Living with 230 data centers on the doorstep: ‘Nobody warned us what was going to happen’ 

One of the factors that led Greg Pirio to buy his house in Loudoun County, in northern Virginia, 14 years ago, was the nature surrounding it. A historian specializing in Africa, he loved to take long walks with his dog and listen to the birds. Three years ago, a large data center was installed just a hundred meters from his door. Since it began operating a year and a half ago, the birdsong has been replaced by a constant buzzing together with fumes that cause headaches, conjunctivitis and respiratory problems.

“Nobody warned us what was going to happen,” he says. From the window, behind a row of trees and shrubs, you can just make out the great blue mass that is the center.

Loudoun County has 430,000 residents and is located on the banks of the Potomac River, very close to Washington D.C. Home to the largest concentration of data centers in the world, it has been dubbed Data Center Alley. Altogether there are 233, either built or under construction. They occupy more than 45 million square meters of land, 3% of the county’s territory, while consuming as much electricity as would supply 2.2 million homes. Their fiscal contribution represents 40% of Loudoun’s budget.

The expansion of data centers over the past decade has also helped make this county the richest in the U.S.: the median income of its residents is around $180,000 per person. Prosperity is evident in its manicured city centers, gleaming sports facilities and lush parks. According to county officials, the sector has created 17,000 jobs and will contribute $1.3 billion in taxes in the 2027 fiscal year while reducing real estate taxes for the county’s residents.

Wide, impeccably paved roads are lined with data centers — immense windowless buildings whose humming has become the soundtrack to the lives of entire communities. Many consider it a nightmare. Several citizen associations have begun to mobilize, convinced that the damage produced by these facilities outweighs the benefits.

These facilities house the equipment and data necessary for the internet and artificial intelligence (AI) to work. A couple of decades ago, they were the size of a big-box store. Now some are larger than the whole of Manhattan. And they have spread across the U.S., from Virginia to California, with many more planned in the urban suburbs and rural areas.

Data centers have also become central to the upcoming midterm elections. Those who promote them, led by Donald Trump, argue that they are a source of wealth and job creation. They add that those who reject them will be irremediably left behind in the race for progress and will remain “poor and underdeveloped,” according to the U.S. president, as they turn their backs on a prosperous future.

But data centers, which have multiplied as the AI race has gained momentum, have also come to symbolize the suspicions aroused by this technology and the brains that develop it. In the U.S., 1,333 of these facilities are already in operation and another 2,359 are in the planning or construction phase, according to data from the market analysis firm Cleanview. According to a study by the Annenberg Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, 61% of residents opposed them in their neighborhoods in August, a jump of 12 percentage points from a previous poll, in February and March.

Loudoun’s concerns are environmental. These complexes consume vast amounts of water and electricity and generate air pollution and noise. Then there is the impact on the price of homes — for many residents, their largest asset — and on electricity bills, which have soared in Northern Virginia. Forty percent of the electricity consumed in 2024 in the state went to these facilities, according to Bloomberg analysis. Virginia has a total of about 600 data centers. And three-quarters of Virginia voters blame these complexes for their soaring electricity bills.

Residents also complain of a lack of transparency from the owners of the data centers, who frequently force their contractors and municipal employees to sign confidentiality agreements, something that has prevented residents from knowing in advance exactly what they were looking at.

Social opposition has seeped into politics. Twenty states, governed by Democrats and Republicans alike, have approved measures to pause or stop the construction of data centers. Seven others have such measures in the pipeline. Texas, for example, has one of the largest concentrations of data centers and a governor, the Republican Greg Abbott, promising to turn the state into the “epicenter of AI development” until he realized he was out of step with voters. Such ambitions have been frozen amid a wave of polls that suggest that Texan voters are looking to Democrats to reverse the data center boom. In Ohio, the consensus against data centers has seen Democratic Senate candidate, Sherrod Brown, rise in the polls against Republican Jon Husted, who has supported the construction of more of the infrastructure.

“They deceived the community”

“We have to stop them,” says historian Pirio. The data center next to his home in the town of Sterling became operational in February 2025. It was not connected to the power grid; instead it was powered by its own electricity generator.

“They deceived the community. We found out from the noise it made. They didn’t notify us or the local authorities,” adds Pirio. “They told us they were going to build a smaller building, then they doubled the size. They never told anyone that they were going to include a power plant.”

The company that owns the data center has launched a $15 million plan to mitigate the noise, but neighbors report that the effects are still being felt. “They have reduced the level according to the regulations, but not to a level where it does not harm health,” says Pirio. “It generates noise 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It causes headaches and does not allow you to sleep at night. And then there is the air pollution. On my street there is a family with four children, and all four have developed respiratory problems. One of them had to be hospitalized.”

The problem is aggravated if there is a power cut in the centers and the systems activate diesel generators to continue operating. “I know right away because I start to feel it in my lungs, in my throat,” explains Pirio.

Most data centers are connected to the power grid. And that creates its own problems, given their massive energy consumption. The power company that serves this area, Dominion, has received requests from data center companies to supply more than 40 gigawatts, enough to cover the needs of more than 10 million homes, and double the grid capacity the company had in 2024 in Northern Virginia.

High voltage invasion into private property

Vicky Hu, a real estate agent by trade, carefully selected the house she bought 26 years ago in Ashburn, Loudoun. “Back then, all this was farmland. There were more animals than people,” she recalls. She is devoted to her well-kept garden, which is surrounded by trees and a stream.

The construction noise of a large Amazon data center complex several hundred yards away didn’t alarm her too much at the start. She thought the noise would stop once the construction phase was over. But in June, she got “the phone call from hell.” The power company plans to expand their power lines to serve the data centers, she was told.

That extension would go through her garden: goodbye trees, hello a 60-meter-high high-voltage pole and a margin around it in the middle of her manicured lawn. “I’m going to lose half of my land and access to the garage,” Hu says. “And it’s dangerous. If they end up planting the pole, my house is within striking distance if there’s a problem and it falls. And we’re talking about a high-voltage pole.”

The origin of the data center boom in Loudoun County dates back to the 1990s, when the telecommunications giant AOL settled there due to its proximity to Washington D.C. and the capital’s international airport, Dulles. The presence of this company attracted others and created the necessary infrastructure for an entire tech web to be created. A series of tax incentives helped to expand it. The development of AI has multiplied it.

The location of the county, just 31 miles (50 km) from the nation’s capital, has also contributed to the explosion in the number of data centers. The federal government and its contractors are data-hungry entities. The abundance of land and proximity to the Potomac River are additional contributory factors.

Not everyone in the county opposes the data centers. At a recent town hall to decide on a series of restrictions on centers already approved but yet to be built, some neighbors flagged up the wealth that these centers have generated.

Michelle Chesser, a mother of two children ages nine and six, works in the maintenance of one center. “My children grow up in a county with fantastic public schools, beautiful parks, and incredible resources. Data centers, and the revenue and activity they generate, have played an important role in helping Loudoun make those investments. And their impact also benefits people like me,” she said at the meeting.

According to calculations by Stijn van Niewerburgh of Columbia University and author of a study titled Financing the construction of artificial intelligence, the construction of data centers, and the infrastructure and equipment needed to make them work will cost $10.3 trillion between 2025 and 2032: an average of 3.6% of U.S. GDP per year. “The projected buildout would be larger relative to the economy than the major U.S. canal, railroad, electrification, highway, and telecommunications investment booms,” Van Niewerburgh notes.

Others say they want data centers to be confined to specific industrial areas, away from residential areas. “We’re not against data centers per se. But we don’t want them near residential areas. There’s a lot of land all over Loudoun that might be better suited to those complexes,” resident Bill Wiert, a former federal employee, said at the town hall.

Like other members of his neighborhood association, Wiert had shown up dressed in green as a gesture of protest. And he declared himself pessimistic about the restrictions the city councilors were going to decide on regarding the centers under construction: “There is too much money, too many vested interests. And there is not enough political pressure,” he said.

He was right. A couple of hours later, local authorities rejected the motion on restrictions. It decided that imposing them would trigger a lawsuit from Big Tech that could cost $60 million.

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