A building lands outside town. No windows. No sign worth reading. A parking lot built for forty cars and a power draw built for a city. The county calls it economic development. The company calls it the cloud. Your water bill and your electric bill will come to know it by another name.
Before we get to the numbers — and the numbers are staggering — I want to start where this series always starts: with something my grandfather wrote down. In 1934, in the middle of the San Francisco General Strike, he recorded a detail the headlines never bothered with. The strikers, holding an entire city in their hands, set out "to organize essential public services under control of the strikers in order that undue hardships be spared the public."14
Read that again. The people with every reason to let the city ache chose instead to keep its essential services running — so ordinary people wouldn't suffer for a fight that wasn't theirs. Working people have always understood what power and water are. Not commodities. A commons.
Ninety years later, the wealthiest companies in human history are reaching into that commons to cool their machines — and this time, the hardship is not being spared. It's being billed. To you.
Start with the scale, because nothing about this is small. There are now more than 5,000 data centers in the United States, and the AI boom is multiplying them at a pace the grid has never seen.4 In 2023 they consumed about 4.4 percent of all U.S. electricity. By 2030, the Electric Power Research Institute projects they could take 9 to 17 percent — doubling to quadrupling their share in seven years.1 In Virginia, data centers already drink roughly a quarter of the state's power; by 2030 that could reach 57 percent. Seven more states — Arizona, Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, Nevada, Oregon, Wyoming — could see them pass 20 percent.1
A single AI-focused hyperscale campus uses as much electricity as 100,000 households. The largest ones now under construction are expected to use twenty times that — one building, drawing the power of two million homes.2
Machines that hot need cooling, and cooling means water. A single large data center can draw up to five million gallons a day — the consumption of a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people.3 Nationally, data centers already pull roughly 449 million gallons every day.4 About 80 percent of what they withdraw evaporates — it doesn't come back.4
And they are being built where the water already isn't. More than 60 percent of the country is in drought, and over fifty data centers are under construction in drought-prone areas right now.4 In Bessemer, Alabama, residents halted a facility that would have drawn two million gallons a day — enough to supply two-thirds of the city's people.4 In Newton County, Georgia, one company's data center already takes 10 percent of the entire county's water — and new permit requests would draw up to six million gallons a day, more than every home and business in the county combined.5
One more thing about where these buildings land. The burden is not spread evenly: researchers find the environmental weight falls hardest on working-class, Black, and Latino communities. In California, 82 percent of data centers sit in communities already suffering poor air quality.4 The places with the least political power get the diesel generators and the drawn-down aquifers. That's not an accident. That's a pattern with a long history, and it has a name: extraction.
Now the part you've already felt, even if no one explained it. In PJM — the grid serving 65 million people across thirteen mid-Atlantic and Midwest states — the price of guaranteeing power supply jumped more than tenfold in two years, from about $29 per megawatt-day to $329, the maximum regulators allow.6 The region's annual capacity bill went from $2.2 billion to $16.4 billion.7 The grid's own independent market monitor traced 63 percent of the first spike — $9.3 billion in a single year — to one cause: data center demand.6
That money doesn't come from the data centers. It comes from everyone. Washington, D.C. households saw bills jump $21 a month. Western Maryland, about $18. Ohio, $16.8 Analysts project the average family in the region will be paying roughly $70 more per month by 2028, with $100 to $163 billion in added costs through 2033 if nothing changes.7 On top of that, utilities quietly assigned $4.3 billion in data center connection costs to ordinary ratepayers in a single year — buried in filings nobody reads.9
Pennsylvania's governor called the 2025 capacity prices "the largest unjust wealth transfer in the history of U.S. energy markets."7 He's a politician, so he was being polite. Here is the plain version: you are paying a surcharge on your own lights so that the richest corporations on earth don't have to pay full freight for theirs.
So what does a town get in return? This series tells the truth even when it complicates the story, so here is the full ledger — both columns.
The debit side is ugly. Data centers are among the least labor-intensive buildings in the economy. A typical facility runs on a few dozen permanent workers; one 1.1-million-square-foot campus outside Reno projected just 73 permanent jobs.10 Yet twenty-seven states hand them special tax exemptions, and when researchers tallied eleven major deals, the subsidies averaged $1.95 million per permanent job — against a recommended ceiling of $50,000.11 One proposed New York facility is seeking subsidies worth $6.4 million per job.12 Virginia's state sales-tax exemption alone costs $1.6 billion a year — money that doesn't reach schools.13 A researcher who has tracked these deals for a decade summarized them in one line: a giant transfer of wealth from taxpayers to shareholders.13
But the credit side is real — when a community refuses to give it away. Two facts, and they change everything.
First: construction. These campuses take years and thousands of skilled hands to build. In some regions, data centers now account for 40 to 50 percent of all union construction hours — electricians, operating engineers, pipefitters — with training programs at record enrollment.15 In Delaware, a developer just signed a project labor agreement covering more than twenty unions before breaking ground.16 Those are real wages, real pensions, real apprenticeships — the kind of work that builds a family, not just a building.
Second: taxes — if you don't abate them. Loudoun County, Virginia never gave away its local property taxes, and today its data centers pay roughly $900 million to $1.3 billion a year — nearly the county's entire operating budget — at $609 per square foot, three times what other businesses pay.17 That money fully funds a $2 billion school system, and the county has cut the homeowner's tax rate every single year since 2016. It even banks 10 percent of the revenue in a stabilization fund for the day the boom slows.17
Read those two columns together and the lesson is sharp: the data center itself is neither gift nor curse. It is a giant, immobile pile of taxable wealth that needs your land, your water, your grid, and years of skilled labor. Whether it extracts or contributes depends entirely on the terms — and the terms depend on who negotiates them.
Which brings us to the flip. The companies need these buildings more than any town needs any one building — they are in a race, and delay is the one thing they cannot afford. That is leverage, and leverage is meant to be used. Six moves.
01Stop paying them to come.
Data centers chase land, power, and fiber — not tax breaks. In an industry survey, only 3 percent of operators called incentives their top siting factor.11 They are coming anyway. Seven states are already moving to repeal or restrict these giveaways.8 Loudoun proved the alternative: charge full freight, and the building that employs almost no one becomes the taxpayer that funds everyone.
02Make them pay their own way.
Oregon became the first state to create a dedicated data center rate class, so the industry's grid costs land on the industry. Virginia's SB 253 would shift capacity and distribution costs from households to the facilities driving them.8 Every state should follow: their transmission lines, their water mains, their backup capacity — on their bill, not grandma's. And in drought country: recycled or non-potable cooling water as a condition of the permit, with metering the public can see.
03Union ink on every beam.
The construction is the jobs engine, so capture it. Project labor agreements before the first shovel. Prevailing wages. State-certified apprenticeships that turn local kids into journeymen electricians over the life of a multi-year build — a career launched by the same building that takes the county's water. The Delaware model — a PLA spanning twenty-plus unions — should be the default, not the exception.16 And the maintenance contracts that follow should stay union too.
04A benefits agreement with teeth.
Not a press release — a contract. Enforceable local-hire minimums, not "good faith efforts."18 A ratepayer relief fund that offsets the power and water increases the facility causes.19 Continuous air and noise monitoring the public can audit. Community groups at the table from day one — not handed the finished agreement two days before the vote.
05The revitalization play.
Here is where underserved communities can flip this hardest. Every data center is a fiber landing — and fiber is the one thing poor rural counties and redlined urban neighborhoods have been denied for decades. Negotiate backhaul capacity leased to local internet providers at below-market rates, and the same building that cools servers can finally deliver broadband to every kid in the county.19 Add funded partnerships with community colleges for fiber-tech, cybersecurity, and data-center operations careers; dedicated compute for local schools, clinics, and startups; and a revenue-sharing endowment, held by a community foundation, that outlives any single company's promises.19 A place that has only ever been extracted from — coal country, mill towns, the neighborhoods on the wrong side of the highway — can demand that the next industrial wave arrive as an investor instead of a tenant who skips the rent.
06Own a piece of the loom.
The horizon move. If public water, public land, public roads, and a public grid make the project possible, the public's stake shouldn't end at a tax bill. Communities can hold ground leases instead of selling land outright. Public utilities can take equity or capacity rights in the generation built to serve these campuses. Loudoun's stabilization fund — banking a tenth of the boom against the bust — is a community wealth fund in embryo.17 Treat the data center like the oil well it is: the resource under it — your water, your grid, your patience — belongs to the people who were here first and will be here after.
I called this a company town on purpose. America has run this experiment before — the coal camp, the mill village, the textile town — where one industry owned the jobs, the store, the water, and the silence. It took working people generations of organizing to break those towns open, and my grandfather's generation paid for it in blood on the Embarcadero.
The data center build-out is the company town's second draft — except this time the company doesn't even need the town's people, just its resources. That makes the fight different, and in one way simpler: they need permission. Yours. Every permit, every rezoning, every water allocation, every interconnection is a door your community holds shut until the terms are right.
In 1934, strikers ran the essential services of a great city so the public wouldn't suffer. In 2026, the question is whether the public will run its essential services so the public doesn't suffer — or hand them over, one discounted megawatt at a time, to companies that mistake your commons for their cooling system.
The machine is coming to your county either way. It can arrive as a landlord, or it can arrive as a neighbor who pays full freight, hires your kids through a union hall, wires your schools, and funds the town long after the boom. The difference is not the technology. The difference is the deal — and the deal depends on whether we show up organized.
Whose town is it?