LinkedIn · https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ai-for-earth_ai-datacenters-sustainability-activity-7481591862433083392-hyWQ
Data centers are splitting towns across party lines. The tax revenue is real, and so is the noise, the power draw, and the deal neighbors were never allowed to read.
They covet fields, and seize them; and houses, and take them away: and they oppress a man and his house, even a man and his heritage.
Micah 2:2
On September 21, NPR reported that one issue has scrambled local politics across Virginia, Maryland, Wisconsin, and Alabama. Not abortion, not immigration. Data centers. About two-thirds of Americans oppose new ones in their own communities, across both parties. Officials have been voted out. This fall, county after county has moved to hit pause.
The benefit is real, and worth naming first. In Loudoun County, Virginia, data centers generated roughly $1.2 billion in property-tax revenue in fiscal 2026, close to 39% of the county budget. Dan Diorio of the Data Center Coalition made the case plainly: property taxes have fallen two years running, "money directly back into people's pockets." Then Loudoun's own board voted to pause new applications.
The cost is real too, and it is physical. The "cloud" turns out to have turbines. One facility in Sterling runs on eight of them, and neighbors say the humming never stops. Then there is what no one is permitted to know. A study of 31 Virginia localities found nondisclosure agreements signed in 25 of them, so residents could not learn what was rising next door.
Steve Black grows trees in Frederick County, Maryland, where a 2,100-acre campus is going up near his nursery. "I have become a single-issue person," he told NPR. Party had stopped mattering to him.
Micah was a village prophet, not a court insider, and his anger fell on people who could rearrange a neighbor's world because they held the leverage. Verse 1 names them lying awake, then acting at first light, because the power is in their hand. What gets seized is never abstract. A field. A house. The thing a family meant to hand down.
Micah's version was at least done in the open. The modern one adds a clause he never had to picture: a signature that keeps the neighbor from knowing.
Luke 8:17For nothing is hidden, that will not be revealed; nor anything secret, that will not be known and come to light.
The turbines are visible. The revenue is countable. Only the agreement had to be signed in the dark.