In This U.S. Hot Spot for Data Centers, Voters Have Turned against Them

Voters in Virginia, a global hub for the hulking warehouses of computers known as data centers, have turned sharply against the facilities after previously welcoming them, a Washington Post-Schar School poll has found.

The share of Virginian voters who would be comfortable with construction of a new data center in their community has plunged to 35 percent, according to the Post-Schar School poll conducted late last month, as worries mount in the state and across the nation that the projects are a scourge on the environment and household utility bills.

In a sign of the growing resistance, Prince William County on Tuesday abandoned plans for one of the country’s biggest and most controversial data center projects: a 1,700-acre campus on the edge of Manassas National Battlefield Park that would have hosted as many as 37 of the compute warehouses. The county board of supervisors dropped a years-long legal effort to defend zoning changes that would have allowed it to proceed.

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