As Eriech Tapia drove home from a recent trip, he passed a sea of dark industrial buildings lining an already jam-packed northern Virginia road: data centers.
“It was interesting to see how many were going up,” said Tapia, a 30-year-old Republican from Arlington, Virginia, who works in higher education advocacy and policy. He noted that data centers lend valuable computing power that can keep the U.S. competitive globally, but he simultaneously worries about their heavy electricity consumption.
