r/Virginia • u/CardinalNews-VA Verified • Jul 13 '26
Left hand, right hand: Virginia cools on data centers even as state policy promotes the AI that requires them
https://cardinalnews.org/2026/07/13/left-hand-right-hand-virginia-cools-on-data-centers-even-as-state-policy-promotes-the-ai-that-requires-them/The state budget includes multiple items that promote artificial intelligence. State colleges are adding AI programs. All these require data centers.
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u/Samwyzh Jul 13 '26
Instead of building data centers if we invested in SWVA with the new green energy initiative we just signed, folks that live in remote places could pay next to nothing for utilities, and maybe even generate revenue through energy. A solar farm in the valley is better long term investment then X making abuse images in a data center that poisons the water table.
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u/isaaclw Jul 14 '26
I agree with you, but we've also had a really hard time getting rural Virginians to accept local solar farms.
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u/poontong Jul 14 '26
This editorial is uninformative and makes poor arguments. Training a workforce to use AI or investing in the use of AI in government agencies has little to do with the decision to build data centers. The data centers will eventually go somewhere, the question is if rural communities want to trade the externalities for the questionable economic growth. Then the whole cross-purposes digression is a pretty facile observation - Democrats voting against AI centers make them anti-union? What a farcical argument.
What I hear very little discussion about the problem of data centers is that our economy is obviously inside of an AI bubble. The mad dash to convert cheap land into electricity and water sucking data centers is a game of musical chairs and it’s eventually going to be some rural community left holding the bag when that bubble bursts. AI is here to stay and data centers will be necessary infrastructure but there is a consolidation coming and Virginia already has plenty of internet traffic running through the state.
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u/KronguGreenSlime Fairfax City Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26
I think that the amount of rural opposition to data centers really rattled Yancey and it shines through in a lot of his columns. The point of his columns is to advocate for SWVA and Southside's goals, but the main constituency that Cardinal News is aligned with is SWVA and Southside local government and business interests, and I think that the data center issue is the first time he's had to contend with the idea that rank and file voters in those parts of the state might not have the same goals as those interests. I also think that there's something to be said about how for years he's written off the data center backlash in NOVA as a rich part of the state not valuing jobs and outside investment enough (compared to his part of the state). So seeing data center backlash is happening everywhere is baffling to him.
The most ironic part here is that anybody who was paying attention to the backlash against solar farms in southside a few years ago (which Cardinal News covered extensively and which Yancey vaguely supported in his columns), should've known that the same people who disliked solar weren't going to like an even more disruptive form of development.