Virginia turned on data centers. Here's the chart the AI industry should be watching

Three years ago, 69% of Virginians were fine with a new data center going up down the road. Now 35% are. The Washington Post/Schar School poll out this week is the cleanest data point in a trend that’s been rumbling through local meetings for eighteen months, and it lands in the same week Prince William County cancelled one of the largest data center projects ever proposed. If you’re building anything that needs megawatts to run, this is the chart to put on the wall.

What the poll actually shows

The top-line 34-point collapse is the headline, but the subquestions are where the story sits. Per the Post: 57% of registered voters now say data centers are hurting home energy bills, compared to just 14% who think they’re helping. Support for the sales-tax exemption that has fueled Northern Virginia’s buildout crashed from 61% to 37%. Sixty-seven percent of voters want the exemption ended outright.

Read that one more time. A two-thirds majority, in the state that contains more data-center capacity than any other single region on earth, wants to kill the tax break that built it. That’s not a rounding error; that’s a political realignment.

The proximate cause is power bills. Dominion Energy reportedly asked for a rate increase four months after the previous one took effect. Residential customers can see the line item. Once an issue shows up on a utility statement, the polling moves.

The Digital Gateway cancellation

On the same timeline, Prince William County walked away from the Prince William Digital Gateway, a 2,100-acre, 37-building development that would have sat right next to the Manassas National Battlefield Park. Full buildout would have required 14 electrical substations and 22 million square feet of building area. It would have been one of the largest such projects in the world.

It’s dead. The Oak Valley Homeowners Association and the American Battlefield Trust won a legal challenge over advertising violations in the rezoning process. Virginia’s Court of Appeals upheld the ruling in March 2026, voiding the rezonings. The county’s board then voted to halt the project rather than start over.

That is an extraordinary reversal. Three years ago, the Digital Gateway was being sold as a jobs-and-tax-base win. The campaigns opposing it were small and local. Now the polling says those local campaigns were just the canary.

The national picture

Data Center Watch, an industry-tracking nonprofit, counted 48 data center projects blocked or delayed across the US in 2025. Combined value of the cancelled or stalled development: roughly $156 billion. Virginia had 57 active grassroots opposition groups as of March. State lawmakers have filed 238 bills addressing data centers, of which 40 passed.

Other data-center hot spots are watching this. Ohio’s Licking County saw residents turn out in force against a QTS-AWS project last fall. Arizona passed a disclosure law. Ireland paused new grid connections in Dublin. Even without a sharp poll number, the direction is clear: the easy sites are gone.

The economics that broke the deal

For a decade, the data-center pitch in Northern Virginia was a tight story. A county accepted a new campus, took the property-tax revenue (data centers pay far more per acre than almost any other commercial use), accepted the sales-tax holiday on servers, and let Dominion Energy handle the rest. Residents got cheap labor-market effects and a bigger tax base, politicians got ribbon cuttings, Amazon got the fiber routes.

That deal worked because the cost side was small. A 30-megawatt facility didn’t move Dominion’s generation mix. Three or four of them in Loudoun County could be absorbed. Then came AI. A single training campus in the 500-megawatt-plus range drops onto a grid that was planned for 50-MW deployments, and suddenly the utility has to site new generation, build new transmission, and raise rates to pay for it. Voters see the bill. The abstract deal becomes concrete.

Dominion’s own integrated resource plan now assumes data-center demand will double the load on its system by 2035. That’s a number with consequences. Somebody pays for it. The fight over who is, in 2026, a fight about residential-versus-commercial rate cost allocation. And the residential side is winning, because the residential side votes.

Why this is happening now, not in 2023

Three things changed. First, AI training loads multiplied the scale. A 2019 data center drew 10 to 30 megawatts; a 2026 AI campus draws 500MW to 1GW. Residents feel it on the grid and see it in their bills. Second, Dominion’s rate case filings made the connection explicit. And third, the local-government-capture playbook the industry used through the 2010s stopped working once homeowner associations and conservation groups learned the procedural tricks. The Oak Valley court win is a template now. Expect to see it copied in every other hot-spot state by Q3.

There’s also a compounding factor: federal policy is catching up. The EIA is building a mandatory energy-disclosure survey for data centers, giving opponents actual numbers to point to for the first time. When Meta’s next Broadcom-fueled AI campus files for siting approval, that disclosure data will be in every public comment.

Who actually wins if Virginia slows down

Two groups. First, states with cheap pre-cleared power and permissive siting: Ohio, Georgia, Texas, and the plains. Ohio’s JobsOhio has been aggressive on courting AWS and Meta expansions, and it’s working. The second group is Nordic and Canadian operators, where hydro and nuclear keep marginal generation costs low and residential rates uncoupled from new industrial load. Expect Microsoft and Google to keep shifting AI training capacity toward those regions through 2027.

There’s also a wildcard: on-site generation. When you can’t get grid connection, you build your own. The Meta/Broadcom MTIA deal is paired with a gigawatt of planned natural-gas co-generation at the same sites. That’s a workaround for the siting problem, but it invites a new one: air-quality permits and carbon reporting. Whatever opposition coalition formed around electricity bills will reassemble around emissions disclosure within a year.

Why you’re hearing about this now

Because the money is big enough now that the fight is national. The Virginia polling is the first time a swing-state electorate has registered this kind of move against a tech-infrastructure category at statewide scale. Every hyperscaler’s real estate team read the Post’s piece on Wednesday. Every permitting agency in a competing state read it too. The effect is not “no more data centers.” The effect is “data centers won’t go where they used to go.”

What this means for you

If you run cloud spend for a team, your vendor’s next capacity rollout is more likely to be in Columbus or Reynoldsburg than Loudoun County, and the latency assumptions you made in your architecture docs may need revisiting. If you’re a developer planning a move to Northern Virginia for the data-center gold rush, the jobs will still be there but the regional economy looks very different in 2028 than it did in 2023. If you invest in REITs or hyperscaler siting plays, the Digital Gateway cancellation is the data point. One project doesn’t make a trend; a project plus a 34-point polling shift does. My read: watch for Dominion’s next rate filing and the Virginia legislature’s 2027 session. If the sales-tax exemption gets rolled back in a purple or red-trifecta state, the whole business model for speculative Northern Virginia sites goes with it, and you’ll want to be positioned for the reshuffling before it hits Q1 earnings calls.