Data center siting decisions do not emerge from abstract market forces. They are made by specific institutions with identifiable interests, operating within regulatory and political frameworks that have been shaped by lobbying, legislation, and administrative action over years. Understanding who those actors are — what they want, what they control, and how they interact — is a prerequisite for understanding why data centers end up where they do, on the terms they do, with the community impacts they do.
The landscape of actors can be organized into three broad groups: those who drive development, those who facilitate it, and those who are working to create accountability. None of these groups is monolithic, and none is appropriately characterized as either villain or hero. They are institutional actors with interests, and those interests explain their behavior more reliably than any assessment of intent.
On the Development Side: Hyperscalers
The largest category of data center investment in the United States comes from four companies: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Meta. These are the hyperscalers — companies whose data center requirements are so large that they operate their own purpose-built facilities rather than relying on third-party colocation providers. Their scale of investment is without precedent in the history of commercial real estate or industrial development.
According to data compiled from their 2025 earnings calls, the four hyperscalers collectively planned to invest up to $630 billion in capital expenditures in 2026 — a 62 percent increase from the record $388 billion spent in 2025. Amazon projected $200 billion in 2026 capital expenditures, primarily for AWS data centers. Google projected $175 to $185 billion, nearly double its 2025 spending. Meta committed $115 to $135 billion. Microsoft projected $110 to $120 billion.
These figures are not projections for global operations alone; they drive an enormous volume of domestic construction. Northern Virginia hosts nearly 15 percent of the world’s data center capacity — a concentration that reflects nearly two decades of hyperscaler investment in Loudoun County and surrounding jurisdictions. Nearly half of all data centers in Virginia are located in Prince William County alone.
Each hyperscaler has made public environmental and community commitments. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have announced goals related to renewable energy, water use, and carbon emissions. The distance between these public commitments and actual practice at specific sites is a subject of ongoing scrutiny by environmental advocates and journalists. A company that commits publicly to being “water positive” by 2030 while opposing state legislation requiring water use disclosure at the facility level is behaving in a way that warrants scrutiny — both of what the commitment means in practice and of what the opposition to disclosure reveals about what that practice actually looks like.
On the Development Side: REITs and Colocation Operators
Not all data center investment comes from the hyperscalers who use the facilities. A second major category of developer and operator consists of real estate investment trusts and colocation operators — companies that build and operate data center facilities and lease space to tenants.
Equinix and Digital Realty are the two largest publicly traded data center REITs. Equinix operates more than 260 data centers globally and has described a strategy of doubling its data center capacity by the end of the decade. Digital Realty is the other major publicly traded player, with a large portfolio in the United States and internationally.
The largest private equity transaction in the data center sector was Blackstone’s 2021 acquisition of QTS Realty Trust for approximately $10 billion. Blackstone has since doubled the value of QTS and was reported in April 2026 to be laying groundwork for a new $2 billion data center REIT. The private equity model differs from the public REIT model in ways that have implications for community accountability: Blackstone holds QTS with a long-term investment horizon and no public quarterly earnings pressure, which affects how management responds to community concerns and regulatory scrutiny.
Iron Mountain, originally a records management company, has expanded into data center operations. Several smaller regional colocation operators also build and operate facilities, often serving mid-market customers rather than hyperscalers.
The REIT and colocation model creates a layer of intermediary between the ultimate user of data center services and the community where the facility is located. A hyperscaler that leases space in an Equinix or Digital Realty facility is not the applicant for the local permits or the recipient of the local tax abatement — the REIT is. This can complicate community accountability efforts, since the ultimate user of the facility may not be identified in local permitting documents.
On the Development Side: Site Selection Consultants
Between the hyperscaler or REIT that wants a new data center and the local government that will eventually vote on permits and subsidies, there is typically a site selection consultant — a firm hired to identify and evaluate potential locations before any public process begins.
Site selection consultants work on behalf of developers to identify communities with the right combination of power availability, land cost, fiber connectivity, tax incentive programs, regulatory environment, and political receptiveness to large industrial development. Their work is confidential. Communities do not know they are being evaluated. By the time a developer approaches a local economic development office — or sometimes, by the time a local official learns they are being approached — the consultant has already ranked multiple potential sites and the developer has a preferred location.
This pre-public selection process is one of the primary reasons that communities often feel that siting decisions have been made before they have any meaningful opportunity to participate. They have been — at least in a practical sense. The consultant’s work precedes any formal process, and communities that score unfavorably on the consultant’s criteria are simply not approached. Those that do receive an approach may encounter a developer who presents the project as effectively determined, with local permitting and subsidies framed as ministerial steps rather than genuine decisions.
The confidentiality of site selection work also means that communities cannot readily compare the terms being offered to them with what other communities are being offered, or evaluate whether the economic development projections being used to justify subsidies are credible. The information asymmetry is built into the model.
On the Facilitation Side: State Legislatures and Tax Incentive Programs
The tax abatement programs that make data center subsidies possible were created by state legislatures. Most of the thirty-two states with data center tax incentive programs enacted their enabling legislation in the 2000s and 2010s, when data centers were smaller, less energy-intensive, and competed with other states’ programs on the margin of investment decisions. The programs were designed as economic development tools, and they were designed by legislators who had relatively limited information about what the industry would become.
What those programs have become is very different from what was designed. Good Jobs First has documented that exemptions designed for modest facilities are now being applied to hyperscale projects costing half a billion dollars or more. Exemptions intended to be selective have become virtually automatic because the investment thresholds qualifying for them are modest relative to what the industry now routinely spends. Exemptions described as temporary are structured to last forty years.
Some state legislatures have begun to respond. Virginia’s legislature considered sixty-one data center bills in its 2026 session, with fifteen reaching Governor Abigail Spanberger’s desk. Georgia’s legislature passed a pause on the state’s data center incentive program in 2024; Governor Brian Kemp vetoed it. Michigan lawmakers held hearings in 2026 after residents testified about secrecy and NDAs. The legislative response to data center growth is uneven and politically contested.
State legislatures also exercise authority over local government powers. Some states have enacted legislation that preempts local governments from denying data center projects that meet state siting standards — limiting the ability of localities to exercise independent judgment about whether a specific project is appropriate for a specific location.
On the Facilitation Side: Utilities
Electric utilities have significant interests in attracting and retaining large industrial customers. A data center that consumes 100 megawatts or more provides a utility with a large, relatively predictable source of revenue. From a utility business perspective, large industrial customers are attractive — they generate revenue, they often have favorable load profiles, and they provide a rationale for infrastructure investments that earn regulated returns.
This institutional interest creates a structural alignment between utilities and data center developers that can disadvantage residential ratepayers in regulatory proceedings. A utility that is simultaneously advocating for rate recovery of transmission infrastructure built to serve data centers and describing itself as a neutral party in rate cases is not behaving neutrally — it has interests that affect how it characterizes costs and benefits in proceedings before the state PUC.
The Piedmont Environmental Council’s analysis of Virginia’s situation captured this dynamic directly: Dominion Energy’s contracts with data centers, and its advocacy before the State Corporation Commission, reflected an institutional interest in accommodating data center load growth rather than protecting residential ratepayers from the costs that growth imposes.
On the Facilitation Side: Local Economic Development Authorities
Industrial development authorities and economic development authorities are the institutions most directly involved in negotiating data center tax abatements at the local level. These authorities — which may be state agencies, regional bodies, or local government entities, depending on jurisdiction — are typically mandated to attract development, measure their success by investment volume and job creation, and operate with significant discretion.
The mission of these authorities creates a structural orientation toward deal-making rather than community protection. An economic development authority that measures its performance by the number and size of deals it closes has institutional incentives to minimize conditions attached to subsidies, to maintain confidentiality around deal terms, and to characterize community concerns as obstacles to economic development rather than legitimate interests to be addressed.
This is not a characterization of individual officials as corrupt or indifferent. It is a description of institutional mandates that produce predictable behavior. An authority that is measured by whether it closed the deal is unlikely to be the entity most attentive to whether the deal is good for surrounding residents.
On the Accountability Side: Good Jobs First
Good Jobs First is a nonprofit organization that tracks corporate subsidies and provides tools and research for communities seeking to understand the economic development deals that affect them. Its Subsidy Tracker database aggregates subsidy information from state disclosure documents, allowing communities to understand the scope of public investment in a specific company or project. Its reports on data center subsidies have documented the scale of revenue loss in states across the country and have provided the factual foundation for legislative efforts to reform or cap incentive programs.
Good Jobs First’s practical guidance for communities includes recommendations that subsidies should require disclosure of all costs, that jobs created must be permanent and pay market wages, and that construction and maintenance workers should receive prevailing wages. These recommendations reflect years of documenting cases where commitments made at public hearings were not kept and where clawback provisions did not exist or were not enforced.
On the Accountability Side: Community Organizations and Environmental Justice Groups
Local community organizations have organized against specific data center siting decisions in Northern Virginia, Phoenix, Memphis, rural Georgia, and elsewhere. These organizations vary in their structure, capacity, and approach. Some are neighborhood groups formed in direct response to a specific project. Others are established environmental or civic organizations that have expanded their work to include data center impacts. The NAACP has engaged directly with data center siting in Black communities, challenging permit applications, filing Clean Air Act complaints, and advocating for community benefit agreements as conditions of approval.
The Piedmont Environmental Council in Virginia represents one model: an established conservation organization with utility regulatory expertise that has used its knowledge of the State Corporation Commission proceedings to engage in rate cases and integrated resource planning processes on behalf of affected communities.
On the Accountability Side: Investigative Journalism
Several journalistic organizations have sustained reporting on data center impacts that has provided community organizations and legislators with factual foundations for accountability efforts. The Washington Post has covered data center development in Northern Virginia extensively, including impacts on communities, water use, and electricity costs. The Guardian has reported on data center environmental impacts in the United States and Europe. Local outlets in high-density data center markets — including Loudoun County, Virginia and the Phoenix metropolitan area — have provided granular coverage of specific projects and their community consequences.
Investigative journalism has also exposed the gap between developer commitments and documented practice: corporate statements about water efficiency, renewable energy, and community engagement that are not borne out by facility-level data or local reporting. This gap is itself a subject of ongoing investigation by reporters who cover the industry.
The Landscape, Not a Ledger
What the landscape of actors reveals is a system in which the institutional interests favoring rapid data center development — hyperscalers, REITs, utilities, economic development authorities, and the state legislators who created their enabling frameworks — are better organized, better resourced, and more structurally aligned with each other than the interests representing affected communities. That asymmetry is not a conspiracy; it is the predictable result of institutions with clear mandates and substantial resources pursuing those mandates within a regulatory environment that was not designed with community protection as a primary objective.
The accountability actors — Good Jobs First, community organizations, EJ advocates, investigative journalists — work against that asymmetry. They do so with significantly fewer resources, in proceedings that were not designed for their participation, on timelines set by developers. Understanding the landscape is a prerequisite for changing it.
This article was researched and drafted with AI assistance under human review. See our full AI and editorial practices.