia has also done what the moratorium campaign insists cannot be done. It engineered the water problem downward instead of legislating the industry out of the state. Loudoun Water laid its first reclaimed water pipelines in 2010, well before anyone in Ashburn was talking about an AI boom, and it built them specifically to serve industrial cooling and the county’s growing data center sector. That network now runs about 20 miles. In 2025, it delivered more than 750 million gallons of reclaimed water to customers, displacing an equivalent volume of potable water. Set that against the statewide total and the scale becomes easier to hold. Virginia’s entire data center fleet uses 2.1 billion gallons a year, and a single county is now recycling 750 million gallons back into industrial service, with the program still expanding and neighboring jurisdictions laying pipe of their own. Virginia’s nonpartisan legislative auditors reviewed the full picture and concluded that data center water use is sustainable, accounting for less than 0.5% of statewide withdrawals, while sensibly noting that it should be measured and managed as it grows.
Electricity was the prediction offered with the most confidence. If concentrating this much computing load in one state drives residential rates through the roof, Virginia should post the highest household bills in America. Households there paid an average of 16.69¢ per kilowatt-hour through mid 2026, 8.1% below the national average of 18.16¢. Virginians pay roughly 49.7% less than Californians, 44.5% less than Massachusetts residents, and 43.7% less than Mainers. California, Massachusetts, and Maine are not data center hubs. They are states that have spent years treating energy abundance as a problem to be managed rather than a condition of growth.
The economics are the same ones that apply to any large industrial customer. Infrastructure carries high fixed costs, and when a very large, very steady, and very creditworthy user arrives and spreads those costs across a bigger base of consumption, the per-unit burden on everyone else falls. Mario Loyola of the Heritage Foundation put the general point cleanly when he observed that soaring demand ought to be good news, because it signals a flourishing economy. Bills rise when supply is blocked. They rise more slowly and almost always fall when a new load helps pay for wires and plants that would have been expensive either way. Virginia’s commercial customers pay about 11.11¢ and its industrial customers about 10.08¢, rates that manufacturers in California can only envy, and if Texas took the cluster to Virginia’s density, the same arithmetic would push Texas rates lower still. None of this means Virginia rates never moved. They have risen with fuel and inflation, as rates have almost everywhere, and anyone who claims otherwise is selling a cleaner story than the monthly filings support. The comparative fact is still the one the campaign keeps missing. The densest market in the country still sits below the national average, and far below the states that constrained generation and then went looking for a villain.
There are real issues in the record, and Virginia has been treating them as engineering problems rather than as proof that the industry cannot be hosted. Water use is heavily skewed, which supports targeted standards for wet-cooled facilities rather than a statewide freeze. Summer consumptive demand in the Potomac basin spikes well above the annual average, which supports seasonal planning and the need for more reclaimed water already moving through Loudoun. Large new loads should pay for the generation and transmission built on their behalf, which is precisely why the State Corporation Commission established a separate GS-5 rate class with 14-year take-and-pay commitments and minimum monthly obligations covering at least 85% of transmission and distribution costs. That tariff is scheduled to take effect in 2027 for the largest customers. It is the ordinary discipline of a state that wants the industry and does not intend to hand the bill to households.
Meanwhile the ledger on the other side is not close, the industry now supports roughly 74,000 jobs across the Commonwealth directly and indirectly, generates about $5.5 billion in annual labor income, and adds around $9.1 billion to Virginia GDP, and in Loudoun County the data centers added $16 billion to the real property portfolio in a single year, bringing their assessed value to $41 billion, producing almost half of all county property tax revenue, and allowing the county to cut its real property tax rate from $1.285 per $100 of assessed value in 2008 to $0.805 today while the schools kept getting funded. A homeowner in the most saturated county in the world now hands the county a third less of the house’s assessed value than that homeowner would have handed over in 2008, which is the fiscal result of letting a high-value industrial use sit on land that used to throw off far less revenue.
Texas, Georgia, and the other states now fighting this out in zoning halls already have a completed record sitting one region over. Virginia put the cluster where the critics said the harm would show first, and after thirty years the household bill, the school budget, and the property rate are the reading. The canary has been singing the same note for a long time. The live question is whether the rest of the country will trust a thirty-year result or keep listening to the Chinese propaganda being fed to them on a daily basis.
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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in a sponsored partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.
There is nothing like facts to mess with the complainers.
Alexander, I applaud your attempt to introduce the real facts and receipts to the perpetually hoodwinked, but I fear they are beyond even your superhuman abilities. Facts and data are not enough for them. They are too accustomed to believing all that MSM prints, and following any shiny object dangled in front of them by the Communist Chinese bots and their allies who want the US to fall behind in every way on the world stage.
And BTW, thank you for another excellent, fact-based article on this important subject. I always look forward to reading what you publish.