We passed cranes, vacant lots and one data centre after another, many still under construction. ‘Check that one out, it’s really huge!’ said Ann Bennett, an activist with the environmental organisation Sierra Club, as she drove us through Virginia’s Loudoun and Fairfax counties close to Washington DC. She was critical of this building explosion. ‘That right there’s the cloud. Just look at it, it’s hard to describe.’

She was right. The landscape is dystopian: behind newly erected powerlines, vast windowless buildings in grey, cream or blue line the straight roads. Over and over we passed huge electrical transformers and building sites. It was only June but temperatures were already soaring above 35ºC. Residents of Virginia’s affluent cities were speeding along ‘Data Center Alley’ in big, air-conditioned cars, heading for their offices in DC or the nearby airport.

Virginia has become the world’s leading data centre hub due to its proximity to the US capital, affordable land, tax incentives, abundant electricity and access to undersea cables that connect North America to Europe. The state is home to hundreds of these centres, with a total installed capacity of 6.2 gigawatts (GW) in the first half of 2025. Virginia’s electricity generation capacity is 29GW, almost half of which comes from gas-fired power plants.

‘What we want to do is we want to keep it [AI] in this country,’ Donald Trump declared in January 2025 as he announced the launch of Stargate, a $500bn private investment project that plans to fund a network of new data centres across the US. ‘China is a competitor and others are competitors.’ Trump acknowledged that these centres would need ‘a lot of electricity’, and suggested combining data centres with energy generation: ‘We’ll make it possible for them to get that production done very easily at their own plants if they want.’ The fossil fuel industry, which gave significant financial funding to Trump’s campaign, has sensed an (…)

Full article: 3 600 words.

(5) Brent Goldfarb and David A Kirsch, Bubbles and Crashes: the Boom and Bust of Technological Innovation, Stanford University Press, 2019.

(13) MIT, ‘The future of nuclear energy in a carbon-constrained world’, 2018, www.energy.mit.edu/.

(14) David Schlissel, ‘Eye-popping new cost estimates released for NuScale small modular reactor’, Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, 11 January 2023, ieefa.org/.

(15) Mycle Schneider et al, ‘World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2025’, September 2025, www.worldnuclearreport.org/.