Sources & Methodology

The spine of this piece is a four-wave panel of national surveys run by Heatmap Pro with Embold Research between August 2025 and August 2026. The waves are usable as a trend only because the question wording was held constant across all four, which Heatmap's founding executive editor confirmed directly; that confirmation is cited below and is load-bearing. Sample sizes and field dates for each wave are listed with the source.

Electricity consumption figures come from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's 2024 report to Congress, which is the only current federal accounting of data center load. Its 2030 range is wide by design and is reported here as a range rather than a point estimate. Capacity market figures come from PJM's published auction results and from Monitoring Analytics, PJM's independent market monitor, which is a separate organization from PJM itself; where the two differ, both are given. Water figures use EPA and Shehabi et al. consumption estimates over USGS national withdrawal denominators, so that a data center number is always divided by the same national total rather than by a regional or sectoral one. Farmland values are USDA NASS state averages, not transaction prices, and are labeled as such wherever a reported sale price is compared against them.

Where a claim rests on a secondary account of a primary document, the secondary source is named. A handful of entries below are trade or advocacy publications; they are cited only for the specific factual claim attributed to them, and every statute, regulatory decision and auction result is cited to the issuing body rather than to a summary of it.

Polling

• Heatmap Pro / Embold Research — August 2026 wave, n=2,045 registered voters, fielded August 8–13, all 50 states and DC, margin of error ±2.3
• Heatmap Pro / Embold Research — May 2026 wave, n=4,118 registered voters, fielded May 15–28, margin of error ±1.6
• Heatmap Pro / Embold Research — February 2026 wave, n=2,091 registered voters
• Heatmap Pro / Embold Research — August 2025 baseline wave, and the project-type battery covering coal, gas, nuclear, wind, solar and data centers
• Robinson Meyer, Heatmap founding executive editor — confirmation that question wording was held constant across all four waves

Federal data and statistics

• Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, LBNL-2001637, 2024 United States Data Center Energy Usage Report — 2014, 2018 and 2023 consumption in TWh and as a share of national load
• Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory — 2030 data center load projection, 6.7% to 12.0% of total U.S. electricity, with the wider published range
• MOST Policy Initiative, citing U.S. EPA (2025) and Shehabi et al. — direct water consumption by U.S. data centers, 2023 actual and 2028 projected
• U.S. Geological Survey, Circular 1441, Estimated Use of Water in the United States — national withdrawals by sector, used as the denominator for every water figure in this piece
• USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, Land Values 2025 Summary — state-level farm real estate values per acre
• Utility Dive, reporting Edison Electric Institute data — utility capital spending on electricity distribution, 2003 to 2023
• U.S. Energy Information Administration, Short-Term Energy Outlook — Henry Hub natural gas price forecast
• U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey — Loudoun County, Virginia median household income
• Federal Highway Administration — Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 and the authorization of the Interstate Highway System

Grid operators and market monitors

• PJM Interconnection — who we are: the regional transmission organization for all or parts of 13 states and DC, serving more than 67 million people
• PJM Interconnection — 2026/2027 Base Residual Auction results, cleared at the FERC-approved cap
• PJM Interconnection — 2024/2025 and 2025/2026 Base Residual Auction results, the comparison basis for the 2026/2027 clear
• Monitoring Analytics via PolitiFact — the Independent Market Monitor's estimate of data center demand's contribution to capacity prices

Legislation, regulation and executive action

• Congress.gov — S. 4214, the Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act
• Office of Governor Janet T. Mills — veto message on LD 307, an 18-month pause on data centers of 20 MW or more
• Maine Morning Star — the failed House override vote on LD 307
• New York State Senate — S10546, the water and energy disclosure bill
• Public Utilities Commission of Ohio — AEP Ohio large-load tariff, approved 9 July 2025
• Georgia Public Service Commission — large-load rules approved 23 January 2025
• Texas Legislature — SB 6, signed 20 June 2025, large-load interconnection and curtailment protocols
• Office of the Texas Governor — directive of 3 August 2026 ordering PUCT and ERCOT to audit every data center in the interconnection queue before any project may proceed
• WHYY — PPL's separate data center rate class in Pennsylvania
• The White House — Ratepayer Protection Pledge, March 2026
• Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Office of the Governor — executive order of 18 August 2026 on data center siting and grid standards
• Pennsylvania Capital-Star — the Pennsylvania House pause vote and the GRID plan
• Maryland Matters — the Calvert County commissioner primary results

International comparisons

• Jamestown Foundation — Eastern Data, Western Computing, the NDRC's multi-agency national computing initiative
• Oxford Institute for Energy Studies — comparative industrial and retail electricity prices, China against the United States and Europe

Industry forecasts and capital commitments

• McKinsey Global Institute — announced hyperscaler and colocation capital commitments
• BloombergNEF, US Data Center Capacity Outlook, 29 July 2026 — base case installed capacity, 2030 and 2033
• Utility Dive, reporting BloombergNEF — the gap between the chip-based and power-constrained forecasts
• NetChoice — New Albany, Ohio data center count and the water and grid conditions attached to each

Orbital compute

• Data Center Dynamics; Starcloud — Starcloud-1, mass, payload and launch date
• CNBC — Starcloud-1 on-orbit training and inference results
• Google Research — Project Suncatcher, solar-powered orbital TPU constellations and the prototype schedule
• CNBC — Jeff Bezos at Italian Tech Week on gigawatt-scale orbital compute
• CNBC; SpaceX Form S-1 — the 12 June 2026 IPO, capital raised, post-IPO valuation and the Starlink revenue share

Local reporting and land

• CNN Business — Quincy, Washington: population, acreage purchased, tax base and the local dispute
• Fortune — Mervin Raudabaugh, Silver Spring Township, Pennsylvania, acreage and the offer declined
• Times Leader (Wilkes-Barre) — the Salem Township land assembly, landowner count and acreage
• Kentucky Lantern — the Mason County, Kentucky offer
• FOX19 Cincinnati — the Northern Kentucky family that turned it down
• Data Center Dynamics — QTS Pennsylvania land acquisition
• Data Center Real Estate — central Ohio farmland pricing, before and after

Economic and fiscal impact

• Virginia Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, Data Centers in Virginia, 9 December 2024 — employment, labor income, tax revenue and the noise findings
• Loudoun County, Virginia — data center share of county property tax revenue
• Virginia JLARC, with acoustics trade literature on low-frequency noise — measured decibel ranges at residential property lines

Fact checks

• PolitiFact — the '267%' bill-increase claim, rated Mostly False, and what the underlying number actually measures
• PolitiFact — five-year residential electricity price increases, national and by state

Advocacy research on opposition funding

• Bitcoin Policy Institute — Foreign Influence in the Campaign Against American AI
• American Energy Institute — Foreign-Funded Opposition to U.S. Data Center Expansion

Disclaimer

AI was used to help design and create the charts, graphs, and tables found in this paper.