Opinion: The battle over data centers -- what they take, where the profits go and how some states show a better path

Data center developers have zoned in on rural America as
the best place to build. (Photo by R. Starnes Sr., Unsplash)

It was sold to Americans as the "cloud." Fluffy, white -- and most importantly, floating harmlessly in the heavens -- never to touch or interfere with life on Earth. But for all its promise, some say it is a lie. 

Lurking behind the cloud are data storage and computation machines that will eat up an inexhaustible amount of energy and water wherever they are built, writes Lawrence Winnerman for Blue Amp Media.

Stepping back, as cloud and AI developments began to take off, data center developers ran into a problem: Where could they find the land and resources to build their mega-scale, profit-generating AI machines? It didn't take them long to find the answer. They pinpointed the rich land and water resources in rural America as the ideal location, writes Jim Branscome in his opinion on Substack. 

Rural Americans, particularly those in Appalachia, who think data center developers are targeting their wide, open land and deep aquifers for their profits, are right. "The Pew Research Center, drawing on Data Center Map figures in early 2026, found that for the first time most planned data centers in the country are being built in rural areas rather than metropolitan ones; the South alone counted some 754 planned facilities against 1,209 existing, a 62% increase," Branscome explains. So far, the coalfields of Northern Virginia have the most planned or in-progress data centers. 

Pew Research graph

From public reporting, Branscome provides a list of Appalachian data center developments: 

• In West Virginia, the Monarch campus in Mason County, the Fundamental Data complex in Tucker County, the TransGas project in Mingo County, a $4 billion campus in Berkeley County, and a multibillion-dollar Google campus in Putnam County 
• In Southwest Virginia, proposals in Wise, Wythe, Pulaski and Montgomery counties, and a Google project in Botetourt
• In Pennsylvania, the four-gigawatt Homer City complex rising on a dead coal plant’s bones in Indiana County

“Every extraction in this region’s history has followed it — timber, then coal, then the dam-and-power complex, and now the machine," Branscome explains. "Each arrived speaking of jobs and progress. Each was welcomed by men who held office. Each took something that could not be replaced and left a bill that the people are still paying. The data center is not a break from that history. It is the latest chapter of it. . ."

And while Appalachia is "being asked to supply the land, the electricity, the natural gas, the water, and the tax forgiveness," the profits will not belong to those communities, Branscome writes. Instead, those riches will "belong to corporations headquartered far from [the] mountains."

As some rural communities have pushed back against data center build-outs, they have sought the support and protective advocacy of their lawmakers. Branscome adds, "Lay the states side by side and the moral is unmistakable. Where lawmakers chose to protect their citizens, they could. Where they chose to protect the industry, that too was a choice."

West Virginia’s leaders, and to a "growing degree Kentucky’s, have decided that the way to compete is to promise the fewest protections and ask the fewest questions. . . . It is precisely the logic that governed the coalfields for a hundred years," Brascome writes. In the name of economic development, elected officials are "signing over the people’s signed objections. This is not a new story. It is the oldest story we have, told in silicon.“

How the battle ends is yet to be decided. Branscome writes, "Pennsylvania, Virginia and Ohio have shown, each in its imperfect way, that a state can make the industry pay its own way, protect the ratepayer, demand transparency, and leave the decision with the people who live there. The technology is not the enemy; the terms are.

"A data center built on a reclaimed mine, paying its full freight for power and water, bound by an enforceable agreement, leaving real money in the county, and sited only where the community has agreed to have it — that would be something genuinely new in the history of these mountains."