She Spent 12 Years Fighting Amazon. Now She Wants to Cut the Power to AI.

About this episode

Most people who care about AI risk are focused on what happens inside the models. Elena Schlossberg has spent 12 years focused on what happens outside them - the concrete, the transmission lines, the water, and the electricity bill landing in your mailbox.

She founded the Coalition to Protect Prince William County in Northern Virginia after Amazon Web Services quietly proposed a data center campus in 2014 and expected the surrounding community to absorb the cost of the transmission line it required. Not just the visual blight. The actual bill.

“Your electric utility can exercise eminent domain over your property,” she told John Sherman on this week’s For Humanity, “and then make you pay for it, because it’s public infrastructure.”

What the data center industry found, she argues, is a structural weakness inside public utility law. They build private infrastructure. They socialize the cost. And they’ve been doing it at scale for over a decade.

The coalition fought Amazon and Dominion Energy for four years. They proved that 97% of the power from a proposed transmission line would serve Amazon. They developed a cost allocation policy to make the company pay. They lost the first round, kept going, and eventually won. That fight became a template.

Data Center Alley is not a local story

John opened the conversation by asking where the national movement stands. The answer is: further along than most people realize.

Virginia alone has more data centers than China. Prince William County - a single county - has roughly 130 active facilities and another 130 planned. Transmission lines are being routed through Pennsylvania, Maryland, and West Virginia to feed the demand. Property is being seized in states that will never see the economic benefit. Communities that didn’t vote for any of this are watching concrete replace farmland and small businesses.

“Those people are pissed,” Elena said, describing residents in Pennsylvania and Maryland whose land is being taken not even for development in their own state. “Their property is being taken, not even for economic development in their own state.”

She also pushed back on the framing that opposition to data centers equals handing a win to China. Virginia already beat China on data center count by itself. The question, she said, is who pays and who profits - and right now, the public pays and the corporations profit.

The jobs argument doesn’t hold up

One of the cleaner moments in the conversation came when Elena took apart the economic case for data centers.

The industry pitches construction jobs. Electricians, plumbers, concrete. But construction work ends. Long-term employment inside a data center is minimal - the parking lots are the tell. “They’re usually empty,” she said.

Meanwhile, the data center expansion is actively hollowing out existing local economies. In Prince William County, Amazon bought