VIRGINIA — U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright urged supporters of data centers to push back against critics during an Amazon Web Services conference on July 1, 2026. Wright said concerns about data centers are "overblown." He stated, "They cannot win and they will not win." Wright added, "We'll roll over the opposition to data centers faster than we otherwise should." He also said, "You should be over-the-top proud of what you're doing … share a little bit of that pride and those facts with everyone around you."

Data centers account for 4 percent of U.S. power demand, with the U.S. Department of Energy expecting this to rise to 9 percent by 2030. These facilities are highly concentrated in Virginia, Ireland, Texas, and Singapore. In Virginia's "Data Center Alley," generator interconnection queues can extend for up to seven years, and Henrico County, Virginia, alone hosts 37 data centers.

The energy consumption of data centers has led to calls for moratoria on their construction from Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. A recent Gallup survey found that seven in 10 Americans oppose data center construction in their local communities. Half of the respondents in that survey cited the excessive use of resources, including power and water supply, as a main concern.

A poll conducted in July 2026 found that one in three Americans approve of the rapid pace of data center construction. PJM Interconnection, which manages power grids across 13 states and the nation's capital, has asked the U.S. Department of Energy to mandate that data centers switch to backup power generators within 15 minutes of receiving an emergency signal. Data centers' cooling systems can account for up to 40 percent of their electricity usage during normal weather conditions. A University of Cambridge study found that temperatures in the immediate vicinity of a data center increased by an average of two degrees Celsius, with some areas experiencing increases of as much as 9.2 degrees Celsius. Pew Research data indicates that 38 percent of Americans live within five miles of one of the 3,000 operational data centers in the U.S.

Sasha Luccioni, co-founder and chief scientific officer of the Sustainable AI Group, said her recent research indicated that choosing appropriately sized models for specific tasks can decrease the required energy by a factor of 33. Luccioni also helped develop Code Carbon, a software package designed to measure energy and carbon for open-source models.