Henrico County, Virginia, has asked its schools and government offices to cut power use as the local grid struggles to meet the power demands of its 37 data centers and considers the impact of 17 more under proposal.
Matthew Gault of 404 Media acquired email sent by County Manager John Vithoulkas to thousands of county employees on June 26, warning that the rate Henrico pays for electricity in all county and school facilities was about to rise by 25%, adding an estimated $5 million to costs in the coming fiscal year. He told staff to expect further increases. To offset them, Vithoulkas asked workers to turn off lights and computers at the end of the day, close blinds to block heat, unplug idle chargers and appliances, and avoid space heaters, which he said can cost the county $150 to $300 a year each.
Henrico is a county of more than 350,000 people east of Richmond. One of the proposed data centers is to be built on the site of a Civil War battlefield. The county is asking residents and public employees, including teachers and first responders, to deal with it. Some new data centers may run "temporarily" on hundreds of diesel generators.
Public opinion is moving against this sort of thing very quickly. In a survey tracking a sharp swing toward opposition, the new buildings—which often employ few locals and generating noise and pollution while stressing local utilities—have become a focal point for public anger. The Atlantic's Charlie Warzel examined the roots of that backlash, tracing why communities near AI data centers increasingly resent the noise, water use, and power costs the projects bring.
Big tech companies seem at a loss to understand any of this, though Marc Cuban's remarks last week were widely misreported and deserve a second look.
"It's time for everyone to realize that the fight against data centers has nothing to do with data centers. They have become a proxy for the hate towards AI and the concentration and accumulation of wealth it's creating," he wrote.
If he's wrong about the data centers (people living near them report heavy noise and air pollution; here's an interview with the lead researcher on Harvard University's new study on the subject) he's right about AI becoming a focal point for runaway wealth inequality.
From the Harvard post:
Together with the Piedmont Environmental Council, we completed an analysis of the Vantage Data Center in Loudoun County, Virginia, which uses on-site gas turbines for power in one of the densest data center corridors in the world. We estimated between $53 million and $99 million in annual health damages from associated air pollution—among the largest health-damage estimates produced for a single facility to date. One of the reasons it's such a staggering number is because it's built in such a populated area, in northern Virginia near the D.C. metro area. The damages we estimated are driven primarily by an estimated 3.4 to 6.5 additional premature deaths per year across the impacted region, along with increased hospital admissions, asthma-related outcomes, and lost productivity.
If you're old enough to remember "too cheap to meter," you're old enough to remember some of the reasons it didn't work out.
County With 37 Data Centers Asks Schools to 'Conserve Electricity' [404 Media]
