Marshall president Smith touts data center benefits for West Virginia
September 1, 2025
WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS, W.Va. — Marshall University president Brad Smith knows a little something about data centers and believes West Virginia needs to find ways to attract their business to the state.
“It’s all in the cloud now. You have everything with WiFi and wearables, and you’ve got smartphones, and you have Ray-Ban sunglasses with Meta embedded in them. You have AI, and all of that has to be powered through servers and data centers,” he said on MetroNews Talkline.
Governor Patrick Morrisey has pushed for West Virginia to take steps toward supporting data centers, signing a bill in May laying out a Certified Microgrid Program and a High Impact Data Center Program that he called “the single biggest economic development bill in many, many years.”
Drawing on his experience as CEO of Intuit, Smith said it’s crucial for the state to provide tech companies with sites that already fit the criteria of what they need.
“They need sites that have already been predeveloped, that have been remediated if there was any sort of contamination, that already have been zoned, have permits that have been cleared and can get up and running in 18 months,” he said.
Employment in the state continues to decline, as Workforce WV’s July jobs report indicated year-over-year decreases in both workforce and total employment. Morrisey has touted the ability of data centers to provide manufacturing and high-skilled jobs, and according to Smith, many of those jobs would be accessible to most West Virginians.
“What’s amazing about these data centers that people don’t understand is 80% of those jobs do not require a four-year degree, so you have people that can come in and work on the machines, so it really employs all of us in West Virginia. Everyone has a part to play in a data center,” he said.
Smith said that while there are public concerns over the effects of data centers, it’s time to get on board because the facilities are here to stay.
“There are things that people are clearly concerned about we have to work through. How do we make sure we have the appropriate water, we have the energy? Those are things that society is going to have to deal with because we are going to be living in a world where those things are required,” he said.
Story by Daniel Woods. MetroNews