Data centers are having to move farther afield because many of the core markets that have received significant investment from the sector over the years — Northern Virginia, Arizona and Silicon Valley, among them — are tapped out, quite literally. https://archive.is/uIXGp#selection-1699.13-1699.260

Mega tech companies aren't willing to pay for the additional infrastructure needed to power mammoth facilities. "These billion-dollar companies should be responsible… to manage or mitigate their demand — and pay to upgrade the grid infrastructure," Johnson said. questioning whether the cost of new investments a utility is building to directly serve a data center will be passed to ratepayers (Lashelle Johnson, state equity policy director at the environmental-advocacy group League of Conservation Voters, works with state LCV entities on regulatory issues, including around data centers. )

It's become more common for data-center groups to propose facilities in rural areas. Land is plentiful, there aren't as many competing uses for power and, perhaps an increasingly important factor for developers, there's typically less local opposition.

Rural areas also tend to have legacy industrial sites that already have zoning in place to allow data-center uses byright, said Andy Cvengros, managing director of Jones Lang LaSalle Inc.'s (NYSE: JLL) data-center team.

MORATORIUMS - CONFLICT - PROTESTS - OPPOSITION

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YOURE IN OVER YOUR HEADS

Virginia Data Center Reform Coalition: Local governments are not equipped to handle the scope of these projects, according to Julie Bolthouse, director of land use at the Piedmont Environmental Council and a member of the coalition. "Once you get to gigawatt campuses that are 1,000 acres, 30 buildings and necessitating ridiculous amounts of power and substations, transmission lines, and lots and lots of water, you need state-level oversight. You need to be modeling the grid at that point."

Data centers are being proposed in more rural places, there's sometimes only one planning staff member to consider those projects. In her view, better regulation of the industry should come at the state level, to provide guidance for places that don't have significant resources or staff to carefully evaluate mega proposals — or consider how one facility in a rural area could impact a region more broadly.