Most of the conversation about data centers in 2026 has been about what they take: water, power, grid capacity, community patience. The conversation is not wrong. But it is incomplete. In Loudoun County, Virginia, data centers now provide about 38 percent of the county’s general fund while occupying roughly 4 percent of its commercial land. The county has cut its real property tax rate every year since 2016. In Richland Parish, Louisiana, the sales tax revenue generated by Meta’s $27 billion data center campus helped the local school board raise full-time teacher bonuses from $10,200 to $50,935 in a single year. Entergy has estimated that data center agreements across Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi will save its 2.3 million customers approximately $5 billion on their electricity bills over two decades.
These are not outliers assembled to make a rhetorical point. They are the documented results of data center development structured to generate community benefit rather than extract it. The question worth examining is what separates these outcomes from the projects that produce the backlash.
What the Success Stories Have in Common
The Center for Data Innovation published an analysis this week examining the community economics of data center development. The findings are specific. Prince William County, Virginia collected $280 million in data center tax revenue in 2024, a 68 percent increase from the prior year. Indiana Michigan Power announced it would cut base rates, the largest component of most customers’ electricity bills, citing added revenue from large customers including data centers. Microsoft fully funded a $31 million water-reuse plant in Quincy, Washington, that recycles cooling water and offsets an estimated 138 million gallons of annual demand. The Virginia Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission found that data centers in that state supported nearly 74,000 jobs annually and contributed $9.1 billion per year to state GDP.
The pattern across these cases is consistent. The projects that generate measurable community benefit are ones in which the developer paid the full cost of the infrastructure it required, made long-term workforce and community commitments, and structured the economic relationship so that growth in the facility produced growth in local revenue rather than growth in local burden.
The cases that produce the opposite dynamic share a different pattern. A large facility connects to a shared grid. The transmission and distribution upgrades required to serve it get socialized across the rate base. Ratepayers see higher bills. Local water systems absorb additional stress. The community receives a construction-phase economic bump that dissipates, followed by a low-employment industrial use that occupies land and consumes resources without proportionate long-term return. The backlash that has produced 500-plus local restrictions and statewide moratoriums in New York and regulatory overhauls in Pennsylvania was not built from manufactured grievance. It was built from that second pattern, repeated enough times in enough communities that it became the frame through which all data center development gets viewed.
The Model Determines the Outcome
The distinction between these two patterns is not primarily about corporate values. It is about infrastructure architecture. A data center that connects to a shared grid during operation creates a structural relationship in which its cost increases are externalized to ratepayers who had no say in the project. A facility that generates its own power on-site eliminates that relationship by design. There is no grid infrastructure build-out to socialize because there is no new grid draw. The electricity cost shift that sits at the center of most of the political opposition to data center development does not exist.
Next Century-Power’s model starts at 1GW and above: single-tenant, fully islanded gas turbine generation with on-site carbon capture, and a Phase 2 roadmap to four integrated 300MW small modular reactors. Our facilities generate their own power and do not connect to the shared grid during operation. Because there is no grid draw, there is no infrastructure cost to shift. The ratepayer relationship that drives opposition in grid-connected projects does not apply. The economic relationship we build with host communities is designed to look more like Loudoun County than the projects generating the moratoriums: long-term, locally invested, and structured so that the facility’s success is shared.
The narrative that data centers are inherently extractive is not supported by the evidence. What the evidence supports is that extraction is the result of a specific model, and that a different model produces different results. Loudoun County residents have seen their property taxes go down for a decade because data centers there generate more than they consume. Louisiana teachers received raises their district could not have funded from any other source. Indiana Michigan Power customers are paying less because a large new load is contributing revenue that would otherwise have to come from existing customers. These outcomes are available to communities that structure the terms correctly. The infrastructure model that produces them is not a community relations strategy. It is an engineering decision, made before the first turbine comes online.
