In 2007, the US was on the cusp of an economic recession, and Buddy Rizer was tasked with finding Loudoun County, Virginia, a new way to make money. Rizer’s earlier career as a radio DJ didn’t exactly make him an obvious candidate to find a solution, but he was looking for what he called a “real job” and stumbled into a role at Loudoun’s economic development authority.
This new gig came with urgency thanks to the bursting of the housing bubble: More than 80 percent of the county’s revenue came from residential real estate. The goal, at the time, was to raise the commercial tax base from about 19 percent of revenue to something like 23 percent, Rizer recalls. Today, just over half of the county’s tax revenue comes from commercial sources. To jumpstart that turnaround, Rizer turned to the carcasses of another recent bubble burst — those of the dot-com era.
The county had been home to the headquarters of AOL, which by 2000 was the US’s largest internet provider. Combined with its proximity to the nation’s capital and access to resources including water and electricity, Loudoun quickly emerged as the physical manifestation of the internet, the place responsible for how the majority of Americans got online. Estimates suggest that as much as 70 percent of the planet’s internet traffic passed through Loudoun County.
But after the collapse of dot-com stocks in 2000, followed by AOL’s disastrous merger with Time Warner, much of that industry dried up, and Loudoun was left with hulking, empty buildings and miles of fiber optic cable already laid in the ground. Where some people saw abandoned infrastructure, Buddy Rizer saw opportunity: “And so I thought if we can fill those, that would be a good start,” he says. Rizer soon realized that the same factors that made Loudoun County attractive to AOL could once again make it a hot spot for technology. It still had an internet exchange point, lots of land, a government eager for investment, and a capable local electricity utility. “And so we came up with this plan to attract data centers.”
Today, Loudoun County has another moniker: Data Center Alley. Over just a small portion of its roughly 515 square miles, it’s home to about 250 data centers, the densest concentration in the world. For a long time, residents there recall only a passing understanding of this, if they realized it at all. The development of data centers in Loudoun was just something going on in the background of many residents’ lives. They noticed construction along main roads, paid an increasingly lower property tax rate, and sent their kids to coveted public schools.
The county’s data center boom arrived as tech companies expanded into the cloud, a sanitized name for the blocky buildings that house rows and rows of servers. And with that business came prosperity: 22 new schools built in just the last 15 years, tax revenue from data centers alone that exceeded the county’s operational budget by $35 million in 2024, and a decline in real property tax rate for residents from about $1.29 to 80 cents per $100 in assessed value since 2008.
Some longtime residents never heard of their county’s nickname until recently, when the effects of data centers on the community started to become impossible to ignore. What had been a relatively quiet boon locally was starting to foment a national backlash elsewhere, and starting to disturb daily life in Loudoun, too.
The current, massive US data center buildout has been accelerating thanks to the widespread adoption of generative AI, which has created a growing need for the physical infrastructure to run tremendous amounts of “compute” — the industry term for processing power. There are already 3,000 data centers in operation around the US, according to an April analysis by the Pew Research Center, with 1,500 more in development. When Rizer began recruiting companies to build data centers in Loudoun, he sat on conference panels for secondary markets. Now when he attends data center conferences, Loudoun is the biggest market there, and “there’s more economic developers than there are data center companies, because everybody sees the opportunity.”
Loudoun County residents are also starting to take notice. Within the past few years, data centers have been elevated from an unremarkable part of daily life in Loudoun to something that many residents now think about every day. For some, it’s the constant hum they hear from their decks; for others, it’s the transmission towers that loom over their favorite green space, or the surprise call from their energy utility that one of those towers could go up in their own backyard. While residents recognize that data centers have brought a lot of prosperity to the county, they’re beginning to wonder how much more they can take.
As communities around the country begin recognizing the potential opportunities of building data centers, the efforts have also faced immense pushback. Opposition to this development is shaping strange alliances across the political spectrum and has become a central issue in this year’s midterm elections. New York and Texas have begun pumping the brakes on new data center buildouts, worried about how their energy grids could support them without leaving residents stuck holding the bag if major tech players change plans. Local stories from around the country show that residents are coming out to community meetings in droves to oppose data centers. In at least one case, a violent attack on a local Indianapolis official appeared motivated by his support for data centers. And national polls show that many Americans do not want to live near them.
With its long history hosting data centers, Loudoun residents have more recently taken to calling it something new: the canary in the coal mine of data center development. Want to know what the country’s future looks like? Loudoun County’s past gives a strong glimpse of it.
Even in Loudoun, where the existence of data centers has been a fact of life for nearly two decades, Rizer says that in the last few years, community opposition has become more vocal. “Before then, people understood what we were doing,” he says. These days, residents seem more aware of the inconveniences.
Rizer is no stranger to this kind of response to his projects, but the tone of the pushback is different. Residents have always had myriad worries: economic, environmental, and aesthetic. That part isn’t new. “I’ve done $70 billion of deals here, and the only thing in common is that somebody’s been against every single one of them,” Rizer says. “I have never seen, in my entire career, the vitriol, the hate that is associated with this.” Asked to put his radio DJ hat on to choose a soundtrack for this moment, he chuckles and says the first one that jumps into his head is Taylor Swift’s “You Need to Calm Down.”
As Rizer and other officials in Loudoun field their own residents’ concerns about data centers, they’re also being flooded with calls from local officials across the country looking for their advice. Rizer is the first to admit that hosting a data center, let alone hundreds, is not the right choice for every community. He stands by the work he’s done to bring them to Loudoun, and still believes they’ve benefited the county on the whole. But data center expansion in Loudoun has recently taken on a life of its own, to the point that even Rizer no longer spends his time courting new facilities. “We don’t want more data centers here, but we want those that are here to be successful and continue to contribute to our community,” he says, diplomatically.
But new facilities are coming anyway, and even Rizer, the “godfather of data centers,” is powerless to stop them. Over a series of visits to Loudoun County, I wanted to see for myself what it’s like to cross through communities surrounded by the cloud. Is the data center future that so many across the country seem to fear all it’s been built up to be?
“I have never seen, in my entire career, the vitriol, the hate that is associated with this.”
Long before it became Data Center Alley, Loudoun County was already solidifying its role as the hometown of the modern internet. In 1996, AOL decided to move its headquarters from neighboring Fairfax County to Loudoun, eventually employing more than 5,000 workers in Ashburn at its peak in 2004. Soon, the first internet exchange point, MAE-East, would make a similar move to Ashburn, making Loudoun the physical location where much of the world’s internet traffic flowed. It was further solidified as a tech juggernaut when telecom company MCI WorldCom also opened a large office in the area, which became its headquarters in 2003.
The companies brought more than just jobs and a new workforce to the area. They also laid fiber underground across the county, attracting other tech firms to the area because of the convenient promise of low latency and proximity to the nation’s capital. The attention earned Loudoun nicknames like “the Silicon Valley of the East” and “Dulles Technology Corridor,” after the nearby airport.
For a while, AOL and MCI’s presence made Loudoun an unlikely but bustling tech hub. Between 1990 and 2000, the county population doubled to 170,000. Early AOL employees have recounted lavish parties thrown by the company in its heyday, including “go-go-style dancers” and a sushi conveyor belt around an airplane at the nearby annex of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
During this time, data centers were already starting to pop up in Loudoun County, but with little fanfare. The first one arrived in 1997, and after that there was a slow drip of new data centers permitted in the area. In 2000, the local zoning administrator made a decision that would have lasting consequences later on, but made little noise at the time. Because data centers looked similar to offices, they became designated as “office parks,” meaning that they could be built on any land zoned for office space “by right” — bypassing more time-intensive regulatory review. That meant that unlike other commercial facilities like heavy machinery plants, which face more restrictions being built near populated residential areas, data centers could be built wherever offices had been allowed.
“Everybody loved the data centers because of the difference it made in our community”
Today, Bolthouse is the director of land use at PEC and helps lead a coalition of Virginia groups that advocate for stronger protections, tracking, and transparency around data center development. Bolthouse isn’t dispositionally anti-data center, nor does she want to see existing ones in the area torn down or shut off. But she does advocate for a pause on new development. “This industry is kind of creating a narrative that they’re up against communities, and that there’s a community backlash, and we just need to explain to the communities the benefits of data centers,” she says. “But what they’re really up against is physics. They’re up against the reality of what it takes to build out gigawatts of power, and the impact of building out gigawatts of power has direct impacts on people.”
Recently, she’s found, more of her neighbors are paying attention. She recalls 2025 as a turning point, where PEC no longer had to do the legwork to get people invested, but instead was triaging which press requests would make the most impact given its limited capacity. And for residents, data centers were becoming more than just eyesores. They were beginning to disrupt life in Loudoun.
Vicky Hu lives in a red brick home on a cul-de-sac beside a peaceful, tree-lined stream. Her backyard stretches far along the water, where a white gazebo gives shade to sit and watch the deer she says regularly cross her yard. Including her mother and daughter, three generations of Hu’s family have lived in this house. Having grown up in the city of Taipei, Hu marveled at the nature that surrounded her new home: deer as well as turtles and cranes. “To me, this is like a dream. My dream home,” she tells me.
Until last year, when Hu got a call that pierced that dream. She got a voicemail from a Dominion Energy representative and first wondered if there was an issue with her energy bill payment. Instead, she was told that a new transmission line connecting two substations would cut directly through her backyard. “Are you out of your fucking mind?” she yelled at the rep.
On the day I visit, the gazebo is filled with poster boards of blown-up maps of the community — and new development plans that threaten to overtake it. The trees along the stream are tagged with bright pink ribbons tied around their trunks. They mark the land Hu’s family says would be cleared should Dominion Energy’s plan to string 185-foot transmission towers through their backyard go through as planned. “It’s like the sort of thing you only think you’d see in a dystopian nightmare,” Hu’s daughter, 23-year-old Madison Taggart, tells me as she shows me around her childhood home.
Growing up, Taggart says that home always felt “like a timeless place that no one else could touch.” Hu bought it shortly after her daughter was born, having seen the community built from the ground up. She worked for a developer and recalls watching workers bury power and communication lines beneath the community from her trailer across the road. By 2003, she’d nearly finished selling the community, except for one lot that was reserved for a VP at her company. As Hu’s aging mother struggled with the stairs in her townhome, she kept thinking about that lot on the cul-de-sac next to the water. She asked her colleague if she could buy it, and two years later, she moved in.
Now, Hu is engaged in a yearlong fight to redirect the transmission line to another route — one that, so far, she’s on the losing end of, pending an appeal to the Supreme Court of Virginia. After that first phone call, Hu said she ran around the neighborhood “like a crazy woman,” ringing doorbells and asking if anyone had heard of the proposal. She said they hadn’t. By the time I visit, a sign in her backyard shows a diagram of the proposed 185-foot transmission tower next to a comparatively stout Statue of Liberty (if you exclude the base she stands on).
“That used to be a major daycare center here in the heart of Data Center Alley, because there were so many people who worked here. Now it’s just these big, giant computer energy-guzzling, water-guzzling warehouses.”
Dominion insists that building the transmission line is necessary to power not only data centers, but also homes, businesses, schools, and hospitals. The local school district has been dragged into the fight over the route as well, though, with one proposal cutting close to two nearby schools. Hu’s homeowners association donated a portion of land that would be cut through to the school district, preventing it from being seized by eminent domain.
Both the school district and residents in Hu’s community have been fighting
