On the way home from a recent trip, Eriech Tapia drove past 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 said the data centers lend valuable computing power that can help keep the U.S. competitive with other nations, but he also worries about how much electricity they use.
