Every data center arrives with an economic impact study. Here is everything those studies leave out.
A company comes to your town. It brings a professional report promising hundreds of jobs and millions in tax revenue. Your town council says yes. The data center gets built.
Here is what happened next in towns across America.
The construction crew shows up. Thousands of workers. Then the building finishes, the crew leaves, and 50 to 400 permanent employees take over. Virginia data centers created just one permanent job for every $54 million invested. Almost half of all state data center tax deals do not even require the company to create jobs at all.
Your electricity bill goes up. Areas with heavy data center development saw electricity prices jump 267 percent over five years. In 2025, Americans paid 10 percent more for electricity on average than the year before. The cost of upgrading the power grid gets passed to every customer in the area, including people who never got a single job from the data center.
The noise starts and never stops. Cooling towers and generators run at up to 96 decibels, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, forever. Residents in multiple states report being unable to open their windows.
A Carnegie Mellon study found data centers cost local communities $25 billion per year in hidden health and environmental damage that never appears in the economic impact study.
Eight out of ten Virginia communities with data centers signed a non-disclosure agreement before they could find out what they were actually agreeing to.
The company read the fine print. Your town council did not.
Now you have.
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