Northern Virginia is home to 35% of the world’s data centers. These massive warehouse-like buildings house computers and networking equipment that store and send data — and feed our ever-growing demand for apps, artificial intelligence and cloud storage.
Now they’re coming to Southside.
They bring with them concerns about viewsheds, traffic, noise and energy capacity — but also the potential for transformational tax revenue and job creation.
Cardinal News reporters Grace Mamon and Tad Dickens talked with local officials, residents, energy providers, environmental experts and others about what communities in our region can expect as these developments spread southward.
Village Place is a complex of neatly packed townhomes in Prince William County, with brick and siding facades and plenty of windows. The main entrance of the neighborhood leads to a roundabout, a stone obelisk at its center, and branches off into three other roads.
The sidewalks are lined with small trees and take abrupt perpendicular turns in front of each home, leading visitors and residents up a set of brick steps to the front door.
Cars park nose to bumper along the street or in the garages around back, which are tucked underneath balconies. When the weather is warm, the balconies are dotted with flower pots, patio furniture and table umbrellas.
The access road leading to those garages is sandwiched between the townhomes on one side, and a 70-foot-tall data center building on the other.
Before 2022, trees grew on that side of the road. Now, 200 feet and a fence are the only things separating the residents of Village Place from the under-construction data center campus owned by a developer called The BlackChamber Group.
The two-story data center building is on a hill, towering over the roofs of the townhomes. It is visible not only from the access road, but also from the neighborhood’s street and from inside some of the homes.
Data centers are large, warehouse-like buildings that house computers and networking equipment used to store and send data. They are more prevalent in Northern Virginia than anywhere else in the world because of the state’s robust infrastructure, conducive climate and competitive tax rates and construction costs.
Virginia is home to about 150 data centers — or around 35% of all known hyperscale data centers worldwide, according to the Virginia Economic Development Partnership.
The industry is a fact of life for many Northern Virginians, who are used to living, working and playing in the shadows of data center buildings.
They can tell stories about the noise, construction traffic and environmental impacts that they’ve seen near neighborhoods, retirement communities, public schools and historic areas.
They have also benefited from the economic success of data centers. Hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenues from data centers has flowed into local coffers across the region, providing a new revenue stream that in some places has led to lower taxes for residents.
As Northern Virginia runs out of land and electric grid capacity to support data centers, the industry is looking south. Data center project proposals have popped up for the first time in Pittsylvania County and Appomattox.
Elected officials there are considering these proposals while they are learning about the industry.
Because of their wealth of experience, Northern Virginia residents and elected officials have suggestions for Southside Virginia, where data centers are much more foreign.
Make sure the projects are zoned correctly, they say. Put them in industrial areas where they have the lowest chance of disrupting residents. Demand specifics about project details and do your research on the parties involved.
And most importantly, ask us for advice, said Sen. Danica Roem, D-Manassas, who has been outspoken against the growth of the data center industry in Virginia.
“Contact your peers in Northern Virginia,” she said. “Ask them, ‘Hey, what questions should I be asking? What are the things I should be looking at?’ Be proactive about this.”
Location, location, location (or, zoning, zoning, zoning)
One issue comes up again and again regarding data centers in Northern Virginia: land use.
Phyllis Randall and Deshundra Jefferson, chairs of the boards of supervisors in Loudoun and Prince William, respectively, said localities can avoid a lot of the problems caused by data centers if they keep the projects in industrial areas.
“These are industrial buildings,” said Jefferson. “They shouldn’t be situated near homes and schools. They shouldn’t be located near sensitive areas.”
Northern Virginia has learned this the hard way, as the data center industry evolved much faster than zoning codes.
Initially, these projects weren’t as massive as they are today. When they first started popping up in Loudoun 20 or 30 years ago, data centers were more akin to office buildings than the large hyperscale projects of today, and most Northern Virginians didn’t mind their presence.
The industry has transformed dramatically over the years, with data center buildings themselves growing much larger, now located on multibuilding campuses with backup diesel generators and sometimes even onsite power.
Loudoun County has more than 25 million square feet of data center operations up and running, with millions more planned. Prince William has 10 million square feet operational, but a total of 90 million planned.
As data centers have grown, so has opposition, especially as the projects have crept outside the zoning overlay district meant to contain them and into the more rural areas of the region.
“It’s a metastasizing cancer,” said Elena Schlossberg, a Prince William resident who has been a vocal opponent of the industry with a grassroots organization called Coalition to Protect Prince William County.
In some places, data center campuses “are right next door to neighborhoods with nothing but a 500-foot buffer between the data center and the homes,” said Tom Gordy, a Prince William County supervisor.
This is a result of insufficient zoning in the past, Randall said, and there was no way to predict how the industry would explode.
When old-school data centers first started popping up in Loudoun, the office-like buildings were zoned for light industrial use, she said.
“The board of supervisors in 1993 made a zoning ordinance decision. … They allowed by-right use for data centers,” she said. “This meant they could build without coming to the board for a stamp of approval.”
Over the years, the industry took advantage of this by-right zoning, which didn’t strictly confine data centers to areas zoned for heavy industry. They were allowed in light industry zones, places where office buildings could be built, including near residential and commercial areas.
“So now, here we are, with data centers in places we don’t want them,” Randall said.
She advised Southside localities to confine data center projects to areas zoned for heavy industry only.
“Tighten up your zoning before you say yes to even one data center,” said Randall, who has chaired the board since 2015.
The Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission echoed this advice in its December report on the data center industry to the General Assembly.
“Inadequate local planning and zoning have allowed some data centers to be located near residential areas,” it says. “The industrial scale of data centers makes them largely incompatible with residential uses.”
Pittsylvania County, which saw its first two data center proposals ever in 2024, has not done a comprehensive rewrite of its zoning code since 1991. The board of supervisors is expected to vote on an overhauled zoning code in August, after postponing it several times.
The county’s first data center proposal was approved unanimously despite resident pushback, and the other is up for a final vote April 15, after two postponements and a recommendation for denial from the planning commission in January.
In addition to zoning, localities should consider infrastructure when deciding where to best locate data centers, said Curry Roberts, president of the Fredericksburg Regional Alliance, an economic development group.
The Fredericksburg area has been working to attract data centers for about 10 years, Roberts said, and currently has around 40 million square feet of data center space planned, though none of that is yet operational.
The area has learned from controversial transmission line extension projects in places like Prince William County, Roberts said.
They realized that data center sites “need to touch transmission lines to avoid long extensions,” he said.
Today, no data center can be built by-right in Loudoun. Every proposal needs to come before the board of supervisors for a vote. But “the horse is out of the barn,” Randall said.
She encouraged Southside localities to let Loudoun be “a cautionary tale” for land use.
“A lot of people say, ‘We don’t want to be like Loudoun,’ and I can’t even get mad at that,” she said. “I don’t blame [board members] in the past but I would encourage other counties to learn from us.”
Know what — and who — you’re dealing with
Localities should do their homework on not only the data center proposal, but the developers and end users, Gordy and Jefferson said.
“You’ve got to understand who you’re dealing with,” he said.
Usually, a land developer submits a data center proposal and helps oversee the buildout but doesn’t actually operate the data center once it’s up and running. That job belongs to data center customers like Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
This means that developers typically don’t submit detailed plans to a locality, since they won’t be the ones running the operations.
“What [developers] offer you is a bubble plan,” Gordy said. “Very little specifics, because they don’t have an end user yet.”
Julie Bolthouse, with the Piedmont Environmental Council, a Warrenton-based nonprofit, said that localities should demand details.
“You don’t know where the generators are going to be, whether they’re facing inward or facing a community, you don’t know what the acoustic projects around those generators are going to be, you don’t know how tall the buildings are going to be, you don’t have a visual of what it’s going to look like,” Bolthouse said. “You don’t know anything.”
Doing due diligence on data center developers, end users and proposals can be difficult, because the industry is notoriously tight-lipped, said Bolthouse.
This is because it is highly competitive, fast-moving and involves a lot of investment money, according to the Data Center Coalition, the membership association for the industry. Members are listed on its website.
Nondisclosure agreements are common during data center project proposals, but they are only meant to restrict information from competitors, said Josh Levi, president of the Data Center Coalition.
“As is the case with other highly competitive industries, data center companies may use NDAs when considering projects to protect company-specific, competitive information,” Levi said. “An NDA between a locality and a company does not restrict information shared with the locality, including information related to water or power.”
Developers may also be unable to provide details before an end user is in place, said Matt Vincent, editor-in-chief of Data Center Frontier, a pro-data center publication that covers trends in the industry.
“They’ll never tell you that stuff,” Vincent said. “Particularly from the developers’ side, there’s a lot of moving parts. There’s a lot of stakeholders. I’m sure they’re all probably very on their guard to be careful about how much they reveal.”
This still sends up a red flag for Jefferson.
“I get nervous when there’s no end user,” she said. “Try to find out as much as you can, and as officials, let them know that you’re not comfortable not knowing who the end user is going to be.”
Randall suggested demanding details about design elements specifically. Before Loudoun started to require aesthetic guidelines, “they were just big ugly concrete buildings going everywhere.”
This is what Randall hears the most complaints from residents about, she said. Most residents aren’t complaining about noise, or traffic, or light pollution, but optics.
“I get daily complaints about data centers,” she said. “People say, ‘I was walking down the Washington and Old Dominion Trail, and I’m looking at a data center, and it’s god awful and ugly. Don’t build them anymore.’”
The JLARC report suggested that the General Assembly could amend the Code of Virginia to require proposed data center developments to submit some of these specifics — things like sound modeling studies and water-use estimates.
Two of the data center bills that passed through the General Assembly would do that, if Gov. Glenn Youngkin signs them. The bills’ language states that a “locality shall require” developers to conduct site assessments examining the sound profiles of facilities with 100 megawatts of power or more on residences and schools within 500 feet.
Roem said Southside elected officials should do their homework on developers and proposals to prepare for all the ripple effects of a data center project.
“You cannot just let the data center industry give you a narrative about what you think you’ll be getting,” Roem said. “Then you come to be surprised later.”
Gordy echoed this.
“Keep your eyes wide open and your head on a swivel, because there will be adverse consequences, and you’re going to have to figure out how to deal with them.”
