The Community Benefits of Data Centers

An Analysis of the Jobs, Tax, Grid, and Community Returns of Modern Data Center Development

The economic, environmental, and community impacts of data centers have fueled some of the hottest election debates of the 2026 cycle. As LLM AI drives the largest wave of infrastructure investment in a generation, cities and counties across the country are being asked to decide whether to welcome the expansion of one of America’s fastest growing industries and a well organized opposition has answered for many of them, arguing that data centers take far more than they give. These groups argue that data centers consume enormous amounts of power, straining fragile local grids and raising community power bills all while bleeding dry local water supplies. The trade off, they claim, are a handful of permanent jobs and hollow tax relief promises.

We are 81 years removed from the birth of the first data center progenitor, and in that time the industry has grown from a U.S. Army project in Pennsylvania to make up almost 3% of the US GDP and use about 4.5% of total US power consumption. This perspective of history allows us to look objectively at how to manage the ongoing growth of one of our most important home grown industries. History allows us to look at real and working towns across the country transformed by their data center partnerships. There are always pros and cons to fostering the development of any industry, and the robust debate on the how’s and why’s is integral to the process, but is meaningless unless we are all debating from the full set of facts. History does tell us of deals made in bad faith, corporations and local governments not being good neighbors, and deals that evaporated after the ground is broken, but if we aren’t also talking about the deals that made boom town, we are doing everyone a disservice.

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