The United States is the hub of the data center universe, and that supremacy owes much to Northern Virginia and its proximity to major clients like the Pentagon and other gargantuan data-crunchers with state-of-the-art computing demands. These clients give data center developers the power, influence, and dollars to operate unfettered in a lax land-use environment.
But beyond federal clients, a well-educated workforce, and infrastructure benefits like fiber-optic networks, there are hundreds of acres of undeveloped (read: forested or farm), lightly regulated land in Virginia where rezoning land from agricultural to industrial use is cheaper for a developer than trying to compete with other users for the available industrial parcels.
Even more importantly, Virginia does not have any state regulations for data centers. Outmatched local officials are left to craft their own ordinances and codes, or not. Desperate for tax revenues to serve their don’t-tax-me-again residents, county governments have grabbed onto data centers as fiscal lifesavers. After all, public services must flow.
The Sierra Club/Virginia Chapter’s “Unconstrained Demand” report, published in May, finds that Virginia is on track to site more than 1,300 data centers in the years ahead. Facilities either completed or in development could spread over 390,000,000 square feet of land, use billions of gallons of water, and consume energy that would otherwise power millions of homes. They erase forests and farms, suck up groundwater, churn out noise that disturbs sleep, and compromise climate goals.
Virginians are slowly waking up to the real-world costs of data center concentration. These encroachments were bound to run into opposition especially in NoVA’s (as Northern Virginia is known locally) suburban and exurban communities, which have the largest concentration of these centers.
In early August, a Prince William County circuit judge revoked the county’s rezoning authorization for the Prince William Digital Gateway data center, a project that, if built, would be the largest data center corridor in the world. The plan, proposed by the data center firms QTS and Compass, would have more than 37 centers on 2,000 acres near homes and the Civil War–era Manassas National Battlefield. The county, the Prince William Times reported, already has 59 data centers, 44 in service and 15 under construction. The millions of square feet of data center space is equivalent to surface area occupied by 67 Walmart superstores.
After the county Board of Supervisors gave a green light to the data center in May, a group of homeowners filed a lawsuit seeking to block rezoning that would have put the data center as close as 130 feet from residential areas in some rezoned parcels. The homeowners cited noise and light pollution, water impacts, power lines, increased traffic, and decreased property value as harms. But what ultimately sank the project was a bureaucratic error: The proposal did not meet state or county code requirements for public notices and associated materials. Compass has announced plans to appeal.
Even if renewables weren’t under siege, they would only cover 40 percent of new data center energy needs in the next five years.
In June, the Chesapeake, Virginia, city council voted down a data center proposal unanimously. The city’s planning commission had also nixed the rezoning plan. Like NoVA community members, the residents of the Hampton Roads region, near the North Carolina border, had strong concerns about power and water issues and proximity to homes. Not surprisingly in these economically perilous times, two unnamed cities in the area have expressed interest in taking up the proposal.
“I don’t know of any community that is welcoming data centers with open arms anymore,” says the Sierra Club’s Tim Cywinski, “because we have so much experience with the past facilities that we know what the worst-case scenario looks like.”
But coming into view even faster for people living near these developments are the energy and water downsides. State Sen. Danica Roem (D-Manassas) represents the area proposed for the Digital Gateway site. She points to electric grid problems that are “uniquely the fault of the data center industry more so than any other sector of the economy,” she says. “The stress that they’re causing is so severe, not only are we at potential risks for blackouts in the future, but people’s residential electric bills are going to go up.”
Many data centers house AI infrastructure, which has its own huge energy demands. A Food & Water Watch March fact sheet notes that ChatGPT uses over half a million kilowatts of electricity every day, equivalent to the daily power use of 180,000 American households. A basic ChatGPT text search uses nearly ten times as much electricity as a Google search.
This increased demand helps utilities justify ongoing and new investments in pipelines and natural gas and coal plants. Even if renewables weren’t under siege, they would only cover 40 percent of new data center energy needs in the next five years. “AI needs fossil fuel energy to meet its increased demand, just like fossil fuel companies need AI to increase demand for energy,” says Ben Murray, a Food & Water Watch senior researcher and author of the AI report.
Utilities are stepping into this space before the next technological leap takes place, when they could be left with stranded fossil fuel assets. And the day that data centers become obsolete poses even greater problems, says Murray: “Cleaning up one of these sites, even in, say, 30 years, is going to be a huge undertaking and really harmful to the surrounding area.”
But localities often offer major tax breaks to lure in data centers—and the revenues from property taxes, other taxes, and fees netted Prince William County nearly $300 million in 2024, a 77 percent year-over-year increase—that have been impossible to resist. But local officials have to be on their guard. Virginia levies a business tax on servers that certain data center tenants such as banks are exempted from. Data center developers often will not disclose that fact, considering it proprietary information, which can lead counties to some unpleasant revelations after contracts are signed. Sierra Club’s Cywinski points to Manassas, which lost some expected revenues after discovering that one of its data centers had bank tenants. “Companies will say, ‘This will be great revenue. But we don’t have to tell you who the client is,’” he says.
Some communities are wising up to data center ploys. In late June, Charles City County officials decided not to vote on a Diode Ventures 515-acre proposal near Richmond, another data center hub. Cywinski, who has been working on this case, notes that the firm refused to divulge information on energy or water usage.
Virginia state lawmakers aiming to establish a regulatory framework have run into obstacles. The industry has established the Data Center Coalition, their own PAC, comprised of heavy hitters like Amazon, CloudHQ, Visa, and others. The coalition has been at work in the Virginia General Assembly, spending $70,500 in campaign contributions so far this year.
Several bills that would have established a set of regulations failed last session, including one proposed by Del. Josh Thomas that would have required applicants to perform site assessments that detail noise, water, agriculture, parks, registered historic sites, and forest impacts. Virigina Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R), a vocal proponent of the centers, vetoed the bill, citing infringements on local control and red tape.
Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, the Republican candidate running to succeed the governor, mirrors his framing. The Democratic candidate, Abigail Spanberger, a former member of Congress, told the Cardinal News that she supports establishing statewide best practices that help community leaders and residents make their own decisions about the centers. She opined that tax breaks that lapse in 2035 should be “studied” (she’s open to them), but she had little to say about how to deal with the negatives.
THE DRENCHING RAINS THAT OFTEN PELT Northern Virginia are a phenomenon that Tucson residents only see in their dreams. The Sonoran Desert city has been experiencing long periods of drought; it saw just 11.5 inches of rain last year. So when the data center proposal known as “Project Blue” came knocking, it was clear that water-guzzlers would not be welcome.
The company planned three data centers for nearly 300 acres and stressed “water positivity,” says Betsy Wilkening, a water education specialist with Third Act Arizona, a democracy and environmental advocacy group. But that didn’t jibe with the local water utility’s work being “a leader in water conservation—in having water for people and water for the environment,” she says.
There was nothing positive about requiring an estimated 1,910 acre-feet of water annually, about 6 percent of Tucson’s total usage for the first two of the three sites. This is the equivalent of four golf courses. To bring the problem home for non-golfers, OpenAI’s GPT-4 uses as much as three 16.9-ounce bottles of water to produce a 100-word email.
The developer also would use fresh water until a pipeline could be completed to deliver reclaimed water to the site. (Data centers use fresh water to cool down the chips and servers, which is preferable, in part, because bacteria are less likely to develop.) As for energy consumption, says Wilkening, “It was like building a second Tucson worth of energy.”
No Desert Data Center, a coalition of local community leaders and environmental groups, only had weeks to organize before a city council vote on the project. But in a place defined by drought, they quickly spread the word about the threats and began to push back on the developer, Beale Infrastructure. They had to navigate some formidable information roadblocks: County officials had signed nondisclosure agreements. But before the planned vote, Arizona Luminaria, a local news outlet, uncovered the end user: Amazon Web Services. The Tucson City Council unanimously rejected the proposal in early August, just like Chesapeake, Virginia.
What is clear is that in data center land-use decision-making, local community members are on their own. Only a fortunate few with the time, volunteers, and local subject-matter experts can rally residents and make a dent in the “free money” attitudes attached to taxes that data center firms can pay.
“It’s tough to hear,” says Murray of Food & Water Watch. Communities are “just so in the dark about how big these facilities are going to be, where they’re going to get their power from, where they’re going to get their water from. A lot of these groups have an uphill battle, more so than they would have even ten years ago.”