A powerful industry demands special treatment. Its executives promise national prosperity. Its lobbyists warn that resistance will only help a foreign rival. And ordinary Americans are told to accept the costs because that’s what the free market requires.

That was the argument behind NAFTA and decades of offshoring. Corporate America shipped jobs overseas and hollowed out communities that had supported American manufacturing for generations in search of cheaper labor. When companies couldn’t move the work abroad, they pushed for more guest workers and looked the other way when illegal immigration expanded the supply of cheap labor.

But the profits kept flowing upward. Working Americans were left with the consequences.

Now Big Tech is using the same playbook to push data center projects through without answering basic questions. Is there enough reliable power and water, and will the companies demanding them actually pay the full cost?

Instead of answering, the industry hides behind “artificial intelligence” and “China.”

Question whether another data center should be built, and someone will accuse you of helping Beijing. Ask who will supply the electricity or pay for the infrastructure, and you’re told you oppose innovation. Raise concerns about water, land, or higher utility bills for consumers, and the industry dismisses you as an environmental extremist.

China is a real threat. America should lead the world in technological innovation. But Big Tech is presenting a false choice. Give it every approval, subsidy and public resource it wants, or risk losing the technological race to China.

Look at what these companies are actually demanding here in Virginia: approvals, tax breaks, electricity, water and infrastructure, all paid for by homeowners and working Virginians. They don’t get to wave the flag while shifting the bill onto Virginia families. That is corporate welfare.

And Virginia shows exactly where this argument leads. A national database counted nearly four hundred data centers in the Commonwealth, with hundreds more planned or under construction. Virginia has far more operating and proposed facilities than Texas, California, or any other state.

Big Tech’s track record should make conservatives skeptical of its sudden appeals to “American jobs.” These same companies have laid off huge numbers of American employees while continuing to import foreign workers through the H-1B program. They make business decisions based on labor costs and profit margins. Yet when they want tax breaks, electricity, water, land, and infrastructure, they suddenly invoke the American worker and national security.

The industry has spent heavily to make its own corporate interests sound like the national interest, building an enormous political and messaging operation of lobbyists, political action committees, advertising campaigns and paid influencers. Recent reporting even exposed a coordinated campaign offering social media influencers thousands of dollars per video to warn that any limits on the industry would help China. Conservatives should recognize an astroturf campaign when they see one.

Virginia has already done more than its share. That’s why I’ve called on Governor Abigail Spanberger to use every lawful authority available to immediately pause new data center approvals across the Commonwealth.

An analysis prepared for Virginia’s General Assembly found that data center growth is the main reason the state’s electricity demand could double within ten years. Meeting that demand would be extraordinarily difficult even if Virginia had a sensible energy policy.

It does not.

The Virginia Clean Economy Act requires utilities to retire nearly all power plants in Virginia that emit carbon by 2045. It also mandates an enormous buildout of intermittent solar and wind generation, with the costs generally recovered directly from utility customers.

The law didn’t create the data center boom. It just makes the consequences worse by tying one hand behind Virginia’s back while electricity demand explodes.

Virginia’s own analysis warns that data center growth will add hundreds of dollars a year to a family’s electric bills. That comes after Virginia already gives the industry about a billion dollars in tax breaks each year. Families are subsidizing the industry through the tax code, and now they are being forced to subsidize it again through their electric bills.

And then there is the water. Virginia data centers already use more than 2 billion gallons of water a year. A state study warns that groundwater supplies in eastern Virginia are already severely strained. In much of the region, there simply isn’t enough dependable groundwater to support another large data center.

The hypocrisy is glaring. Families and businesses around Virginia were asked to conserve water, even as massive new data center projects continued moving through the approval process. Take shorter showers. Use less water. Accept higher electric bills. Watch your local countryside disappear beneath solar farms and transmission corridors.

Virginia tells families to cut back. But it refuses to tell Big Tech “no.”

Governor Spanberger’s response has been to tax growth and announce narrow reforms while keeping approvals moving. Virginia recently imposed a new tax on electricity consumed by data centers, which the governor presents as a measure of accountability. In reality, it gives state government a new revenue stream tied directly to even more data center growth. That just creates a perverse incentive for state and local leaders to keep rubber-stamping projects.

State regulators did recently require data centers to pay for transmission infrastructure built exclusively for their projects. That fixes one bill. But it doesn’t determine who pays to build the power plants needed to meet the new demand, how to protect constrained water supplies, how to fix the disastrous Virginia Clean Economy Act, or how to stop another project from being approved.

That is why Virginia needs a moratorium.

Stop approving projects while the Commonwealth determines whether more data centers should be permitted at all, whether reliable power and water actually exist, who will pay the true costs, and what protections must be in place before approvals resume.

The industry will call that radical. What’s radical is approving hundreds of industrial projects first, and expecting families and ratepayers to deal with the fallout later.

America needs computing capacity to remain competitive. But that doesn’t mean trillion-dollar companies get to build wherever they want, consume whatever resources they want, and hand the bill to everyone else.

We’ve seen this movie before.

Powerful corporations promise prosperity. Government gives them what they want. The profits flow upward, the costs are spread among everyone else, and working Americans are told that questioning the arrangement makes them backward, anti-business, or unpatriotic.

We shouldn’t repeat the mistakes of NAFTA and offshoring simply because today’s corporations sell computing power instead of imported goods.

America can beat China without giving Big Tech a blank check.

Virginia families shouldn’t have to pay more, use less water, and watch their communities transformed so these global corporations can keep building without any restrictions.

Virginia families have carried enough of the load.

Pause the projects.

***

Glen Sturtevant is a Virginia state senator representing Central Virginia in the state’s General Assembly.

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Big Tech Is Selling Corporate Welfare As Patriotism