There is a version of the data center fight that conservatives are about to lose by winning.
Across the country, the Right is discovering it can beat data centers at the ballot box. In Pennsylvania, the Republican candidate for governor is running to the incumbent’s left on the issue — demanding a total development pause after Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA), playing catch-up with public fury, ordered what he described as the nation’s strictest restrictions. The politics are understandable. The mob at the county hearing is real; I’ve stood in front of it in Virginia. But let’s be honest about where “pause everything” leads: to a permanent regulatory apparatus, run by people who never liked private infrastructure in the first place, deciding forever what may be built and where. Conservatives are winning a battle whose spoils are a bigger administrative state.
There is a better position, and it is the most conservative idea in the world: Make the deal good.
Start with what these towns are actually angry about because their instincts are sound. A landowner’s rights matter — and so do his neighbor’s. A company that arrives with lawyers and leaves with the water table has not engaged in free exchange; it has engaged in extraction with a permit. The remedy for a bad bargain is not a bureau. It is a better bargain, struck locally, by the people who have to live with it.
Here is the bargain sitting on the table, unnoticed by both parties. Every data center produces, around the clock, a river of waste heat — bought and paid for, then thrown into the sky. That heat is precisely the input that year-round greenhouse agriculture requires, and the lack of it — energy cost — is the reason a decade of indoor farming ventures failed without ever asking Washington for a bailout that could have saved them. Pair the two, privately, and the economics flip. The data center’s trash becomes the farm’s fuel. No subsidy. No new agency. A pipe.
Now consider who benefits. American family farms have been bleeding out for two generations — squeezed by input costs, weather, and a food system that pays everyone except the person who grows things. A heat-recovery greenhouse is a new crop with no winter: steady, contracted, monthly income, suited to exactly the co-op structures rural America built a century ago and still knows how to run. This is not a competitor to the family farm. It is the first new barn anybody has offered it in decades. And it comes with the sweetest words in any rural county’s ledger: local food, local money, no middleman in a distant city.
The scale is not sentimental. Virginia operates 371 data centers today. By our modeling, one recovery farm at each would put fresh produce on the table of every food-insecure family in the commonwealth — roughly 700,000 people — precisely as federal food assistance tightens and the dependency debate grinds on. Conservatives have argued for years that communities, churches, and markets can do what programs cannot. Here is the proof standing next to the interstate, venting its evidence into the clouds.
AMERICA IS HAVING THE WRONG DATA CENTER CONVERSATION — AND ITS SHOOTING US IN THE FOOT
So the ask for candidates this fall is simple, and it costs nothing from the Treasury. Don’t promise to block. Promise to negotiate — and to stand with every county that makes the harvest, the water, and the local hire the price of the land. Let the data center come when the data center pays its way in kind, in public, in a contract the town can read. That is not hostility to industry. That is how free people have always dealt with powerful newcomers: welcome, on terms.
The Left will eventually find this issue and reach, as it reliably does, for the mandate. Conservatives have a narrow window to get there first with the market version — and to walk into every county hearing in America carrying the one thing no moratorium ever grew: Groceries.
Andrew Potter is the founder and CEO of Intelligent Harvest, a Virginia company that pairs waste-heat-recovery farms with data centers to grow food for the communities that host them. A professional operatic bass who has appeared on national stages, including the Metropolitan Opera, he lives in Lynchburg, Virginia, and writes on data center policy and community development.